This is not an area I normally delve into as we have several more dedicated writers on these issues here on Daily Kos, Valtin and others who keep us up to date on what the government is doing in our names (Americans) in places like Gitmo, Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan.
This article written in Truthout caught my eye as it was written by two men whom I admire greatly from their previous works.
Cries From the Past: Torture's Ugly Echoes
Sunday 23 May 2010
by: H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Jeffrey Kaye, t r u t h o u t | Report
One of the names in the article caught my attention as I knew him informally a decade ago, Stephen Xenakis, I was his letter carrier, when he was the Commanding General of the military hospital at Fort Gordon named Dwight David Eisenhower Army Medical Center or DDEMAC. I seldom saw him except on saturdays if he came out of his home to get the mail.
So I read the article as curiosity got the better of me, and then it drew me in with the discussion of MKULTRA and how it was used as a scapegoat for other supposed sub projects that were construed as being part of MKULTRA and that supposedly ended in 1975 when the Army was ordered to stop all human testing.
Somehow some of the sub projects were not stopped and the government just moved them deeper into the woodwork.
Operation Dormouse
Contemporary torture's earliest, deepest and most influential roots are found in the CIA's Artichoke Project. Indeed, it is Project Artichoke that encapsulates the CIA's real traveling road show of horrors and atrocities, not MK/ULTRA which, although responsible for its own acts of mindless cruelty, pales in comparison.
That MK/ULTRA received, and continues to receive, the lion's share of the media's attention and public outrage over CIA mind control programs was a deliberately planned outcome on the part of the Agency. This outcome was the central objective of a never before revealed covert operation launched in 1975 and informally code-named Dormouse.
Dormouse, operated out of the CIA's Security Research branch, had its genesis in the 1975 Rockefeller Commission report and in the subsequent Congressional hearings into CIA illegal activities chaired by Senators Frank Church and Teddy Kennedy. Following the initial revelation of Frank Olson's alleged "suicide" by the Rockefeller Commission, a number of high-level meetings occurred between President Gerald Ford's White House and CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston.
The government is good at using exposed programs to help it evade ongoing operations. Two of the men at the center of this were Richard B Cheney as the White House Chief of Staff and Donald Rumsfeld as the Secretary of Defense.
This is part of the explanation farther down in the article but it is very illuminating:
Houston additionally explained to Rumsfeld and Cheney that, along with the release of MK/ULTRA details to the media, the names of a few former CIA employees, such as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, would also be released to the press. Incredibly, when the subject of possible federal prosecutions of CIA officials for capital crimes and felonies, such as murder and drug trafficking, came up in their discussion, Houston informed Rumsfeld and Cheney that there was little cause for concern.
Explained the Agency's General Counsel, since early 1954, following the death of Army biochemist Frank Olson, a secret agreement between the CIA and the U.S. Department of Justice had been put in place whereby the violation of "criminal statutes" by CIA personnel would not result in Department of Justice prosecutions, if "highly classified and complex covert operations" were threatened with exposure. The agreement had been struck between Houston and Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers in February 1954, not long after Frank Olson's death, and still remained solidly in place.
So the Justice department made a deal NOT to prosecute CIA employees if doing so would threaten exposure of highly covert operations, why? Is this a case of the famous "get out of jail free card" that movie makers enjoy showing in political espionage movies?
Without doubt, as the extant record clearly reveals, the CIA's Dormouse Operation, as expressed by Houston, was remarkably effective. Information released on the Agency's MK/ULTRA program more than sated the media's curiosity for mind control details, and even a few random Artichoke Program citations in a couple released documents failed to draw any concerted examination by anyone in the press. For example: documents revealing that Dr. Frank Olson had been part of the CIA's ongoing "Artichoke Conference" were near completely overlooked. Within a few short months, Artichoke was widely believed by the media and public to be but a small, innocuous project that had been replaced by the MK/ULTRA behemoth. Still today, numerous publications state that Artichoke was absorbed and replaced by MK/ULTRA, when actually Artichoke operated independently for nearly 17 years beyond the dawn of MK/ULTRA.
As this article shows that the government is still conducting covert research using human subjects and there are psychiatrists and medical doctors that are complicit in these activities, and no one is willing to hold them accountable, either the medical boards who can revoke their licenses to practice medicine nor the Justice department for violating federal laws.
When will accountability ever be demanded, who will demand it? Will it be Congress? Will it be the American people. I am still asking for justice for what part of the MKULTRA program did to myself and 7119 other Army "volunteers" at Edgewood Arsenal from 1955 thru 1975, we volunteered for safe experiments and we gave consent, but there is a major difference between consent and informed consent, if the test subjects are not told of all of the parameters, told who the people are conducting the experiments (no one told the volunteers about the 9 German doctors who worked with the likes of Dr Mengele in the WW2 camps) who were employed by the Army at Edgewood Arsenal after WW2. We were not told what substances we were being exposed to, how much or even why.
That is why this lawsuit has been filed Vietnam Veterans of America, et al. v. Central Intelligence Agency, et al.
What This Case Is About
Plaintiffs seek declaratory and injunctive relief only – no monetary damages – and Plaintiffs seek redress for 25 years of diabolical experiments followed by over 30 years of neglect, including:
the use of troops to test nerve gas, psychochemicals, and thousands of other toxic chemical or biological substances and perhaps most gruesomely, the insertion of septal implants in the brains of subjects in a ghastly series of mind control experiments that went awry;
the failures to secure informed consent and other widespread failures to follow the precepts of U.S. and international law regarding the use of human subjects, including the 1953 Wilson Directive and the Nuremberg Code;
an almost fanatical refusal to satisfy their legal and moral obligations to locate the victims of their gruesome experiments or to provide health care or compensation to them;
the deliberate destruction of evidence and files documenting their illegal actions, actions which were punctuated by fraud, deception, and a callous disregard for the value of human life.
The Complaint asks the Court to determine that Defendants’ actions were illegal and that Defendants have a duty to notify all victims and to provide them with health care going forward.
I think it is time for the President and the national Security Council to end the games that these doctors are doing in the guise of the "National Good" this is nothing but harmful to us as a nation, and it is a black eye that needs to be treated and exposed and it might be time for a National Committee to learn the "truth" much like other nations have done in pursuit of the truth. Does the US need a "truth commission"?