U S Army Tests Bio Weapons On US Citizens

Operation: Big City

Open-air testing takes research into deadly agents out of the laboratories in order to study their effectiveness, including their aerial dispersion patterns, and whether they actually infect and kill in field trials. 

Fort Detrick is the U.S. Army's biowarfare facility, founded in 1943. Frank Olson was one of the first scientists to work there. From the final years of World War II through the Korean War and up to the present time scientists at Fort Detrick developed biological weapons including anthrax....In November 1953 Olson attended a meeting of a group of CIA agents at a country retreat where they discussed their work. Olson was suspected by the CIA of being a security risk.

He was given a drink laced with '___' and when well under the influence of the drug he was subjected to interrogation using Artichoke techniques, probably a very unpleasant experience. 

A week later Olson was staying in Room 1018A at the Hotel Statler in New York City under the supervision of a CIA doctor, Richard Lashbrook. The manager of the hotel, Armond Pastore, heard a thump outside and went out to find Olson dying on the pavement, having fallen from the 13th floor. The manager later found that a phone call had been made from Room 1018A to a number in Long Island and the caller had said only, "Olson's gone." 

....A California history professor, Kathryn Olmstead, has discovered documents at the Gerald Ford library which were written by Cheney and Rumsfeld. 

They show how far the White House went to conceal information about Olson's death — and his role in preparing anthrax and other biological weapons. ... 

Cheney and Rumsfeld were given the task of covering up the details of Frank Olson's death. At the time, Rumsfeld was White House Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford. Dick Cheney was a senior White House assistant. 

The documents uncovered by Professor Olmstead include one that states "Dr Olson's job was so sensitive that it is highly unlikely that we would submit relevant evidence". 

CIA Secret Experiments

Courtesy Of The National Geographic Channel

"It's the height of the Cold War and the United States government is desperate to combat the spread of Communism. The CIA launches a highly classified, top secret research program into the covert use of biological and chemical agents. In simulated attacks on enemy populations, entire cities in America are contaminated with bacteria, exposing millions of Americans to germ warfare. But the real focus of the research is on mastering the art of mind control.

"Psychiatrists at top academic institutions work under secret contract with the agency. Psychiatric patients, prisoners, even unwitting members of the public are exposed to a startling array of experiments designed to facilitate interrogations, induce amnesia and program in new behavior. Every psychological technique is explored, including hypnosis, electroshock therapy and lethal cocktails of drugs. What was the extent of these brainwashing experiments? How did the CIA become involved in such far-reaching and disturbing research? Join us as National Geographic presents: CIA Secret Experiments."

This powerful National Geographic video documents how for decades, top secret government projects worked virtually non-stop to perfect means of controlling the human mind. Though for many years the government denied that these projects even existed, the details have long been preserved in thousands of pages of now declassified government documents reluctantly released through the Freedom of Information Act. LSD and electroshock therapy in huge doses given to unsuspecting citizens are only a part of this unbelievable program.

CIA Secret Experiments blows the lid off years of chilling experiments, drawing on the above-mentioned declassified documents and interviews with some of the victims. Hear from John Marks, the author of In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, who originally broke the story of the CIA's abuses by unraveling the mysteries contained in the declassified documents. Learn how many of the most important records pertaining to the mind control experiments were destroyed by the director of the CIA in an attempt to prevent the details from ever being known.

The projects involved brutal, at times lethal experiments on thousands of unsuspecting citizens in direct defiance of law, all ethical codes, and basic human rights. Interviews with top psychiatrists, lawyers, and victims send chills up the spine. U.S. intelligence agencies spent millions on these mind control projects with a goal of creating programmable human spies. A former head of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Ewen Cameron, is one of many highly respected doctors who erased the personalities of thousands of unsuspecting victims, while many in the profession simply turned a blind eye.

Torturing Abu Zubaydah and The Art Of Deception

A guard watches over detainees at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2009.

J

As a guinea pig for ‘enhanced interrogation,’ Gitmo captive ™had a well-developed technique for misleading interrogators

By Jason Leopold

Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah had endured days of beatings, humiliation and being tied up in a stress position. But his Pakistani-intelligence interrogators were not giving up as they grilled the self-styled jihadi on his role among the Arab volunteers who had gone to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets but were now often suspected of plotting attacks against the West.

Although the CIA had worked with Pakistani and Arab intelligence agencies to support these volunteer networks in the 1980s, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was the first sign of a dramatic blowback, and Pakistan’s security services were now under pressure from their U.S. allies to crack down on an enterprise they had originally helped nurture.

One officer repeatedly struck Abu Zubaydah, according to the vivid account written in 1995 and 1996 in the fourth volume of his diaries — the U.S. government translation of which has been obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera.

“I want you to talk about your life for the last 10 years,” the officer told his captive. Today one of 14 high-value detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Zubaydah back then was a leading figure in the Arab mujahedeen milieu from which Al-Qaeda emerged.

Leg restraints in an interview room at Camp V, styled after state-of-the-art U.S. federal prisons, at Guantanamo Bay.

Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images

Abu Zubaydah was not going to confess. When asked by his Pakistani tormentors for specific information — by his own account — he gave the impression of suffering greater physical pain than was the case and eventually offered false information in order to stop the abuse.

“Who is your trainer?” the officer asked, referring to the identity of the individual who trained him in weapons at Khaldan camp in Afghanistan.

“My teacher’s name is Mahmud,” Abu Zubaydah replied.

“Mahmud who?”

“Mahmud Al-Milaiji,” he answered, confident that his interrogator would not be aware that this was the name of an Egyptian film star. Abu Zubaydah would repeat the name of the Egyptian actor during a later CIA interrogation session, according to the book “The Black Banners,” written by Ali Soufan, an FBI special agent who was present at the CIA black site where Abu Zubaydah was rendered after his capture.

Abu Zubaydah was found along with his diaries in Pakistan on March 28, 2002, having fled the collapse of the Taliban regime. In the hands of the CIA, he became something of a guinea pig for the George W. Bush administration's interrogation procedures, which many groups, including top human-rights organizations, have labeled as torture. Although Al Jazeera has not seen the three subsequent diary volumes that Abu Zubaydah wrote while in CIA custody, according to his lawyers, they are a chronicle of his torture at the hands of U.S. captors.

On Aug. 1, 2002, five months after Abu Zubaydah’s capture, the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel sent the White House a memo drafted by attorney John Yoo and signed by his boss, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee. It authorized the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah using 10 techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, cramped confinement, stress positions, wall slamming and being placed in a confinement box with insects. This last technique was inspired by his diaries, where he had written of his fear of bugs.

Yoo’s memo asserted that Abu Zubaydah had been one of the planners of the 9/11 attacks, the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and every other major assault carried out by Al-Qaeda — claims later significantly pulled back by U.S. authorities.

On April 27, 2002, Newsweek reported, under the headline “How Good Is Abu Zubaydah’s Information?” that he was the source of information leading to two U.S. domestic terrorism warningspertaining to possible attacks against banks, supermarkets and shopping malls.

'Your jihad is over'

The chronicle of his Pakistan torture experience in his diaries raises the question of whether Abu Zubaydah attempted to confound his American interrogators, too, by concealing information while appearing to be releasing gems of intelligence. Obviously, unlike his Pakistani interrogators in 1995, the CIA may have been using physical duress in conjunction with other more sophisticated methods. Still, the diaries  which could be painting a rosier picture than was the case of his performance under physical assault — suggest that Abu Zubaydah saw interrogation and torture as a contest from which he could emerge with his secrets intact, having fooled his questioners.

Abu Zubaydah had been captured at a Pakistani checkpoint as he drove with another man — a Yemeni from Saudi Arabia — on a journey in a mini-convoy of two vehicles delivering materials to comrades moved to a safe house, the House of Exile in Babi Jadeed, because of a crackdown by Pakistani police and intelligence services. 

They had been looking for Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Before he was caught, Yousef was one of the most notorious residents of the House of Martyrs, the guesthouse Abu Zubaydah ran and “the center of terrorism, as it’s called,” Abu Zubaydah wrote.

He recounted in his diary, “The police stopped us … I didn’t say a word. The police said to me, while pointing at me to come down, in a broken English, as if the Arabs are English speaking, he said, ‘Your Jihad is over.'”

Abu Zubaydah handed the border guard a United Nations refugee card he acquired earlier in the year, but the ploy did not work, and he and his passenger were taken to an office in the nearby Pakistani city of Peshawar. He recounted a frantic attempt to get rid of some seals that he had used to make fake Afghan passports for his comrades:

They decided to search us before being presented to the person in charge, and I was scared that they might discover the faked seals that I was carrying with me, so I said, I need to go to the bathroom (to urinate) but they didn’t allow me before doing a search. But I insisted that I can’t stand it any more, and that I will urinate in my pants. So they had to take me to the bathroom. After I closed the door, and get rid of the plastic seals, and left the wooden parts in the upper window … Then I pulled the flush and all the seals disappeared in the toilet. So I went out cheerfully because I don’t have a problem now.

However, he had forgotten one seal in a pocket, which was soon found. Abu Zubaydah wrote that he tried to portray himself as a “poor oppressed reporter who is calling for democracy and fighting dictatorship.” But the Pakistani officer didn’t believe him. “F--- you don’t try to bluff,” he reportedly said.

Soon the beatings began. Abu Zubaydah was taken downstairs to a prison and waited as a police car packed with Pakistani soldiers arrived. He sat in the backseat, handcuffed. The officer was in the front seat. “They took me around most of the places in the city (at night), and showed me to whomever they encountered, but no one could identify me … So they beat me up in the street and in front of the public while I was tied up. I could only push them back or scream in their faces.”

The Pakistanis were trying to force Abu Zubaydah to identify the location of the House of Martyrs. He was hit using shoes and facial slaps. Then he was taken to the upper floor of a house and thrown to the ground. Two of the men grabbed his feet “while the officer started flogging using a heavy stick.”

Abu Zubaydah wrote that he “turned to deceit” to get the Pakistanis to stop beating him.

“I played a theatrical role; I cried loudly while pointing to my head with my hand, then the beating stopped, and he wanted to check out what happened, so I held his hand and put it on the wound toward the opening.”

In Volume 2 of his diaries, Abu Zubaydah wrote that he suffered a shrapnel wound to his head, which left a small hole in his skull, while performing ablutions on a mountain in Gardez, Afghanistan. He temporarily lost his sight and hearing and the ability to move his body. He also lost part of his memory, the ability to speak and write for about seven months. He wrote in an entry that reading his “memoirs help(ed) me memory (sic) to recall everything.”

At the interrogation, Abu Zubaydah contorted his fingers to make it appear that the beating “will leave me in a state of nervous shock … I opened my right hand keeping two of my fingers twisted, and said, ‘I cannot control them.’” The officer “became more scared, left the room and lighted a cigarette hoping that the smoking will calm down his anger.”

But he returned about 15 minutes later and started beating Abu Zubaydah again.

“I am not going to let you go even if you die, where is the house?” he said.

“I only answered with a few words trying to show that my nervous (sic) had an impact on my tongue … But he started beating me again more forcefully while I was shouting at them in English, ‘you animals!” Abu Zubaydah wrote.

The officer left the room while a soldier continued to beat Abu Zubaydah. He was then taken to a prison at Qura Qabrastan. The officer, Abu Zubaydah wrote in his diary, “ordered that I should be tied up to the high bars so I can’t sit down or sleep during the night, and in fact that was what happened.”

“Hours passed by and I was feeling the pain in the bottom of my foot (The location of the beating). I also felt the pain in the calf, and the thigh, because of standing a long time … And I started to realize their intention, they must be trying to make me reach a nervous breakdown so I will confess with everything I know at the time of interrogation … I relied on my determination and rested against the bars and tried to sleep, and I really slept while standing, and when the pain increased in one foot, I woke up and leaned on the other foot so I could sleep.”

The technique the Pakistanis used on Abu Zubaydah was a stress position, one of 10 “enhanced interrogation methods” the CIA used on him. Almost immediately after his capture, according to declassified documents released several years ago, top Bush administration officials discussed using an “alternative” set of interrogation methods “because the CIA believed that Abu Zubaydah was withholding imminent-threat information during the initial interrogation sessions.”

A Viet Cong prisoner is interrogated by U.S. forces in a stress position in Thuong Duc, Vietnam.

 National Archives

The CIA prepared a psychological assessment of Abu Zubaydah in July 2002, based heavily on his six volumes of diaries, that focused on how to break down a man the CIA then believed was the No. 3 person in Al-Qaeda’s hierarchy. 

His diaries provide clues to how he may have hoped to respond to physical pain inflicted by his CIA interrogators — although what actually transpired in the course of his “enhanced interrogation” by U.S. operatives remains unknown.

During his interrogation in Pakistan, after a night of half-sleeping in a stress position, Abu Zubaydah once again faced the interrogator with the “big mustache,” who questioned him about the fake passport seals. Abu Zubaydah was returned to the prison cell, where, he said, he spent more than two days “standing on my feet, almost torn down.” But “God gave me help because as long as I am thinking of (the brothers who are outside the prison, I don’t feel the pain, but when I stop thinking of them, then I think of pain).”

Prince at House of Martyrs?

Another day, Abu Zubaydah was taken by bus along with his Yemeni companion to an office he calls “The Special Branch.” There, he watched the interrogation of a young man he believed might have been a Pakistani who plotted a failed assassination attempt on Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. It’s unclear why Abu Zubaydah was present at the session. He wrote that he was forced to “sit in some place, and from the opening of the door we were revealed to — or we can see at the same time — a veiled person.”

He said after the man responded to the interrogator’s questions, he and his companion were quickly taken back to the bus and returned to the prison. Abu Zubaydah was then hooded, tied up and interrogated again by the “huge man with the big mustache.” The room, Abu Zubaydah wrote, was crowded and he could hear English words coming from near the vicinity of the “huge man.”

“The huge man started with a question which I was expecting … He said, ‘What do you know about the House of Martyrs?’ He spoke the words ‘House of Martyrs’ in Arabic, and the rest in English.”

Abu Zubaydah responded, he said, “In a very cool manner, ‘I heard about it.’”

The officer used his baton and smashed Abu Zubaydah “on the upper calf, just in the back of my left knee.”

“I said angrily, ‘What happened?’”

He was asked another question, “What do you know about the (prince of the House of Martyrs)?”

“I said angrily, ‘I don’t know him.’” The officer smashed Abu Zubaydah on the back of his calf again.

After repeated blows he said, “If the interrogation will continue in this manner, then go ahead and writing down all the answers that are appropriate for you, then I will sign, and everything will be over.” As the beating continued, Abu Zubaydah started giving false names to his questioners. He denied that he was the “prince” of the House of Martyrs. When asked about his affiliation, he denied that he was the emir of the Khaldan training camp.

“I am a sick man, and I am still taking medications … for my memory case, do you think that anyone is going to rely on me to run a camp,” he said.

Waterboarding equipment used for torture.

 Waterboarding.org

After his capture by the United States, Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations became more intense. In “The Black Banners” Soufan, one of two agents who first interrogated Abu Zubaydah at that CIA black-site prison, suggested the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were an experiment. It’s a word that he uses more than a dozen times in his book to describe the techniques first used on Abu Zubaydah.

Soufan interrogated Abu Zubaydah using traditional rapport-building techniques that, Soufan said, resulted in cooperation. It was only after two psychologists under contract to the CIA took over the interrogation in the weeks after Abu Zubaydah’s capture and used abusive methods that he began to clam up. Soufan left the black site, according to an interview he gave “60 Minutes” after the publication of his book in 2011, when one of the psychologists introduced a box to be used during Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation session that resembled a coffin.

The effectiveness of the CIA’s interrogation of Abu Zubaydah is questioned in a 6,000-page report prepared by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which spent four years investigating the CIA’s so-called rendition, detention and interrogation program. According to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who chaired the panel, the report “uncovers startling details about the CIA detention and interrogation program and raises critical questions about intelligence operations and oversight.” Abu Zubaydah figures prominently in the report, the executive summary of which Al Jazeera is seeking from the Justice Department under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

It is uncertain whether being held by the CIA was Abu Zubaydah’s first experience of American intelligence operatives during interrogations. He wrote that some questioning took place while he was hooded. He said at one point he heard “… some people leaving the room quietly, and I later learned that they were Americans who came to watch the interrogation with the one who is supposed to be the prince of the House of Martyrs.”

Former CIA operations officer Marc Sageman, who was based in Islamabad in the late 1980s, is now a forensic psychiatrist and reviewed Abu Zubaydah’s diaries for Al Jazeera. He believes the Americans Abu Zubaydah referred to were FBI agents who were in Pakistan hunting for Ramzi Yousef’s fellow conspirators. The FBI would not respond to questions about that possibility.

Abu Zubaydah wrote that he later learned that eight of his brothers, whom the police had arrested and whom he identifies by name, “were Mujahedeen and the others were employed by the relief agencies … They were arrested because one of them was accused of supporting Yusif Ramzi financially.” Abu Zubaydah wrote that they were eventually freed after paying the Pakistanis a bribe of more than half a million rupees.

After the “Americans” left the room, Abu Zubaydah’s hood was removed. He contorted his fingers again to make it appear as if he had a nervous breakdown. He refused to eat for three days after being returned to his prison cell. He was allowed to make a phone call, which he used to call his brothers at the House of Exile guesthouse and warned them that they should leave because they may be arrested.

The Pakistanis brought Abu Zubaydah before a judge, and he was charged with being “one of those Arab Mujahideen who has been left behind with no residency permit.” He waved his U.N. refugee card, but the judge ruled that he should be deported. He was taken to a central jail, where he was detained for three months.

But the U.N. came to his rescue. He wrote, “The United infidel nations started its job by contacting the ministry of the interior to establish my right for residency as it was stated before, so I was expecting to stay for two months in the prison …” Abu Zubaydah said an Italian and a Pakistani official from the U.N. visited him during that time and asked him about the other Arabs detained in the prison. He lied to them too, saying, “I am scared from them; they are fundamentalists.”

“Good! Be aware (sic) of them!” one of the U.N. officials said.

“I said, ‘I hate terrorism,’” Abu Zubaydah continued.

The U.N. official, “Mister Ferlando,” said after he left, “You look like a terrorist, but I know you well (apparently he meant my beard) … I said to myself, ‘Only if you knew!'”

Upon his release, Abu Zubaydah wrote that he and the brothers moved to a new guesthouse, away from the police, and he began “to steer the show one more time regarding … Khaldun affairs.”

More Charges Of Forced Drugging At Guantanamo

By: Jeff Kaye

On February 21, attorneys for six former Guantanamo prisoners took their civil case against Donald Rumsfeld and a number of U.S. military officials to federal appeals court. Rumsfeld and the others are being sued “for the torture, religious abuse and other mistreatment of plaintiffs,” according to a press release from Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).

Unremarked in the otherwise thin press coverage of this case was the fact that four of the six former prisoners charge the U.S. with forced drugging, via pills or injections. In one case, a special riot squad known as the “Extreme Reaction Force” entered the cell of one of the prisoners to restrain him and force medications upon him.

The former prisoners were from Turkey, Uzbekistan and Algeria. According to an Agence France-Presse account published at The Raw Story the day of the hearing, “the judges will make their ruling in several weeks, but one of them, Judge David Tatel, said military and civilian officials at the Pentagon had failed in their duty.

“‘Their job is to protect the detainees from abuse, they failed to do so,’ he said.”

A year ago, the case had been dismissed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, despite the fact that three of the plaintiffs were held prisoner at Guantanamo and subjected to torture and other cruel treatment even after a Pentagon-initiated review process had found them not to be “enemy combatants.”

According to CCR’s press release, the current appeal is based in part on the fact that immunity doctrines used to shield “the actions of government officials who abused Guantánamo detainees” were based on the fact these prisoners “were suspected of being enemy combatants.” The fact that the U.S. military tortured men who were not under the category of “enemy combatant” may undermine the government’s immunity argument, or perhaps allow for a Supreme Court ruling on the matter.

Drugging Led To Inspector General Investigation

The forced use of drugs at Guantanamo and other U.S. military sites is not a minor issue, for such use of drugs is both medically unethical and illegal according to both domestic and international law. Back in Spring 2008, the controversy over reports of such forced drugging was a front-page story in the American press, leading three U.S. senators — two of whom, Joseph Biden and Chuck Hagel, are now the Vice-President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense, respectively — to task the inspector generals (IG) of both the CIA and the Department of Defense to investigate the issue.

While the CIA report is still classified, DoD released a redacted copy of their IG report to me, and Jason Leopold and I published a thorough review of that report at Truthout in July 2012. Leopold and I found that the government admitted to interrogating prisoners while they were being medicated. The government maintained such prisoners were not specifically drugged for interrogation, but for other reasons. Indeed, the military admitted to forcibly drugging prisoners who they wished to be “chemically restrained.”

In a follow-up story at Truthout in September 2012, I noted various ways in which the DoD IG report was a cover-up regarding the extent of the drugging of the prisoners.

“But while the IG report was spurred by a June 2008 Washington Post article reporting a number of former detainees’ complaints of drugging and a subsequent letter to the IG from three US senators,” I wrote, “the IG report never interviewed any of the detainees mentioned in the Post story.

“The IG interviewed only three detainees, all of whom were still held at Guantanamo. ‘We did not attempt to interview detainees who had been repatriated,’ the IG stated, which would include any of the detainees who had previously made public statements to the press that they had been forcibly drugged.”

Indeed, many former detainees have charged Guantanamo officials with forced drugging. 

For instance, a military prosecutor admitted to former detainee David Hicks’s attorney that prison authorities put drugs in Hicks’s food, as they “periodically sedated [Hicks] for non-therapeutic reasons.”

In another example, after he was forcibly repatriated to Algeria from his cell at Guantanamo, Abdul Aziz Naji, who was sentenced to prison in Algeria after his release from U.S. custody, told an Algerian newspaper that some prisoners at Guantanamo were forced “to take some medicines for three months to drive them crazy, loosing [sic] memory and committing suicide.”

New Charges About “Unspecified Pills and Injections”

Four of the six men suing Rumsfeld and the others in the CCR case charge that they were forcibly drugged at Guantanamo.

According to court documents, Yuksel Celikgogus, a 39 year old Turkish citizen, “was repeatedly forced to take unspecified pills and injections. Mr. Celikgogus asked what type of medicine he was receiving, but the guards would neither let him refuse the medication nor tell him what they were giving him.”

Twenty-six year old Turkish citizen Ibrahim Sen “was forcibly given unspecified pills and injections. The guards would neither let him resist the medication nor respond to his inquiries as to its substance.”

Nuri Mert, who is a 35 year old Turkish citizen, released, like Ceilikgogus and Sen to Turkey some years ago, suffered physical attack when he tried to resist the forced drugging.

According to the court document, “Throughout his detention at Guantánamo, Mr. Mert was forcibly given unspecified pills and injections. The guards would neither let him resist the medication nor respond to his inquiries as to its substance. In multiple instances, when Mr. Mert refused the medication, he was forcibly medicated by an Extreme Reaction Force (“ERF”) team. As is typical in such instances, a group of soldiers in riot gear burst into his cell, threw him to the ground and restrained him, carried him out of the cell, and forced him to either take pills or an injection. During his time in Camp Delta, Mr. Mert became extremely ill; he experienced severe stomach and chest pains and regular vomiting. When Mr. Mert wanted medical care, he was often deprived of such care despite frequent requests.”

Zakirjan Hasam was the fourth of the former detainees who claimed he was “forcibly medicated with pills and injections repeatedly while in Guantánamo.” Hasam is an Uzbek refugee who transferred to Albania in 2006. Along with Abu Muhammad, the other Uzbek in the case, he currently lives in a refugee camp in Tirana.

All the former detainees are said to suffer terribly from their torture at the hands of the American armed forces. According to Shayana Kadidal, Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, “These men’s lives were irreparably damaged at Guantánamo. The U.S. government acknowledges they were wrongly imprisoned for years yet refuses to compensate them and help them rebuild their lives.”

Besides Rumsfeld, the other defendants in the suit include former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers and General Peter Pace, former commanders of Joint Task Force-GTMO Major General Michael Dunlavey, Major General Geoffrey Miller and Brigadier General Jay Hood, as well as the former director of the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantanamo, Esteban Rodriguez, among many others.

Besides forced drugging with “unknown substances,” the former prisoners’ suit describes a panoply of tortuous treatment, including “beatings, short-shackling, sleep deprivation… subjection to extremes of cold or heat and light and dark, hooding, stress positions, isolation, forced shaving, forced nakedness, forced sexual contact and intimidation with vicious dogs and threats, many in concert with each other.”

Drugs and The Army Field Manual

While some of these “techniques” have now been banned by the military — such as hooding — others continue in use as official parts of the Army Field Manual, whose interrogation procedures have been propounded by President Obama’s January 22, 2009 executive order on “lawful interrogations.” These include sleep deprivation, manipulation of temperatures, isolation, and other so-called interrogation “approaches” and “techniques.”

While it is not commonly known, the Army Field Manual does allow use of drugs on detainees, so long as they do not “induce lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage.” This makes military use of drugs on prisoners even more permissive than John Yoo’s allowance to the CIA in his famous 2002 memos. Yoo had told the CIA it could not use on prisoners “mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.” While Yoo’s stricture had a lot of room for possible abuse, the current version of the Army Field Manual allows almost any kind of drug to be used, lacking proof of “lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage.”

This is all a far cry from how the military once considered the issue of drugging prisoners. 

According to areport by the Congressional Research Service [CRS], earlier military doctrine “prohibited the use of any drugs on prisoners unless required for medical purposes.” The CRS report describes a 1961 opinion by the Army’s Judge Advocate General which stated, “’the suggested use of a chemical “truth serum” during the questioning of prisoners of war would be in violation of the obligations of the United States under the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War.’ From this opinion it seems clear that any attempt to extract information from an unwilling prisoner of war by the use of chemicals, drugs, physiological or psychological devices, which impair or deprive the prisoner of his free will without being in his interest, such as a bonafide medical treatment, will be deemed a violation of Articles 13 and 17 of the [Geneva] Convention.” [p. CRS-14]

Moreover, according to CRS, the 1987 version of the Army Field Manual on interrogation “suggested that the use of any drugs for interrogation purposes amounted to mental coercion.”

How far we have come since those days can be traced by how the U.S. treats the drugging of prisoners today. The full story of how the U.S. used drugs on prisoners at Guantanamo, if in fact such use is still not happening, remains to be uncovered. The military’s IG investigation was a whitewash. Meanwhile both Congress and the mainstream press have appeared to wash their hands of the matter. But the suffering of the prisoners remains, and their testimony may not be left lingering in limbo forever. Sooner or later these crimes will have their day in a court of law or other duly constituted tribunal.

Israeli Death Merchants And Palestinian Guinea Pigs

By Gilad Atzmon

“The Lab” is a new groundbreaking Israeli documentary film that redefines our entire understanding of the Jewish state, its aims, its identity and its global destructive role. It is a fundamental and most important commentary on Israel.

In “The Lab”, Director Yotam Feldman exposes the Israeli military industry and its operation, and interviews key figures in Israel’s “security’ trade. He elaborates on the role of the industry within the Israeli society and economy – in the last few years Israeli “security” exports reached an unprecedented 7 billion US dollars a year. A full 20 per cent of Israeli exports are military or military related. Approximately 150,000 families in Israel are dependent on that industry. Israel is now the fourth biggest military exporter.

Here is a clip from “The Lab”:



In the last decade every Israeli military operation led to an immediate and sharp increase in Israeli military export around the world: weaponry, systems, intelligence, strategies, doctrines, knowledge and experience.

Feldman gives us a glimpse into a very organized universe. We visit Israeli weapon fairs around the world and see arenas filled to capacity with foreign generals, officials and diplomats shopping for Israeli military products. The message is clear: the 7 billion dollars is just part of the story. The Israeli military elite is now deeply interwoven with the political and military elite of every country around the globe. This emerging Israeli business buys the Jewish state influence and support.

Watch foreign generals shopping for Israeli military products:



“The Lab” makes it evidently clear that the Palestinian civilian population in the West Bank and Gaza are viewed as guinea pigs for Israeli tactics, weaponry and fighting philosophy (“Fighting Torah” – Torat Lechima – as the Israelis call it). The destruction of the Palestinians has now been transformed into a very profitable industry. We are dealing here with nothing short of highly calculated murder.

Through a set of fascinating interviews, Feldman conveys a very genuine picture of the Israeli death merchants. Feldman lets them talk, he hardly interferes. They are sharp, they are genuine, they are even funny at times, occasionally witty, and a few of them, might even be charming if you did not know who they are. But make no mistake: they are sinister, and some of them are clearly psychotic. They are mass murderers and they are free. They sell destruction and havoc and do it very successfully.

Watch the Israeli army’s Yoav Galant, the planner and executioner of Operation Cast Lead, coldly discussing “ratios”:



As an Israeli-born and raised musician and writer, I think I can recognize Israeli dedication, perseverance and creativity when I see it, no matter in what field it is deployed. (Perhaps I was lucky to be rescued by bebop.) The talent of those Israeli death angels is used to amplify human misery. The consequences are tragic.

Game Changer

It is hadrly a secret that a century of Palestinian struggle has led to practically nothing. The state of the Palestinian solidarity movement is even more embarrassing. Feldman’s film, “The Lab”, is a game changer, for it can explain decades of impotence.

We are immersed in flawed terminology – “colonialism”, “apartheid”, “conflict resolution”, “Zionism” are just a few examples. Gaza is now a vast laboratory – the Israelis are the “scientists” and the “technicians”, the Palestinians are the “guinea pigs”.

Watching “The Lab” must lead all of us to fundamentally question our notions. We are dealing with a premeditated war crime. The notion of resolution (as in “two-state solution”), for instance, is not applicable. It is clear beyond doubt that in the real world the “scientist” does not negotiate with the “guinea pig”. The “scientist” also doesn’t consider sharing reality with his “guinea pig” in a “one democratic state”. Yotam Feldman’s “The Lab” is a glimpse into the Israeli mind: you clearly do not find much compassion there.

For decades we were foolish to examine the success and failure of Israeli military operations with reference to Israeli military and political “objectives” as we surmised them. We were clearly wrong.

As we learn from Feldman’s film, the real objective of Israeli operations may as well be examining new doctrines and operational systems in order to distribute them around the world soon after. Ehud Barak, for instance, wasn’t exactly the most sophisticated Israeli minister of defence – he clearly failed to defend his people or even make them feel secure. However, he was very successful in selling Israeli weapons and doctrines.

The prospect of Tel Aviv being subjected to a barrage of rockets may be seen by Israelis as devastating news but, from a military-industrial point of view, it was a golden opportunity to examine and promote the Israeli anti-missile system, the Iron Dome. If I am correct here, it becomes clear that, as with the Palestinians, more and more Israelis are also becoming “guinea pigs” in this ever growing military laboratory.

One may wonder how and when “the Zionist dream” transformed itself into a military business. Only a few of us, writers and scholars, have attempted to answer this question. The transformation of the Jewish state into an oppression factory seems to be a direct outcome of Israel’s supremacist ideology. If we want to understand what is happening in the Jewish state, we must first grasp the notions of choseness, Jewishness and Jewish identity politics.

I guess that enough Palestinians in Gaza do realize by now that they have been part of an Israeli experiment. Too often we learn from Palestinian doctors that while treating casualties of Israeli aggression they encounter new types of wounds. “The Lab” explains it but it isn’t Palestine alone. We also witness a growing similarity between the operational mode of police forces around the world and the Israeli military’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Watching Yotam Feldman’s “The Lab” explains it all. We are all Palestinians. We are either occupied by Israel or by its proxy forces around the world – those who are trained in Israel and implement Israeli weaponry and tactics.

Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli-born musician, writer and anti-racism campaigner..His New Book: The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics http://www.gilad.co.uk

Syphilis Laboratory - Guatemala

Courtesy Of JourneyMan Pictures
A Film By SBS
Distributed By Journeyman Pictures
July 2011

Obama may have apologised last year for the 1940s US medical experiments that intentionally infected Guatemalans with syphilis, but as this startling report shows, its legacy continues to destroy lives.

Soldiers, prostitutes, the mentally ill and even orphaned children; no one was safe from the American government's decision to deliberately infect them with syphilis. The costs are still being felt today in Guatemala as the infected and their descendants, who have inherited the disease, all bear the painful scars of those experiments. Dr Cutler moved his base when he was banned from practising in the States, after watching the effects of syphilis on African-American men who had no idea they were infected. Treating the disease "would interfere with the study", 

Cutler said. All are victims of a "serious crime" says the lawyer pressing a lawsuit against the US government on behalf of the Guatemalans. Obama's apology for this atrocity is a start but it isn't enough to mend the ruined lives of the surviving human guinea pigs.

The Pentagon's Mind Experiments

Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (credit: DARPA)

By Ray Kurzweil

Duke University experiments in connecting the brains of two rats through implanted electrodes and the planned Brain Activity Map project reflect a growing Pentagon interest in neuroscience for applications that range from such far-off ideas as teleoperation of military devices (think mind-controlled drones), to more near-term and less controversial technology, like prosthetics controlled by the human brain, BBC Future reports.

The Pentagon’s expanding work in neuroscience in recent years has focused on medical applications, like research to understand traumatic brain injury and on concepts intended to help the military fight wars more effectively, such as studying ways to keep soldiers’ brains alert even after days without sleep.

But under the rubric of “Augmented Cognition,” DARPA has also pursued a number of military technologies, like goggles that would monitor a soldier’s brain signals to pick up potential threats before the conscious mind is aware of them.

While some of the applications might be a generation away, or may never arrive, like mind-controlled drones, others, like the brain-monitoring goggles, are already in testing (though probably not ready for use in the field).  That’s raising questions from ethicists, who are pushing for the government to begin now to think about “neuro ethics.”

In a 2012 article published last year in the journal Plos Biology, Jonathan Moreno, a professor of medical ethics, and Michael Tennison, a professor of neurology, argued that many neuroscientists don’t think about the contribution of their work to warfare, or consider the ethical implication of such work.

The question they raise is what choice future soldiers might have in such cognitively enhanced warfare. “If a warfighter is allowed no autonomous freedom to accept or decline an enhancement intervention, and the intervention in question is as invasive as remote brain control,” they write, “then the ethical implications are immense.”

Sharon Weinberger spoke in more detail about the Pentagon’s growing interest in neuroscience in her talk A Manhattan Project of the Mind at SXSW.

Human Resources - Social Engineering In The 20th Century

Human Behavior Is Predictable, Therefore Controllable

"Every civilization tends to believe its own propaganda."

"The Real Killers Are Governments"

"It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth - and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it." 

(Patrick Henry - Speech in the Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775)

Army Conducts Chemical Tests On Unsuspecting U.S. Population

The video covers Dr. Lisa Martino-Taylor's horrific findings after she submitted hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests seeking the truth about government experiments on human populations. Martino-Taylor uncovered a mountain of evidence proving that an aerosol spraying campaign was in fact conducted by the U.S. Army during the 1950s and '60s. She has revealed documents clearly showing that sprayers were set up in multiple cities on buildings, deployed from station wagons, and attached to planes.

Despite statements at the time which downplayed the spraying as non-toxic, the evidence shows that the Army knew that what was sprayed consisted of radioactive compounds breathed in by hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens. Furthermore, they went to great lengths to cover up the information.

Martino-Taylor says she’s obtained documents from multiple federal agencies showing the government concocted an elaborate story to keep the testing secret.

Martino-Taylor says some of the key players in the cover-up were also members of the Manhattan Atomic Bomb Project and involved in other radiological testing across the United States at the time. 'This was against all military guidelines of the day, against all ethical guidelines, against all international codes such as the Nuremberg Code.'  (Source)

Martino-Taylor is pressing for an investigation into whether or not the spraying could have led to illnesses, including cancer.

The abstract of her dissertation reads as follows:

This piece analyzes a covert Manhattan Project spin-off organization referred to here as the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition, and an obscure aerosol study in St. Louis, Missouri, conducted under contract by the U.S. military from 1953–1954, and 1963–1965. The military-sponsored studies targeted a segregated, high-density urban area, where low-income persons of color predominantly resided. Examination of the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition and the St. Louis aerosol studies, reveal their connections to each other, and to a much larger military project that secretly tested humans, both alive and deceased, in an effort to understand the effects of weaponized radiation. Through this case study, the author explores how a large number of participants inside an organization will willingly participate in organizational acts that are harmful to others, and how large numbers of outsiders, who may or may not be victims of organizational activities, are unable to determine illegal or harmful activity by an organization. The author explains how ethical and observational lapses are engineered by the organization through several specific mechanisms, in an effort to disable critical analysis, and prevent both internal and external dissent of harmful organizational actions. Through studying the process of complex organizational deviance, we can develop public policies that protect the public's right to know, and construct checks and methods to minimize the chance of covert projects that are contrary to societal norms.

You can click here to access the full text.

This story is important to keep in mind, as mad scientists are at work transforming the climate through an aerosol spraying campaign. They, too, insist that what is being sprayed is not harmful even as cases of respiratory illness, cancer, Alzheimer's and mystery diseases across naturecontinue to climb (here and here). New diseases such as Morgellons have emerged, which seem to indicate a nano-level component that very well could be targeting human DNA.

Dr. Lisa Martino-Taylor's research has received mainstream media attention due to the overwhelming amount of undeniable evidence. According to KDSK News, St. Louis, many people subsequently came forward to say they remembered the spraying:

 . . . men in protective suits, on roofs, with machines spewing a thick fog. One of them is Benjamin Phillips. He believes his numerous health issues may be connected to the secret tests.

Coverage of the lawsuit can be seen below, which implicates Parsons Corporation, SRI Internationaland, yes, Monsanto:



These tests serve as the perfect example to discuss with anyone who hurls the word conspiracy in your direction to shut down discussion of uncomfortable topics.

This type of testing is not an aberration. Click here for some other gruesome government experiments from our supposed benevolent protectors that treated humans like lab rats. 

Via: "Activist Post"

U.S. Government Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition

Deborah Blum informs us of the following horrific acts perpetrated by the government against American citizens it was tasked to safeguard:

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. 

Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination."

I learned of the federal poisoning program while researching my new book, The Poisoner's Handbook, which is set in jazz-age New York. My first reaction was that I must have gotten it wrong. "I never heard that the government poisoned people during Prohibition, did you?" I kept saying to friends, family members, colleagues.

I did, however, remember the U.S. government's controversial decision in the 1970s to spray Mexican marijuana fields with Paraquat, an herbicide. Its use was primarily intended to destroy crops, but government officials also insisted that awareness of the toxin would deter marijuana smokers. They echoed the official position of the 1920s—if some citizens ended up poisoned, well, they'd brought it upon themselves. Although Paraquat wasn't really all that toxic, the outcry forced the government to drop the plan. 

During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927: "Normally, no American government would engage in such business. … It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified." 

Others, however, accused lawmakers opposed to the poisoning plan of being in cahoots with criminals and argued that bootleggers and their law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy. "Must Uncle Sam guarantee safety first for souses?" asked Nebraska's Omaha Bee.

The saga began with ratification of the 18^th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States. * High-minded crusaders and anti-alcohol organizations had helped push the amendment through in 1919, playing on fears of moral decay in a country just emerging from war. The Volstead Act, spelling out the rules for enforcement, passed shortly later, and Prohibition itself went into effect on Jan. 1, 1920.

But people continued to drink—and in large quantities. Alcoholism rates soared during the 1920s; insurance companies charted the increase at more than 300 more percent. Speakeasies promptly opened for business. By the decade's end, some 30,000 existed in New York City alone. Street gangs grew into bootlegging empires built on smuggling, stealing, and manufacturing illegal alcohol. The country's defiant response to the new laws shocked those who sincerely (and naively) believed that the amendment would usher in a new era of upright behavior.

Rigorous enforcement had managed to slow the smuggling of alcohol from Canada and other countries. But crime syndicates responded by stealing massive quantities of industrial alcohol—used in paints and solvents, fuels and medical supplies—and redistilling it to make it potable.

Well, sort of. Industrial alcohol is basically grain alcohol with some unpleasant chemicals mixed in to render it undrinkable. The U.S. government started requiring this "denaturing" process in 1906 for manufacturers who wanted to avoid the taxes levied on potable spirits. The U.S. Treasury Department, charged with overseeing alcohol enforcement, estimated that by the mid-1920s, some 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol were stolen annually to supply the country's drinkers. In response, in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge's government decided to turn to chemistry as an enforcement tool. Some 70 denaturing formulas existed by the 1920s. Most simply added poisonous methyl alcohol into the mix. Others used bitter-tasting compounds that were less lethal, designed to make the alcohol taste so awful that it became undrinkable.

To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to "renature" the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly.

By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.

The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. 

"The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."

His department issued warnings to citizens, detailing the dangers in whiskey circulating in the city: "[P]ractically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic," read one 1928 alert. He publicized every death by alcohol poisoning. He assigned his toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, to analyze confiscated whiskey for poisons—that long list of toxic materials I cited came in part from studies done by the New York City medical examiner's office.

Norris also condemned the federal program for its disproportionate effect on the country's poorest residents. Wealthy people, he pointed out, could afford the best whiskey available. Most of those sickened and dying were those "who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff."

And the numbers were not trivial. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor. 

Furious anti-Prohibition legislators pushed for a halt in the use of lethal chemistry. "Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes," proclaimed Sen. James Reed of Missouri.

Officially, the special denaturing program ended only once the 18^th Amendment was repealed in December 1933. But the chemist's war itself faded away before then. Slowly, government officials quit talking about it. And when Prohibition ended and good grain whiskey reappeared, it was almost as if the craziness of Prohibition—and the poisonous measures taken to enforce it—had never quite happened.

Correction, Feb. 22, 2010: The article originally and incorrectly said that the 18^thAmendment banned the sale and consumption of alcohol. It banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol, not consumption. (Return  to the corrected sentence.)

Via: "Slate"