It took me a bit of time before reading Chris Hedges latest
contribution, but after skimming it, I went back and read it slowly.
This is a "must read". And after reading it we need to think about
how we are enabling or supporting or ignoring this rush toward the end
of sanity.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/16/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Our Invisible Government
Our Invisible Government
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
There are two forms of government in the United States. There is the visible
government—the White House, Congress, the courts, state legislatures and
governorships—and the invisible government, or deep state, where anonymous
technocrats, intelligence operatives, generals, bankers, corporations and
lobbyists manage foreign and domestic policy regardless of which political
party holds a majority.
The most powerful and important organs in the invisible government are the
nation’s bloated and unaccountable intelligence agencies. They are the
vanguard of the invisible government. They oversee a vast “black world,”
tasked with maintaining the invisible government’s lock on power. They spy
on and smear domestic and foreign critics, fix elections, bribe, extort,
torture, assassinate and flood the airwaves with “black propaganda.” They
are impervious to the chaos and human destruction they leave in their wake.
Disasters, social upheavals, economic collapses, massive suffering, death
and rabid anti-American blowback have grown out of the invisible
government’s overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran,
Guatemala and Chile and the wars it fostered in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya and Syria. The United States and the rest of the globe would be far
safer if our self-styled shadow warriors—who failed to foresee the Iranian
revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 9/11 attacks or the
absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and whose widespread use of
torture makes them the most potent recruiters for radical jihadism—were made
accountable to the public and the rule of law.
There are periodic glimpses of the moral squalor and ineptitude that define
this shadow world, such as those provided by the 1970s hearings led by Sen.
Frank Church and the leaking of photographs of prisoners being tortured at
Abu Ghraib in Iraq. But those who attempt to defy or expose the pernicious
inner workings, including Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, are usually
discredited, persecuted, silenced and sometimes “disappeared.” The invisible
government justifies its secrecy and criminality as necessary in the face of
existential threats, posed first by communism and later by Islamic
terrorism. The ends always justify the means. Anything, no matter how
immoral or criminal, is permissible.
The best window we have into this shadow world comes with historical
accounts of its crimes, including those in Stephen Kinzer’s new book,
“Prisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.”
The black sites and torture techniques pioneered by the Central Intelligence
Agency in the decades after World War II—developments that saw people
kidnapped, tortured and often executed—were “an indispensable link in this
grim chain,” he writes.
The medical experiments carried out by the Nazis in concentration camps and
the Japanese in the occupied Chinese region of Manchuria elicited two
responses after World War II. There were some in the visible government who
sought to hold the war criminals accountable. But there were many in the
invisible government who wanted to obtain and exploit the results of these
experiments and recruit the war criminals who had overseen them to work for
U.S. intelligence services and the military.
The backgrounds of the Nazi scientists who had directed chemical and
biological warfare projects, murdering thousands of helpless victims,
including children, with agents such as the gas sarin, were sanitized by the
invisible government in what became known as Operation Paperclip. No
criminal, including Kurt Blome, who had overseen the Nazis’ research into
biological warfare, was too heinous or sadistic for the United States to
welcome and use.
“Whenever a scientist they coveted turned out to have a blemish on his
record, they rewrote his biography,” Kinzer writes. “They systematically
expunged references to membership in the SS, collaboration with the Gestapo,
abuse of slave laborers, and experiments on human subjects. Applicants who
had been rated by interrogators as ‘ardent Nazi’ were re-categorized as ‘not
an ardent Nazi.’ References to their exemplary family lives were added. Once
they had been thus ‘bleached,’ they became suitable candidates for Paperclip
contracts.”
Shiro Ishii, who between 1936 and 1942 killed as many as 12,000 captured
Chinese soldiers, anti-Japanese partisans, Koreans, Mongolians, prisoners,
mental patients and, by some accounts, American prisoners of war in medical
experiments on behalf of the Japanese government, was a highly valued asset
to the invisible government.
Ishii oversaw a four-square-mile complex, called Unit 731, that housed 3,000
scientists and other employees. Kinzer writes that victims “were exposed to
poison gas so that their lungs could later be removed and studied; slowly
roasted by electricity to determine voltages needed to produce death; hung
upside down to study the progress of natural choking; locked into
high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out; spun in centrifuges;
infected with anthrax, syphilis, plague, cholera, and other diseases;
forcibly impregnated to provide infants for vivisection; bound to stakes to
be incinerated by soldiers testing flamethrowers; and slowly frozen to
observe the progress of hypothermia. Air was injected into victims’ veins to
provoke embolisms; animal blood was injected to see what effect it would
have. Some were dissected alive, or had limbs amputated so attendants could
monitor their slow deaths by bleeding and gangrene. According to a U.S. Army
report that was later declassified, groups of men, women, and children were
tied to stakes so that ‘their legs and buttocks were bared and exposed to
shrapnel from anthrax bombs exploded yards away,’ then monitored to see how
long they lived—which was never more than a week. Ishii required a constant
flow of human organs, meaning a steady need for ‘logs’ [the euphemism for
victims].”
After each experiment, “Ishii’s microbiologists would meticulously remove
tissue samples and mount them on slides for study,” Kinzer writes.
“Technicians used their research to prepare poisoned chocolate and chewing
gum, as well as hairpins and fountain pens rigged with toxin-coated needles
for use in close-quarters killing. In industrial-scale laboratories they
bred plague-infested fleas and manufactured tons of anthrax that were placed
in bomb casings and used to kill thousands of Chinese civilians.”
America’s invisible government went to great lengths to recruit Ishii and
obtain the extensive records and slides from his gruesome experiments. These
types of experiments would soon be replicated by the CIA in a top-secret
program, MK-ULTRA, with the assistance of Ishii and an assortment of
ex-Nazis.
Kinzer builds his book around Sidney Gottlieb, an elusive, quirky and
powerful operative in the CIA who in his quest for mind control—something he
and others in the CIA had convinced themselves the Soviets had
mastered—oversaw medical experiments that had been originated by his German
and Japanese collaborators. These experiments were coded-named Bluebird and
later Artichoke, which Kinzer calls “one of the most violently abusive
projects ever sponsored by an agency of the United States government.” The
torture sessions often permanently shattered the minds of his subjects.
Victims were kidnapped (later this would be called “extraordinary
rendition”) and sent to clandestine centers around the globe—now known as
“black sites”—or were picked from the prison population abroad and at home.
Those forced into taking part in these experiments included impoverished
African Americans at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Ky. Many of
the victims were labeled “expendables,” meaning they could be murdered after
the experiments and disappeared. The corpses were usually burned. Anyone who
was powerless, or could be made powerless, was a potential target. Mentally
handicapped children at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Massachusetts,
for example, were fed cereal laced with uranium and radioactive calcium and
their induced sicknesses were monitored. Gottlieb oversaw the administering
of LSD and other drugs to induce psychotic states at the federal prison in
Atlanta and a youth correctional facility in Bordentown, N.J. None of his
subjects consented to being a human guinea pig, and many ended up
psychologically impaired for life. The Boston gangster James “Whitey”
Bolger, being held in the Atlanta penitentiary, was told he would be part of
an experiment on curing schizophrenia but then was surreptitiously given LSD
nearly every day for 15 months. CIA scientists also conducted experiments on
terminally ill patients at an annex of Georgetown University Hospital in
Washington, D.C.
Gottlieb searched for years for a cocktail of drugs that, in Kinzer’s words,
would draw “prisoners away from their identities, induce them to reveal
secrets, and perhaps even program them to commit acts against their will.”
It was a vain quest. But with each failure he and the CIA became ever more
zealous, working closely with former German Gen. Walter Schreiber, the
onetime surgeon general of the Nazi army who had “approved experiments at
the Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Dachau concentration camps in which inmates
were frozen, injected with mescaline and other drugs, and cut open so the
progress of gangrene on their bones could be monitored.” Kinzer adds that
according to one American researcher, the experiments “usually resulted in a
slow and agonizing death.”
Gottlieb had a habit of secretly lacing the drinks of colleagues with LSD to
see their reaction. Some never recovered. One of his victims was Frank
Olson, a CIA scientist who was appalled by the brutal interrogations he
witnessed and planned to resign from the CIA. Gottlieb and his secretive
group of torturers and assassins were terrified Olson would go public. Olson
was found dead in 1953 on a sidewalk in Manhattan after allegedly diving
through a hotel window. His son Eric had his father’s body exhumed in 1994
and turned over to James Starrs, a forensic pathologist at George Washington
University in the District of Columbia. “Starrs had found no glass shards on
the victim’s head or neck, as might be expected if he had dived through a
window,” Kinzer writes. “Most intriguingly, although Olson had reportedly
landed on his back, the skull above his left eye was disfigured.”
“I would venture to say that this hematoma is singular evidence of the
possibility that Dr. Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head by some
person or instrument prior to his exiting through the window of room 1018A,”
Starrs concluded.
Starrs was later more emphatic: “I think Frank Olson was intentionally,
deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window.”
Gottlieb also oversaw the production of an array of poisons intended to be
used on leaders and others deemed hostile to the United States, including
Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro. He and the CIA pursued bizarre schemes,
including finding a chemical that would make Castro’s beard fall out,
leaving the Cuban leader, in the minds of CIA operatives, open to ridicule
that would result in his overthrow.
The CIA also experimented with implanting electrodes in brains to control
behavior. “ ‘An Agency team flew to Saigon in July 1968; among them were a
neurosurgeon and a neurologist … ,’ ” Kinzer says in quoting a study of
American intelligence. “ ‘In a closed-off compound at Bien Hoa Hospital, the
Agency team set to work. Three Vietcong prisoners had been selected by the
local station. How or why they were chosen would remain uncertain. In turn
each man was anaesthetized and, after he had hinged back a flap in their
skulls, the neurosurgeon implanted tiny electrodes in each brain. When the
prisoners regained consciousness, the behaviorists set to work. … The
prisoners were placed in a room and given knives. Pressing the control
buttons on their handsets, the behaviorists tried to arouse their subjects
to violence. Nothing happened. For a whole week the doctors tried to make
the men attack each other. Baffled at their lack of success, the team flew
back to Washington. As previously arranged in case of failure, while the
physicians were still in the air the prisoners were shot by Green Beret
troopers and their bodies burned.’ ”
The depth of moral squalor and criminality that can be reached by those
given unlimited resources, no oversight or public accountability and total
secrecy is breathtaking. Gottlieb and the CIA lured clueless victims in New
York City to a “safe house” on Bedford Street and gave them drinks laced
with LSD. CIA operatives directed by the thuggish George Hunter White
monitored the effects.
“[White] regularly used illegal drugs, keeping for himself a share of
whatever he confiscated,” Kinzer writes. “His consumption of alcohol—often a
full bottle of gin with dinner—was legendary. His other appetite was sexual
fetish, especially sadomasochism and high heels. He bought his second wife a
closet full of boots, and patronized prostitutes who bound and whipped him.
One of his few emotional bonds was with his pet canary. He loved to hold and
stroke it. When the bird died, he was deeply pained. ‘Poor little bastard
just couldn’t make it,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever
get another bird or pet. It’s tough on everyone when they die.’ ”
White, who as a narcotics officer had hounded and often framed jazz
musicians including Billie Holiday, was later moved to a safe house in San
Francisco that functioned as a CIA brothel. Gottlieb, Kinzer writes, “wanted
to systematize the study of how sex, especially in combination with drugs,
could loosen men’s tongues.” The prostituted women were hired by the CIA to
lure clients to bedrooms, decorated with photos of manacled women in black
stockings and studded leather collars, and lace their drinks with LSD and
other drugs.
“While his prostitutes and their clients had sex, White would watch through
a one-way mirror, sitting on his portable toilet,” Kinzer writes. Gottlieb,
on visits to the safe house, demanded the women have sex with him as if they
were part of his personal harem.
White was given a second safe house in Marin County outside San Francisco
where he used his prostituted women not only to drug men but test an array
of Little-Shop-of-Horrors gadgets on his victims including stink bombs,
itching powder, sneezing powder, diarrhea inducers, drug-laced swizzle
sticks and aerosol cans filled with LSD.
After the long quest for a mind-control drug was abandoned, the CIA
destroyed most of the records of its experiments. White, in a letter to
Gottlieb thanking him for hiring him, wrote: “Where else could a red-blooded
American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and
blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty good stuff, Brudder!” That would make a
far more honest motto for the CIA than the biblical passage from John 8:32
carved on the walls of its original headquarters at Langley, Va.: “And ye
shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
Prisoners, the CIA eventually concluded, were best broken through extreme
isolation and sensory deprivation. These techniques, pioneered by CIA-funded
research at McGill University in Canada, were laid out in a 1964 manual
titled “KUBARK Counter-Intelligence Interrogation.” KUBARK is the CIA’s
cryptonym for itself. The 128-page manual was not fully declassified until
2014. It was the primary resource used by CIA interrogators in the 1960s,
including in Vietnam, where at least 20,000 captured Vietnamese were killed,
often after being tortured. An updated version of the manual called “Human
Resources Exploitation Training Manual” came out in 1983. These forms of
torture, which include shackling, sleep deprivation, electroshock, sexual
and physical humiliation, prolonged cramped confinement, and hooding for
disorientation and sensory deprivation, became routine after 9/11 in
American intelligence black sites at home and abroad. CIA psychologists,
like Gottlieb’s earlier stable of mad scientists and torturers, monitor and
perfect these techniques to ensure complete psychological collapse and a
childlike dependence on the interrogator.
It would be naive to relegate the behavior of Gottlieb and the CIA to the
past, especially since the invisible government has once again shrouded the
activities of intelligence agencies from congressional oversight or public
scrutiny and installed a proponent of torture, Gina Haspel, as the head of
the agency.
When an intelligence service resorts to torture, it has failed. When it
relies on sadists and thugs, it has failed. When it treats human beings,
including its own citizens, as unwitting pawns to be experimented upon and
murdered, it has failed. When it uses dirty tricks, provides billions of
dollars in weapons to renegade militias and Islamic radicals, overthrows
governments and assassinates leaders, leaving in its wake mayhem and
disasters it did not foresee, it has failed.
Intelligence gathering, like investigative reporting, is a process that
requires immense patience, trusted sources cultivated over long periods and
a cultural, historical and linguistic literacy that is the result of years
of study. It is not a summer camp for creeps who revel in human degradation,
dirty tricks and murder. All countries need good intelligence officials and
agents, not the buffoons, gangsters, sadists and killers who, in the name of
national security, do us so much damage.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers…
Chris Hedges
