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Comment by keanebean86 | Hacker News Reader

I assume the CIA leaks mkultra and related stuff to keep the crazies busy and troll other countries.

There's also patents for seemingly impossible technology filed by the Navy.

Except MKULTRA was part of CIA’s “family jewels” —- indeed, it was so infamous that a cover letter to the DCI suggested they not familiarize themselves with the program in order to maintain plausible deniability. And MKULTRA was only part of a set of equally concerning operations, such as its progenitors, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, or Project OFTEN, which collaborated with pharmaceutical firms to uncover drugs too risky for release that might have covert applications (and which were then tested on unwitting military personnel).

While CIA certainly uses disinformation for a variety of reasons, this doesn’t obviate the fact that the agency has been — largely if not quite entirely in the past — a very, very amoral actor.

  > a very, very amoral actor

A criminal syndicate, perhaps?

I have to wonder about the extent to which the CIA really believed this was possible, or if it was more along the lines of "well sure, it sounds batshit, but the Soviets are doing it and if there really is something to it, we don't want to be behind in the game."

When one has infinite funding and no ethical oversight, the pit really is bottomless.

Mkultra seems pretty plausible to me, at least with the science they had at the time. LSD was making huge waves in the psychiatric community, and many humint objectives like interrogation and brainwashing are inherently applied psychology. LSD was a breakthrough tool that laid the psyche bare, if only they could discover how to harness it.

Combine that with amoral thinking about the cold war and "greater good" and it's understandable, yet reprehensible, that they dosed prisoners and johns in brothels.

It's funny you mention that, because the first thing that crosses my mind, whenever I run across stuff like this, is that the people who perpetrated these things were probably nice polite folks who had friends, got along with their neighbors, were kind to their families, and held the door open for people when they went to the supermarket.

And then they went to work every morning and played their part in monstrous endeavors that—on coming to light—make the rest of us question our faith in humanity.

I don't doubt that some people who wind up doing these things are legitimately sociopathic. But I also have a disturbing suspicion that many of them were probably normal, and bought into the idea that drugging and blackmailing some random person played a role in defending America. What matters more—some lowlife from the streets, or national security? Sacrifices have to be made, etc.

Pretty much every atrocity I know of—while spearheaded by evil people—relied heavily on the ability of normal, decent people to rationalize what they were doing.

It's more likely, given the CIA's provenance, that the initial idea came from the Nazi prison camp experiments.

It would be poetically just if people who constantly lie lost the ability to discern the truth.

If someone has a slightly more rigorous justification for the notion I would be happy to hear it.

Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist (not to say poisoner) who oversaw a lot of CIA’s dirty work, must have believed in what he was doing, because he lived long enough to regret it (and turn to advocating pacifism and good works).

Very hard to view this as some kind of genuine development of a conscience, given that he never corrected the perjury he committed during the Congressional testimony for which he was granted blanket immunity for his role in MKULTRA.

You mean the crazies like you? RV is real. Look into it and try it

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788...

Ed Dames, Pat Price, Dean Radin

Or maybe you weren't saying you think it's false, and people who believe something you think is false are crazies....

Maybe you were saying, true or not, the leak is crazy fodder and trolling. I'm sure that's part of it....

But it did seem flippant, and I don't think you should be so flippant about a topic like MKULTRA.... wasn't that seriously harmful to lots of people?

They're probably a limited hangout.

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