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Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

People like to laugh about it, and the emphasis on the sillier aspects are, I think, intentional. They got up to some really nasty stuff.

Anyone not familiar with the program would do well to spend a couple minutes on the summary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

And of course it served as the template for how to deal with the Abu Ghraib fallout:

   Given the CIA's purposeful destruction of most records, its failure to follow informed consent protocols with thousands of participants, the uncontrolled nature of the experiments, and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of MKUltra experiments, including deaths, may never be known.

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One of the crazier projects https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Midnight_Climax

That is an absolute bombshell of a story and I'd guess that the vast majority of people have never heard of it but would be horrified if they did. It sounds like they even blackmailed the people.

Holy goddamn. I never heard of that.

This is one of those moments when I started to feel shock and horror shifting towards disbelief, and then remembered that this is the CIA and of course they did stuff like that because who would stop them?

One of those little examples of how journalism really is one of the last bulwarks between the country we want to think we are and the country we very easily could be.

The Church committee[1] in '75 did some good work to reign in the worst of the intelligence communities work. Most of that has been undone by now though.

The CIA's work on LSD wasn't the worst thing going on and - surprisingly to me - the intelligence agencies were far from the worst. Eg, there was a Sloan-Kettering Institute researcher who injected live cancer cells into unwitting humans through out the 1950s and 60s[2]. Or in 1952 a Detroit Hospital administered radioactive iodine to premature babies, and fed it via a tube to healthy non-premature babies. Or the doctor who administered 100 or more rads of radiation after forging consent forms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

If you think that's horrifying, let me introduce you to Dr. Jolly West and the Jimmy Shaver case:

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/24/cia-mkultra-louis-jolyon...

Highly recommend Tom O'Neill's 'CHAOS' for some of the new details he dug up on MKULTRA. The rumor mill has it that he is working on a new book exploring its potential ties to the RFK assassination, the Grateful Dead, and the Jonestown massacre.

On the subject of the Jonestown/MKULTRA links, also check out this interview with an aide to Congressman Leo Ryan (who was killed when he went to investigate in Guyana): https://twitter.com/gumby4christ/status/1289361962917191681

The fringes of this material gets wild and significantly less credible really fast. It is very important to stick to the hard facts when dealing with government wrongdoing or you open yourself up to the “conspiracy theory” thought stopper charge.

Wild conspiracy theories help cover up actual conspiracy and malfeasance.

The stuff you are referencing is definitely not impossible, but it’s unproven and likely unprovable and is mixed in with a lot of trash. We have enough documented stuff about the government meddling with the counterculture (e.g. COINTELPRO) that we don’t need to make shit up or chase phantoms.

> Wild conspiracy theories help cover up actual conspiracy and malfeasance.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you believe the principal actors in the publicly known and acknowledged aspects of MKULTRA were not held to account because of 'wild conspiracy theories' which had little traction outside fringe newsletters in the 1970s when MKULTRA came to some semblance of public light? Do you believe the general public would be more aware and educated about these abuses if not for the existence of those theories?

There's nothing outside hard facts in any of what Tom O'Neill has printed, so you can save your charges that I am "making shit up" or "chasing phantoms." The idea that he is exploring connections to the other historical events I mentioned is so far just rumor, but rumor to which O'Neill himself has lent some credence on his own Twitter page: https://twitter.com/chaosmansonbook/status/12990091441424179... https://twitter.com/chaosmansonbook/status/12990005775952486...

Everyone already knows the standard narrative line that "MKULTRA was a temporary, discontinued, and largely unsuccessful program, which like COINTELPRO was ended (we promise!) when documentary evidence of it was brought to light." I don't see how informed, fact-based speculation that there may be more to it than that does anything to 'cover up' or absolve the people involved.

That's nothing; look at what they did in Canada:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_experiments

'The Men Who Stare at Goats' points out that the whole "haha they're making them listen to the Barney song, that drives me crazy when my kids make me put it on too!" was probably a cover for more sinister interrogation or even mind control techniques being explored with music blasted at prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Surely just a coincidence that the cult leader of ISIS was at that same prison ....

I can certainly see someone being radicalized to the point of delusional psychosis by being victimized in this way.

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