Padilla Injected with a "Truth Serum"

Further confirmation that MKULTRA never died:

Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. He was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured this extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds.

Padilla also says he was injected with a "truth serum," a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP.

According to his lawyers and two mental health specialists who examined him, Padilla has been so shattered that he lacks the ability to assist in his own defence. He is convinced that his lawyers are "part of a continuing interrogation program" and sees his captors as protectors.

And Klein has clearly done her homework:

Now that his mental state is the central issue in the case, the government prosecutors have a problem. The CIA and the military have known since the early 1960s that extreme sensory deprivation and sensory overload cause personality disintegration that's the whole point.

Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, a declassified 1963 CIA manual for interrogating "resistant sources" was based on the findings of the agency's notorious MK-Ultra program. In the 1950s, it funnelled about $25 million to scientists to research "unusual techniques of interrogation." One of the psychiatrists who received CIA funding was the infamous Ewen Cameron of Montreal's McGill University.

Cameron subjected hundreds of psychiatric patients to large doses of electroshock and total sensory isolation and drugged them with LSD and PCP. In 1960, Cameron gave a lecture at the Brooks Air Force Base in Texas in which he stated that sensory deprivation "produces the primary symptoms of schizophrenia."

There is no need to go so far back to prove that the U.S. military knew full well that it was driving Padilla mad. The Army's field manual, reissued just last year, states, "Sensory deprivation may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and anti-social behavior," as well as "significant psychological distress."

If these techniques drove Padilla insane, that means the U.S. government has been deliberately driving hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners insane around the world. What is on trial in Florida is not one man's mental state. It is the whole system of U.S. psychological torture.

Remembering Frank Olson, MKULTRA victim and "suicidee"

(Image: President Ford and Frank Olson's widow)

The recent news item about the activist lawyer "falling" to his death, along with the disgusting paeans to recently-deceased President Ford, brought to mind the story of Frank Olson. The Olson saga is a miniature primer of parapolitics, bringing together the nastiest of the dark players -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Colby, and of course GHW Bush and clan -- and the blackest of CIA projects, Paperclip, MKULTRA, and ARTICHOKE.

There's a lot of material about this online, but this site does a good job of condensing the story. See the links on the page for further material.

Al Qaeda Suspect: U.S. Government Gave Me LSD

More confirmation that MKULTRA never went away.

Lawyers for Padilla, who was born in Brooklyn and converted to Islam while in prison for gang-related crimes, made the claims of torture in a motion filed last week with a federal court in Florida.

"He was threatened with being cut with a knife and having alcohol poured on the wounds. He was also threatened with imminent execution," the chief federal defender in Miami, Michael Caruso, wrote. "Additionally, Padilla was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations."

See also the Sex, Drugs, Mind Control, and Torture index.