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villager Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-08-07 01:47 PM
Original message
Canadian victim of CIA brainwashing seeks class-action against government
Canadian victim of CIA brainwashing seeks class-action against government



MONTREAL (CP) - Janine Huard says she was a young mother of four with mild post-partum depression when she checked herself in for psychiatric treatment at a Montreal hospital more than five decades ago. Huard says what happened after that still haunts her today and she will be in a federal courtroom this week seeking to launch a class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government for Cold War-era brainwashing experiments carried out on her and hundreds of other patients.

"I was a guinea pig," Huard told The Canadian Press. On and off over more than a decade at McGill University's renowned Allan Memorial Institute, Huard says she received massive electroshocks and was fed more than 40 experimental pills a day. Huard, who will be 79 at the end of the month, says she was drugged and subjected to so-called "depatterning," during which repetitive recordings were played in her ear for weeks on end, one of them telling her she was of no use to her family.

"I came out of there so sick that my mother had to live with me for 10 years," Huard says. "I couldn't take care of my children any more." Huard says she lost memories and suffered from migraines.

The ordeal came at the hands of Dr. Ewen Cameron, an Edinburgh-educated, New York-based doctor who pioneered "psychic driving," by which he believed he could erase the memories of patients and rebuild their psyches without psychiatric defect. The idea intrigued the CIA, which recruited Cameron to experiment with mind control techniques beginning in 1950. The McGill experiments were jointly funded by the CIA and the Canadian government.

As director of the institute until 1964, Cameron conducted a range of experiments, often without the knowledge or permission of patients. Cameron gave patients LSD and subjected them to massive and multiple electroshock treatments. Some underwent sleep deprivation or total sensory deprivation. Others were kept in drug-induced comas for months on end while speakers under their pillows broadcasts messages for up to 16 hours a day.

The experiments were part of a larger CIA program called MK-ULTRA, which also saw LSD administered to U.S. prison inmates and patrons of brothels without their knowledge, according to testimony before a 1977 U.S. Senate committee.
The CIA eventually settled a class-action lawsuit by test subjects, including Huard, and the Canadian government ordered a judicial report into Cameron's experiments.

<snip>

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/070107/national/cia_brainwash_lawsuit
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Torn_Scorned_Ignored Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-08-07 01:56 PM
Response to Original message
1. .....
The CIA eventually settled a class-action lawsuit by test subjects, including Huard, and the Canadian government ordered a judicial report into Cameron's experiments.


Good, they did the right thing. :sarcasm:
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villager Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-08-07 02:00 PM
Response to Reply #1
2. yes, your CIA "at work..."
n/t
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formercia Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-08-07 03:02 PM
Response to Original message
3. Duplessis Orphans
Edited on Mon Jan-08-07 03:03 PM by formercia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplessis_Orphans

Duplessis Orphans
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Duplessis Orphans (French: les Orphelins de Duplessis) are the victims of a scheme in which several thousand orphaned children were falsely certified as mentally ill by the government of the province of Quebec, Canada and confined to psychiatric institutions. It is widely regarded as the largest case of institution-based child abuse in Canadian history.

Orphanages and schools were the financial responsibility of the provincial government but funding for mental institutions was also provided by the government of Canada. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the 1960s, Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis in cooperation with the Roman Catholic Church who ran the orphanages, developed a scheme to obtain Federal funding for thousands of children, most of whom had been orphaned through their abandonment by an unwed mother. In some cases the Catholic orphanages were relabelled as health-care facilities and in other cases the children were shipped from orphanages to existing mental asylums. Years later, long after these institutions were closed, the adult children who had survived them began to speak out about the harsh treatment and sexual abuse they were forced to endure at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church priests, nuns, and administrators. Reminiscent of the abuses by the Catholic-run Magdalen Asylums, members of the Duplessis Orphans claim that they were used as slave labour and subjected to extreme physical abuse for misbehaviour.

By the 1990s, there remained about 3000 survivors and a large group formed to start a campaign for justice. They called themselves the Duplessis Orphans after Maurice Duplessis, the premier of the province during that time whose government was responsible for their plight. In addition to government and Church responsibility, the College of Physicians of Quebec came under fire after some of the orphans found copies of their medical records that had been falsified. Labelled as mentally deficient, many of these children were subjected to a variety of drug testing and used in other medical experiments.


--snip--




A continuation of work done by the Nazis...
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villager Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-08-07 04:32 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. yes, the west seems to have embraced Nazi-style experimentation...
whether they own up to it or not...
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otherlander Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-08-07 05:40 PM
Response to Reply #4
6. That's what happens when
you accept Nazi war criminals into your government and agree not to charge them if they give you information.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1301306.stm
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otherlander Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-08-07 05:37 PM
Response to Original message
5. OMFG
Thousands... and no one was held accountable.

Having a nation's intelligence gathering agency entirely under the control of the President pretty much throws the whole system of checks and balances out the window.
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provis99 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-09-07 08:48 PM
Response to Original message
7. the CIA is less culpable than the Canadian government
the CIA was doing these experiments to foreigners, which is despicable enough. But the Canadian government was knowingly allow these experiments on their own people, which is far worse. Sue the Canadian government first.
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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-09-07 09:49 PM
Response to Reply #7
8. Your assumptions are just wrong, it wasn't just the CIA, it wasn't only
experiments, it wasn't just "foreigners", and many of the pragmatic results of this "research" have been privatized and patented. This was systemic, President Clinton apologized for it (he called it "...excesses of the Cold War...") and opened an Office to deal with some of it. Many of the unwitting human test subjects were from our own military and intelligence communities, their families and social networks.

Truly some of this "research" originated from within the Third Reich and the real Nazis that were clandestinely recruited and given jobs as Americans working in national security immediately following WWII.

Why did the totalitarian command economies of the former USSR and Soviet Bloc states as well as the People's Republic of China (along with other nation states) also investigate and research what is known as mind control, brainwashing, perception management, neuro-influencing, etc, etc?

Because it yielded pragmatic results.

The primary US force behind this "research" was the late Richard McGarrah Helms who proposed it to CIA Director Allen Dulles in April 1953, Dulles approved it. The rest is history, much of it hidden behind the security classification shield because so much of it was criminal.

There were at least 149 sub-projects at at least 80 institutions known as MK ULTRA alone-not to mention all the similar research being done by our military and other agencies besides the CIA, this went on for decades and has continued in some areas (neuro-science, directed energy weapons, pharmacology, etc).

Consider this ruling from 2002 when Reporters Committee for a Free Press won a decision allowing access to records of mind control not destroyed by Richard McGarrah Helms.
http://www.rcfp.org/news/2002/0819kellyv.html

Again, no flames intended here, but your assumptions are wrong.
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redqueen Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-10-07 01:26 PM
Response to Reply #8
11. Because it yielded pragmatic results?
I don't see how this lets anyone off the hook.
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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-10-07 04:19 PM
Response to Reply #11
12. Hi redqueen, I certainly would like to see everyone involved in
this horrible history of "research" into the manipulation and control of the central nervous system of human beings for any purpose held accountable.

In the context of my post, to clarify, I noted that not only did our public and private sectors engage in this but so did entirely differently based political economies, ergo-why?

"Because it yielded pragmatic results."
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Vidar Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-10-07 09:28 AM
Response to Original message
9. I wish her the best.
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donkeyotay Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Jan-10-07 12:56 PM
Response to Original message
10. Well, you know we have to do these things because we're fighting bad people
As Cheney Hissevilself said, we've got to go over to the dark side. Even as we learn about the Nazi experimentation, supposedly-hopefully, of the past, the current CIA scion is implementing the gulag and the KGB. But what choice do we have? :sarcasm: We must become the enemy or they'll defeat us.:sarcasm:
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