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Le Projet MKULTRA (connu aussi sous le nom de MK-ULTRA) est le nom de code d'un projet de la CIA des années 50 à 70 visant à manipuler mentalement certaines personnes par l'injection de substances psychotropes. Le congrès des États-Unis d'Amérique a établi une commission (le comité Church) sur le sujet dans les années 70 ainsi que la présidence de la république et le sénat américain.

"Le directeur adjoint de la CIA a révélé que plus de 30 universités et institutions avaient participé à un 'large projet de tests et d'expérimentations' qui incluait des tests de médicaments cachés sur des sujets non-volontaires de 'toutes les catégories sociales, hautes et basses, américains et étrangers'. Plusieurs de ces tests consistaient à administrer du LSD sur des 'sujets ignorants dans diverses situations sociales'. Au moins une mort, celle du Dr. Olson est due à ces activités. L'Agence a elle-même reconnu que ces expériences n'avaient pas de valeur scientifique. Les agents qui faisaient le suivi n'étaient pas des observateurs scientifiques compétents."
Sénateur Kennedy.
Sénat des Etats-Unis, le 3 Août 1977
COMITE SUR LE RENSEIGNEMENT,
SOUS-COMITE SUR LA SANTE
SERVICE DE RECHERCHE DU COMITE DES RESSOURCES HUMAINES


[modifier] Origines

Dirigé par le Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, le projet MKULTRA fut initié sous l'impulsion du directeur de la CIA Allen Dulles en avril 1953, largement en réponse à des utilisations supposés de techniques de contrôle mental qui auraient été faites par l' Union Soviétique, la Chine et la Corée du Nord sur des prisonniers de guerre américains lors de la guerre de Corée. La CIA voulait développer des techniques similaires. L'agence voulait aussi être capable de manipuler des leaders étrangers et tentera d'ailleurs d'utiliser certaines de ces techniques sur Fidel Castro.

En 1964, le projet fut renommé MKSEARCH. Le but était de produire un sérum de vérité parfait déstiné aux interrogatoires de personnes soupçonnées d'être des espions soviétiques et plus généralement d'explorer les techniques de contrôle mental.

En 1972, Richard Helms, directeur de la CIA ordonne la destruction des archives du projet. Il est donc difficille d'avoir une compréhension complète de MKULTRA étant donné que plus de 150 sous-projets différents ont été financés dans le cadre de ce programme.

Certaines de ces expériences ont été menées sans le consentement du sujet.

[modifier] Les expériences

Les documents de la CIA suggèrent que l'agence a considéré d'utiliser des radiations dans le cadre du projet. La plupart des experiences ont consisté en l'utilisation de psychotropes, particulièrement la LSD. Les expériences se sont déroulées sur des employées de la CIA, du personnel militaire, d'autres agents du gouvernement, des prostituées, des personnes affligées de pathologies mentales et des membres du public, généralement sans la connaissance du sujet.

Les expériences on parfois pris une tournure sadique. Gottlieb enfermait ses victimes en les enfermants dans des chambres de dépravation sensorielle aprés leur avoir injécté du LSD. Il enregistrait les patients souffrant de troubles mentaux lors de leurs thérapies et jouait les parties les plus dégradantes des enregistrements en continu à travers des casques audio aprés que les patients aient été vêtus de camisole de force et injectés de LSD. Gottlieb était lui-même un consommateur fréquent de LSD, s'enfermant dans son bureaux et prenant des notes détaillés sur les effets de la drogue..

Les efforts pour 'recruter' les sujets étaient parfois illégales même s'il n'y avait pas de prise de drogue. Au cours de l'Operation Midnight Climax, la CIA a utilisé des prostitués pour obtenir des sujets qui seraient trop embarrassés pour parler des experiences. Les chambres des maisons closes étaient équipées de miroirs sans tain et les 'sessions' étaient enregistrés pour des analyses ultèrieures.Les clients buvaient de l'alcool dans lequel de la LSD avait été ajouté et les prostituées performaient sous la surveillance d'agents de la CIA.

Certaines exeriences étaient acceptées dans ces cas, les sujets étaient victimes d'experiences encore plus dures. Au cours d'un cas, une sélections de volontaires a consommé du LSD en continu durant 77 jours.

La LSD fut finalement rejetté par les chercheur en raison de ses effets imprévisibles.

Une autre technique était d'injecter des barbituriques par intraveineuse dans un bras et de la métamphétamine dans l'autre. Les barbituriques étaint libérés en premier, et aussitôt que le sujet commençait à s'endormir les amphétamines étaient injectées. Le sujet déclamait alors des propos incohérents mais il était parfois possible de l'interroger et d'obtenir des réponses intéressantes. Le traitement fut rejeté car il en résultait parfois la mort du patient en raison des effets secondaires de la combinaison des médicaments, ce qui rendait toute interrogation supplémentaire impossible. D'autres expériences ont utilisé l'héroïne, la mescaline, la psilocybine, la scopolamine, la marijuana, l'alcool et le thiopental .

Il n'y a pas de preuves que la CIA (ou qui que ce soit) ait réussi à contrôler les actes d'une personne à traver des techniques de contrôle mentale qui ont été testées dans le projet MKULTRA. De telles théories sont souvent avancées par les adeptes de théories conspiratrices.

[modifier] Partiçipants connus

Liste de personnes ayant participé au projet ou qui sont largement considéré :

[modifier] Budget

Un arrangement secret réservait au projet un pourcentage du budget de la CIA. Le directeur du projet MKULTRA reçut 6% du budget de la centrale en 1953, hors de tout contrôle budgétaire. [1]

[modifier] Expériences au Canada

Une partie de ces expériences eurent lieu au Canada aprés que la CIA ait recruté un médecin d'Albany, le dr. Ewan Cameron auteur d'un livre psychic driving (instinct psychique) que la CIA avait trouvé particulièrement intéressant. Cameron y décrit sa théorie de correction de la folie qui consistait à effacer la mémoire du sujet et à la reconstruire complètement. Il faisait l'aller-retour chaque semaine à Montréal pour travailler au Allan Memorial Institute reçu 69 000$ de paiement entre 1957 et 1964. Il semble que la CIA lui avait confié les expériences les plus dangereuses à essayer sur des ressortissants étrangers.

En plus de la LSD, Cameron expérimenta diverses substances paralysantes ainsi qu'une thérapie par éléctrochocs qui utilisait des courants 30 à 40 fois plus puissants que la normale. Ses expériences consistaient à mettre les sujets dans un coma induit par des psychotropes pendant plusieurs mois (jusqu'à 3 mois dans un cas) tout en jouant des enregistrements de simple bruits ou de phrases répétitives. Ses expériences étaient typiquement faites sur des patients ayant été admis dans l'institut pour des troubles d'anxiété ou de dépréssion. Beaucoup de ces patients ont conservé des séquelles.

C'est à cette époque que Cameron devint célèbre aprés avoir servi comme premier président de l'association mondiale de psychiatrie et comme président de l'association de psyschiatre Canado-Américaine. Moins d'une décennie auparavant, il avait été membre du tribunal médical de Nuremberg qui avait jugé les expériences sur des cobayes humains par l'Allemagne nazie.

[modifier] Revelation

En décembre 1974, le New York Times révéla que la CIA avait conduit des activités illégales sur le territoire américain, dont des expériences sur des citoyens américains dans les années 60. Ce rapport entraina la formation d'une commision d'enquête du congrés américain.


reported that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens, during the 1960s. That report prompted investigations by both the U.S. Congress (in the form of the Church Committee) and a presidential commission (known as the Rockefeller Commission) into the domestic activities of the CIA, the FBI, and intelligence-related agencies of the military.

In the summer of 1975, congressional hearings and the Rockefeller Commission report revealed to the public for the first time that the CIA and the DOD had conducted experiments on both cognizant and unwitting human subjects as part of an extensive program to influence and control human behavior through the use of psychoactive drugs such as LSD and mescaline and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least one subject had died after administration of LSD.

Frank Olson, an Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in 1953 as part of a CIA experiment and apparently committed suicide a week later following a severe psychotic episode. A CIA doctor assigned to monitor Olson's recovery was supposedly asleep in another bed in a New York city hotel room when Olson jumped through the window to fall ten stories to his death.

Olson's son disputes this version of events, and maintains that his father was murdered due to his knowledge of the sometimes-lethal interrogation techniques employed by the CIA in Europe, used on cold war prisoners. Frank Olson's body was exhumed in 1994, and cranial injuries suggested Olson had been knocked unconscious before being thrown out of the window.

The CIA's own internal investigation, by contrast, claimed Gottlieb had conducted the experiment with Olson's prior knowledge, although neither Olson nor the other men taking part in the experiment were informed the exact nature of the drug until some 20 minutes after its ingestion. The report further suggested that Gottlieb was nonetheless due a reprimand, as he had failed to take into account suicidal tendencies Olson had been diagnosed as suffering from which might well have been exacerbated by the LSD.

Subsequent reports would show that another person, Harold Blauer, a professional tennis player in New York City, died as a result of a secret Army experiment involving mescaline.

The congressional committee investigating the CIA research, chaired by Senator Frank Church, concluded that "[p]rior consent was obviously not obtained from any of the subjects." The committee noted that the "experiments sponsored by these researchers . . . call into question the decision by the agencies not to fix guidelines for experiments." (Documents show that the CIA participated in at least two of the DOD committees whose discussions, in 1952, led up to the issuance of the memorandum by Secretary of Defense Wilson which initiated the project.)

Following the recommendations of the Church Committee, President Gerald Ford in 1976 issued the first Executive Order on Intelligence Activities which, among other things, prohibited "experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject" and in accordance with the guidelines issued by the National Commission. Subsequent orders by Presidents Carter and Reagan expanded the directive to apply to any human experimentation.

Following on the heels of the revelations about CIA experiments were similar stories about the Army. In response, in 1975 the Secretary of the Army instructed the Army Inspector General to conduct an investigation. Among the findings of the Inspector General was the existence of the then-still-classified 1953 Wilson memorandum.

In response to the Inspector General's investigation, the Wilson Memorandum was declassified in August 1975. The Inspector General also found that the requirements of the 1953 memorandum had, at least in regard to Army drug testing, been essentially followed as written. The Army used only "volunteers" for its drug-testing program, with one or two exceptions. However, the Inspector General concluded that the "volunteers were not fully informed, as required, prior to their participation; and the methods of procuring their services, in many cases, appeared not to have been in accord with the intent of Department of the Army policies governing use of volunteers in research." The Inspector General also noted that "the evidence clearly reflected that every possible medical consideration was observed by the professional investigators at the Medical Research Laboratories." This conclusion, if accurate, is in striking contrast to what took place at the CIA.

In Canada, the issue took much longer to surface, becoming widely known in 1984 on a CBC news show, the fifth estate. It was learned that not only had the CIA funded Dr. Cameron's efforts, but perhaps even more shockingly, the Canadian government was fully aware of this, and had later provided another $500,000 in funding to continue the experiments. This revelation largely derailed efforts by the victims to sue the CIA as their U.S. counterparts had, and the Canadian government eventually settled out-of-court for $100,000 to each of the 127 victims.

[modifier] Legal issues involving informed consent

The revelations about the CIA and the Army prompted a number of subjects or their survivors to file lawsuits against the federal government for conducting illegal experiments. Although the government aggressively, and sometimes successfully, sought to avoid legal liability, several plaintiffs did receive compensation through court order, out-of-court settlement, or acts of Congress. Frank Olson's family received $750,000 by a special act of Congress, and both President Ford and CIA director William Colby met with Olson's family to publicly apologize.

Previously, the CIA and the Army had actively and successfully sought to withhold incriminating information, even as they secretly provided compensation to the families. One subject of Army drug experimentation, James Stanley, an Army sergeant, brought an important, albeit unsuccessful, suit. The government argued that Stanley was barred from suing under a legal doctrine—known as the Feres doctrine, after a 1950 Supreme Court case, Feres v. United States—that prohibits members of the Armed Forces from suing the government for any harms that were inflicted "incident to service."

In 1987, the Supreme Court affirmed this defense in a 5-4 decision that dismissed Stanley's case. The majority argued that "a test for liability that depends on the extent to which particular suits would call into question military discipline and decision making would itself require judicial inquiry into, and hence intrusion upon, military matters." In dissent, Justice William Brennan argued that the need to preserve military discipline should not protect the government from liability and punishment for serious violations of constitutional rights:

The medical trials at Nuremberg in 1947 deeply impressed upon the world that experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable. The United States Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as a standard against which to judge German scientists who experimented with human subjects. . . . [I]n defiance of this principle, military intelligence officials . . . began surreptitiously testing chemical and biological materials, including LSD.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing a separate dissent, stated:

No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United States played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimented with human subjects during the Second World War, and the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals developed to judge the behavior of the defendants stated that the 'voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential . . . to satisfy moral, ethical, and legal concepts.' If this principle is violated, the very least that society can do is to see that the victims are compensated, as best they can be, by the perpetrators.

This is the only Supreme Court case to address the application of the Nuremberg Code to experimentation sponsored by the U.S. government. And while the suit was unsuccessful, dissenting opinions put the Army—and by association the entire government—on notice that use of individuals without their consent is unacceptable. The limited application of the Nuremberg Code in U.S. courts does not detract from the power of the principles it espouses, especially in light of stories of failure to follow these principles that appeared in the media and professional literature during the 1960s and 1970s and the policies eventually adopted in the mid-1970s.

In 2004, Chief U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled that Wayne Ritchie could proceed to trial with a case that he was used as a test subject for LSD by the CIA in 1957. She dismissed the case in 2005.

[modifier] Pop culture references

  • The band mk Ultra took their name from this project.

[modifier] See also

  • Sidney Gottlieb
  • Louis Joylon West
  • other CIA cryptonyms
  • Project CHATTER
  • Project BLUEBIRD
  • Project ARTICHOKE
  • MKNAOMI
  • MKDELTA
  • Project Monarch
  • Tuskegee syphilis study
  • Brainwashing

[modifier] References

[modifier] Government Documents

  • [2] U.S. Congress: The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence (Church Committee report), report no. 94-755, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1976), 394.
  • [3] U.S. Senate: Joint Hearing before The Select Committee on Intelligence and The Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, 95th Cong., 1st Sess. August 3, 1977
  • [4] U.S Department of Energy: Supreme Court Dissents Invoke the Nuremberg Code: CIA and DOD Human Subjects Research Scandals
  • [5] U.S Department of Energy: The Records of Our Past
  • [6] Office of the Director of Central Intelligence (ODCI): Studies in Intelligence - Fifteen DCIs' First 100 Days

[modifier] Articles

(sorted by date)

  • "Book Disputes CIA Chief on Mind-Control Efforts", by Bill Richards. The Washington Post, January 29, 1979, page A2.
  • "The CIA's Attempt At Mind Control: Bad Trips?", The Washington Post, February 15, 1979, page C2.
  • "Canadians Sue U.S. Over CIA Tests Of Behavior Modification Methods", by Laura A. Kiernan. The Washington Post, December 12, 1980, page A44.
  • "Tests Contradict U.S. Story of Man's Suicide; Family Suspects CIA Killed Researcher", by Brian Mooar. The Washington Post, July 12, 1994, page B1.
  • "New Study Yields Little on Death of Biochemist Drugged by CIA", by Brian Mooar. The Washington Post, November 29, 1994, page B3.
  • "Mk Ultra", by Mark Jenkins. The Washington Post, September 25, 1998, page N15.
  • "CIA Official Sidney Gottlieb, 80, Dies", by Bart Barnes. The Washington Post, March 11, 1999, page B5.
  • "The Coldest", by Ted Gup. The Washington Post, December 16, 2001, page W9.
  • [7] "Government-linked 'suicide' probed", H.P. Albarelli Jr., 08 September 2002.
  • [8] "Operation Midnight Climax", by Lawrence Segel. The Medical Post, September 17, 2002, Volume 38 Issue 33.
  • [9] "Woman awarded $100,000 for CIA-funded electroshock" - CBC news, 10 June 2004
  • [10] "Brainwash victims win cash claims" - Sunday Times, October 17 2004

[modifier] Books

  • Acid: The Secret History of LSD, by David Black, London: Vision, 1998, ISBN 1901250113. Later edition exists.
  • Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, New York: Grove Press, 1985, ISBN 0802130623
  • The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, by John Ranelagh, p208-210.
  • In the Sleep Room: The Story of CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada, Anne Collins, Lester & Orpen Dennys (Toronto), 1988.
  • Journey into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse, by Gordon Thomas, NY: Bantam, 1989, ISBN 0553284134
  • Operation Mind Control: Our Secret Governments's War Against Its Own People, by W H Bowart, New York: Dell, 1978, ISBN 0440167558
  • The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, by John Marks, W.W. Norton & Company Ltd, 1999, ISBN 0393307948
  • Storming Heaven: LSD and The American Dream, by Jay Stevens, New York: Grove Press, 1987, ISBN 0802135870

[modifier] External links

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