The CIA's Long-Running MK-Ultra Mind Control Program Failed, Because Brains Don't Make Minds

The story of the MK-Ultra project is one of the sickest stories in the history of abusive science. In the 1950's there began a CIA project called MK-Ultra. The project was all based on materialist notions of the mind. Making the erroneous assumption that the mind is merely the product of the brain and its chemical outputs, scientists attempted to find or produce chemicals that could control a person's mind. One ambition of the project was to find some chemical potion that could "break down a person's mind," so that, for example, a dedicated Communist might first have his mind "broken down," and then be converted into a capitalist or an anti-Communist. Another ambition of the project was to discover some "truth serum" that would cause a subject to confess any secrets he had sworn to keep. Another ambition of the project was to find some kind of amnesia drug that would cause someone to forget secret things he had recently learned, without destroying his memory entirely. 

The project was a dismal failure. None of its goals was achieved. While the project was operating, innumerable lives were disrupted or destroyed. The project is described in the Washington Post column below, written by the leading journalist Jack Anderson:

A page on the CIA web site tells us this about MK-Ultra:

"MK-ULTRA, or MKULTRA, was the code name for a covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. This official U.S. government program began in the early 1950s, continuing at least through the late 1960s, and it supposedly used United States citizens as unwitting test subjects...The published evidence indicates that Project MK-ULTRA involved the surreptitious use of many types of drugs, as well as other methods, to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function. Project MK-ULTRA was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms' destruction order.  Although the CIA insists that MK-ULTRA-type experiments have been abandoned, 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti has stated in various interviews that the CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continued. In a 1977 interview, Marchetti specifically called the CIA claim that MK-ULTRA was abandoned a 'cover story.' On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said: The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an 'extensive testing and experimentation' program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign'....At least one death, that of Dr. Frank Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense.' "

Later in the same document we get these tidbits:

• "In 1964, the project was renamed MK-SEARCII. The project attempted to produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and generally to explore any other possibilities of mind control."
• The MK-ULTRA project was interested in finding "materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use,"  "a material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning,"  "substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public," "materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness," 
  and "substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception."
• "The MK-ULTRA director was granted six percent of the CIA 'operating budget in 1953, without oversight or accounting." This presumably resulted in many millions of dollars of funding. 
• "LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge or informed consent."
• "Volunteers were given LSD for 77 consecutive days."
• " CIA recruited Scottish psychiatrist Donald Owen Cameron did experiments that "consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions." 
• " Run by TSS chief Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the program came to include 149 separate animal and human behavior modification projects, some conducted by Agency and Army researchers, but most involving one of 80 participating American and Canadian universities, hospitals, and research institutions operating under contracts that did not reveal Agency funding or associations."

The wikipedia.org article on Donald Owen Cameron is a portrait of a man who sunk into very dark depths of evil, after serving for two years as the president of the American Psychiatric Association.  Cameron devised sinister experimental programs of long-term mental torture, which had no useful results. The biography of Sidney Gottlieb is a portrait of a biochemist who sunk into depths of evil.  That biography of Gottlieb says, "Gottlieb retired from the CIA in 1973, saying he did not believe his work had been effective." 

Nothing useful came out of all the many years of reckless highly-funded experiments performed as part of the MK-Ultra project. No one found any chemical way to control a mind, nor did anyone find any chemical way to induce amnesia or produce a truth serum.  The dismal failure of the project makes sense after you have studied the very many powerful reasons (discussed in the posts of this blog) for thinking the human mind cannot be the product of the brain, and that brains cannot be a storage place for human memories. Also, the very deep involvement of US universities in this sinister project (over many years) is another reason why we should question the credibility of biology pronouncements coming from such universities.