The Poisoner in Chief

[jazzcyclist]

I had never heard of this Gottlieb character but he reminds me of some supervillain in a James Bond or DC Comics superhero movie. SMDH!

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/75898...soner-in-chief

[user4]

Nothing quite matches the comic genius of the austin powers series and gold member was priceless. If you didnt laugh a lung out then you have no heart in you!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin..._in_Goldmember

[Atticus]

I had never heard of this Gottlieb character but he reminds me of some supervillain in a James Bond or DC Comics superhero movie. SMDH!

Excerpt:

"Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process," Kinzer says. "First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. We didn't get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one."

Which (esp. the bolded part) is pure and utter BS.

You can certainly find use drugs that inhibit one's mental capacities, but as in hypnosis, getting someone to give up their will just ain't doable with modern neuroscience (maybe in 100 years). And even that is a far cry from "blasting away the existing mind' or "inserting a new mind".

Psychobabble sci-fi fantasy (which is, of course, why the program failed).

[jazzcyclist]

What about this part?

[Gottlieb] operated almost completely without supervision. He had sort of a checkoff from his titular boss and from his real boss, Richard Helms, and from the CIA director, Allen Dulles. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. This guy had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal — yet nobody looked over his shoulder.

[Atticus]

What about this part?

"He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal."

great copy - authenticity suspect

[user4]

great copy - authenticity suspect

Ill side with Atticus here. I doubt the historicity of human subjects exposed to fatal tests. Im very skeptical and the articles just dont provide the evidence to support the claim.

Here is the wiki take on MKUltra:

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

[bobguild76]

great copy - authenticity suspect

While there was probably stuff taking place that pushed the boundaries of morality and legality, after reading the article, I got the sense the author must have watched The Bourne movies prior to writing.

[Conor Dary]

I remember when he died 20 years ago....that's when I first heard about the program....

In the 1950's and early 1960's, the agency gave mind-altering drugs to hundreds of unsuspecting Americans in an effort to explore the possibilities of controlling human consciousness. Many of the human guinea pigs were mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes -- ''people who could not fight back,'' as one agency officer put it. In one case, a mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days.

Other experiments involved agency employees, military officers and college students, who had varying degrees of knowledge about the tests. In all, the agency conducted 149 separate mind-control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects. First-hand testimony, fragmentary Government documents and court records show that at least one participant died, others went mad, and still others suffered psychological damage after participating in the project, known as MK Ultra. The experiments were useless, Mr. Gottlieb concluded in 1972, shortly before he retired.

The C.I.A. awarded Mr. Gottlieb the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and deliberately destroyed most of the MKUltra records in 1973.

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/10/u...sd-to-cia.html

[jazzcyclist]

More on Gottlieb and his program:

Gottlieb did not emerge in a vacuum but in the primordial ooze of moral justification following World War II. While America was putting its public virtue on display during the Nuremberg trials, the army under the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was courting Nazi scientists who had been involved in the most grotesque human experimentation imaginable during the war. Their expertise in biological warfare and psychoactive drugs was highly prized. The Americans had to make sure, after all, that the commies didn’t get to them first.

So under Operation Paperclip, the army “bleached” their records and brought these men in among several hundred other scientists, engineers, and technicians who served the Third Reich. Instead of prison, they were settled into comfortable obscurity in suburban Washington, working for the U.S. government.

For those whose crimes were not so easily scrubbed, the army found ways to collaborate with them overseas in even less controlled environs. Like Kurt Blome, a Nazi scientist who deliberately infected prisoners with deadly viruses, including the plague, at the Auschwitz concentration camp and other sites. After saving him from the gallows at Nuremburg, officials quietly installed him in the European Command Intelligence Center at Oberursel, West Germany—otherwise known as “Camp King”—to conduct more experiments, but on our side.

The same went for Japanese scientist Shiro Ishi, who was reportedly responsible for some 10,000 deaths in and around his Manchurian complex called Unit 731 during the war. His ghastly activities included everything from slow-roasting test subjects with electricity, to amputating limbs and dissecting people alive to monitor their slow deaths. At one point, he lined up naked Chinese women and children to see how long they would live after being struck by shrapnel in the buttocks. He also created tons of anthrax that was later used to kill thousands of Chinese civilians.

But instead of bringing this monster to justice, U.S. agents granted Ishi and his Japanese collaborators immunity and obtained all of his research on how toxins affect the body—including all of the tissue slides from people whose organs were taken out while they were still alive. “Scientists at Camp Detrick (Maryland) were delighted,” Kinzer writes.

“Thus did the man responsible for directing the dissection of thousands of living prisoners…escape punishment,” he adds, noting that Ishi and his minions were deployed to U.S. detention centers in East Asia, where they “helped Americans conceive and carry out experiments on human subjects that could not legally be conducted in the United States.

https://www.theamericanconservative....ires-dr-death/

[gh]

disturbing trend emerging here guys.... cutting and pasting huge chunks of copy from other sites. Please restrict yourself to the main point and then cut directly to the link.

thanks