House hearing sheds NEW LIGHT: Historian says MKULTRA experiments were medical torture

[0:00] lawmakers reopen one of the darkest files in american history with a hearing titled [0:05] mind control and accountability uncovering the truth of the cia's mk ultra project for nearly 20 [0:13] years the cia ran a top secret program to develop techniques for controlling the human mind they [0:21] dosed unaware people with lsd subjected them to hypnosis sensory deprivation electroshock and [0:28] psychological torture often in secret safe houses prisons and hospitals many records were deliberately [0:36] destroyed in 1973 but what survived revealed a program that operated with almost no oversight [0:44] the hearing led by the house oversight committee's task force on the declassification of federal secrets [0:51] aimed to push for greater transparency and accountability decades later joining us now [0:57] is one of the foremost experts on this story steven kinzer the author of the definitive book on the man [1:04] who ran the program poisoner in chief sydney gottlieb and the cia search for mind control steven it's great [1:12] to have you here with us you have written as i mentioned extensively about gottlieb the canon chemist [1:17] who directed mk ultra you described him as having what amounted to a government issued license to [1:25] kill part of your testimony yesterday speaks to that we want to listen to that here in its search [1:35] for ways to destroy a human mind and body mk ultra conducted the most extreme experiments on human [1:42] beings that have ever been carried out by a u.s government agency by any standard they qualify [1:50] as medical torture steven who was gottlieb really how did he end up with that kind of unchecked power [1:57] inside the cia height of the cold war and there was a terrifying feeling in the united states that [2:06] the world was coming to an end the soviets were going to attack we were on the edge of disaster [2:12] in this kind of an environment fantasies run wild the cia developed an idea which turned out to be [2:18] mistaken that the soviets or the chinese communists had discovered the secret of mind control [2:25] and so they decided we should set up a program of our own sydney gottlieb was hired to run this [2:31] project called mk ultra and he decided at the beginning that the way to find a tool to insert [2:40] a new mind into somebody's brain would require first that you destroy the mind that's in there [2:47] so how do you destroy a human mind and a human body that was the question that led to all these gruesome [2:54] experiments in which many people were tortured and an unknown people an unknown number were [2:58] experimented to death who were the targets from our political adversaries to vulnerable americans [3:06] there were different categories for inside the united states and outside the united states [3:11] experiments inside the united states were carried out often in clinics in hospitals and particularly in [3:17] prisons and federal drug facilities where the people had no real control over their own fate [3:23] abroad it was even more intense sydney gottlieb the cia officer in charge of mk ultra had the right [3:31] to go to foreign countries and ask the local cia station to provide him with what were called expendables [3:40] that is human beings who if they disappeared wouldn't be missed by anyone else and he was able to conduct [3:47] whatever experiments he wanted to on these people many of them were quite gruesome and back at the cia [3:54] it was considered important not to know anything about what gottlieb was doing in the culture of the cia [4:01] and other secret services ignorance can be an asset you don't want to know anything and i think what [4:07] happened in the end was that everybody wound up blaming the excesses of mk ultra on sydney gottlieb and [4:15] that was the plan from the beginning that's why he was hired and essentially he took the fall and in [4:21] an effort by the cia to escape its institutional responsibility and blame the whole thing on the [4:28] excesses of one crazy guy you don't want to know anything but decades later here we are and and hoping [4:34] to find more information especially on those vulnerable americans that you mentioned the cia in [4:39] the process of declassifying a trove of new documents what do you expect what do you hope to learn [4:46] the first thing i'd like to have is documents that we now have that have been heavily redacted so we [4:52] know those documents exist and in there there's a lot of evidence about what mk ultra was next step [4:59] would be to look for documents still out at the cia that we haven't seen yet even though the large trove [5:05] of them was originally destroyed as you mentioned in 1973 and then the next step might be to ask ourselves [5:12] and to ask the cia if there is any super secret program going on now that's equivalent to the [5:19] super secret program that was going on in the 1950s and that's what i was just going to ask you today's [5:25] rapid advances i mean you think about it neuroscience artificial intelligence and surveillance technology [5:30] we are all navigating a new world uh and you've raised the possibility of modern equivalence to mk ultra [5:38] do you see any warning signs that something similar could be happening today under perhaps a different [5:43] name i do think that we're subject to various forms of mind control efforts you could see the media social [5:52] media and advertising as one form of that because what we are able to learn from those sources is heavily [5:59] curated so we only get certain kinds of information but beyond that it just makes sense that although [6:06] sydney godley was probably right at the end of mk ultra when he said it was all a myth there's no such thing [6:13] as mind control he's probably right at the time that he said it but that was more than 60 years ago all these [6:20] advances to which you just referred put us in a completely new category so even if it was true in 1960 that [6:28] there's no such thing as mind control and you can't make a person do something that he's fundamentally [6:33] opposed to doing i asked myself is that still true now with all the advances we've had and if i'm asking [6:40] myself this question isn't it logical to think that people inside secret services like the cia are asking [6:46] themselves the same question i think it's an interesting point that you mentioned um you know back in the day [6:53] we're thinking lsd we're thinking substances but now you know you scroll on your phone and you know [6:59] maybe you could unknowingly be subjected to some of this what should the public in congress in your [7:05] opinion be watching for the emergence of the covert sphere in america is the basis of all conspiracy [7:13] theories americans realize that what we say we are as a nation and the way we say we behave and the [7:20] respect that we say we offer to all american citizens and to people in other countries is [7:25] actually not the way we are that there's a whole secret level below what we're seeing on the surface [7:32] and that makes the paranoid mindset seem more and more realistic so i think it's uh we're now at a point [7:42] at which things that might have seemed completely fantastic not so long ago are realistic and the very [7:49] existence of mk ultra is an example of how far intelligence agencies are willing to go when they [7:57] feel that they're under stress and under pressure and need to produce results i know it seems like [8:01] and i'm sure you've heard this like a like a plot out of a movie this is a new terrifying reality that [8:07] you know i hope that we learn more about steven kinzer thank you for joining us and sharing your [8:12] research with us it's a chilling subject but good to discuss it with you thanks