The United States has secretly experimented with mind control on people on every continent for decades; no official apology (2023)

DEEP/DEEP

Photo: VCG

"I've been taken enough. I don't remember my birth name. I have no contact with my children. It's a very humbling and devastating reality," said Maryam Ruhullah, 72, an MK Ultra victim who now resides in Grand Prairie, Texas.

MK Ultra is the codename for a human experimentation program developed and operated by the United States and its infamous spy agency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It started on April 13, 1953 and lasted 20 years.

It was the height of the Cold War, and the US organized a covert operation, including MK Ultra, whose aim was to develop tools that could be used against Soviet bloc enemies to control human behavior using drugs and other psychological manipulations.

Psychedelic drugs, paralytics, and electroshock therapy — all vile and inhumane techniques — were secretly but routinely used on humans. Among them were citizens of the United States and other countries who were unwitting guinea pigs, a compendium of serious human rights abuses.

Many experiments were conducted at Fort Detrick as an important base of operations. Many people died as a result of these experiments. The survivors had their memories forcibly erased, their names forgotten and their personalities irrevocably altered, their lives threatened and they lived in fear for the rest of their lives. More than 40 years later, physical, mental, emotional and social horrors and injuries are still associated with her, Ruhullah told the Global Times.

US Mind Control Scheme

Ruhullah's introduction to psychosis began when he was 5 or 6 years old, while taking part in a fashion show in London. She was then taken to the United States, where CIA agents constantly used a recording played on a tape recorder to record in her mind what she intended to do in her own memory.

“I remember one time I was shocked with electric batons and put back in a room. When I regained consciousness, I heard a hospital worker say something like, Why are you doing this to him? Why are they giving him so many shock treatments?" Ruhullah said.

Ruhullah believed that what happened to him was political due to his Iranian heritage. She was then resettled, taken and then lived and studied in Russia. At age 19, she married an American and moved to the United States. Seven years later, a member of the US police entered her home and told her that he needed protective custody. Although she protested a lot, she had to go. She was unable to communicate with her husband or her son, who was about 6 years old at the time. It was the second time he had unwittingly participated in a mind control program.

Ruhullah said he lived someone else's lie.

“You get physically drained because there's something draining your spirit. You can't talk to anyone about a situation because everyone who is allowed into your life will be swept away by the lie, either out of complete indifference and complacency, or they are building a loyalty to the government that they should go along with that lie or something. it will happen to them.

The CIA's mind control systems not only remained on US soil, but also spread to US allied countries such as Denmark, Australia and Canada.

In December 2021, a Danish documentary titled The Search for Myself was released, which accused the CIA of financially helping to conduct experiments on 311 Danish children, many of whom were orphaned or adopted, in the early 1960s. Filmmaker Per Wennick himself was one of them.

Wennick told Radio Denmark that when one of the children was forced to participate in the experiment, electrodes were placed around her heart on her arms, legs and chest. Children are also exposed to loud, squeaky noises, which is "very bothersome".

According to Australian media reports, the US brought experiments involving psychology students from the University of Sydney to Australia in the 1960s.

What happened in the Danish documentation and in the Australian media reports was just the tip of the iceberg. Between 1950 and 1964, Government of Canada and partially funded CIA MK Ultra experiments were conducted at the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University, Canada, under the direction of Scottish psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron introduced himself.

None of the Canadian patients gave consent or knew they were being used for confidential research. So far, neither the CIA nor the Canadian government has apologized for their role in these experiments that ruined hundreds of families.

Julie Tanny's family is one of them. In 1957, when he was 5 years old, his father went to the doctor because he was suffering from trigeminal neuralgia, while the doctor associated with Dr. Cameron in cahoots, putting him in one of the many brainwashing programs.

Tanny told the Global Times that her father was first put to sleep and then forced to listen to clips of some of the things he said on a 24-hour loop under his pillow as he slept as part of the brainwashing process. He was then subjected to shock treatments, administered with a machine called the Page-Russells, which delivered voltages approximately 75 times stronger than normal shock treatment, and the aim was to erase his memory.

These experiments were administered to Tanny's father for three months, and he was released because he "still has ties to his past life". He returned home, but the happy family was soon torn apart.

Photo: VCG

Colin A. Ross, an American psychiatrist, wrote a book called The C.I.A. Doctors: Human Rights Violations by US Psychiatrists After Reading a 15,000-Page File Collection from the CIA Reading Room. As a psychiatrist, he believes that the CIA's mind control programs grossly abuse innate human nature.

Additionally, Ross questions the medical ethics of CIA doctors.

"You have to intentionally create a psychiatric disorder that is totally contrary to the purpose of psychiatry. And the patient, the subject, is not giving informed consent. He has no legal representation. So it's completely against all medical ethics," he said.

Despite growing public backlash and condemnation, the CIA has yet to issue an official apology for actions it took during and after the Cold War. The CIA's mind control projects remain relevant today because they provide a chilling historical narrative of intelligence agency misconduct in a country that continues to preach human rights and freedom.

"The problem I have with the United States, even as an American citizen, is that they tend to point fingers at other countries in the world, accuse other countries in the world of human rights abuses, but don't take responsibility for themselves. I think it's hypocritical and it's all part of geopolitical maneuvering and all that," Ross said.

"It's typical style of American democracy: violating human rights and committing crimes at will, and decades later being forced to admit it," Aleksandr Kolpakidi, a historian at the Russian intelligence agency, told the Global Times.

Tanny said she gets a lot of emails from people saying they are currently experimenting, and she believes that mind control experiments are still happening, although they are not as primitive as those from the 1950s.

"I suppose there are various forms of mind control today that are far more advanced than in the past. That's hard to say. It wouldn't surprise me one bit. Governments are governments. I don't think all that has changed much. Our world is about power and control," said Tanny.

The CIA Mind Control Myth. Graphic: Deng Zijun/GT

The CIA's MK Ultra program became public knowledge in 1975, and victims and their families in Canada began to fight to bring those responsible to justice and accountability for lifelong pain and suffering.

In an eight-year lawsuit that began in 1980, nine Canadians were awarded just $67,000 by the US Department of Justice.

Tanny's father died in 1992, the same day his wife, Tanny's mother, received $100,000 in compensation from the Canadian government. He was among the 77 victims who received such compensation.

But for Tanny, that was just a drop in the bucket compared to the $2 million it cost her mother to care for her father. And her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer shortly after her father's death.

In 2017, she founded the Survivors Allies Against Government Abuse group with other victims to put more pressure on the accused, and she continues to meet new people who are victims of such mind control programs. Tanny filed a class action lawsuit against the US and Canadian governments, McGill University Health Center, McGill University and Allan Memorial Institute in hopes of extending compensation to family members and other victims.

Tanny told the Global Times that they will be tried against the US government on April 26th.

Ruhullah said he hopes the world will remember the immense suffering of MK Ultra victims by marking a special day.

“I know that after apartheid there was a reconciliation council. We have none of that if it's MK Ultra, if it's slavery, if it's Native American genocide, for people and land to recover. There has to be recognition, there has to be an apology, there has to be compensation and there has to be real reconciliation," Ruhullah said.