Here’s one of the best-ever ABC News documentaries, a 1979 exploration of mind control experiments by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The documentary’s expose of past CIA misdeeds is chilling, but what has happened in the years since remains an open question.
We do know that the controversial “torture memo” [ posted as two part PDF] by former White House Counsel and current UC Berkeley Law School faculty member John Yoo authorized use of drugs on detainees captured in the war on terror. While Washington officialdom has denied the use of drugs in interrogation, both the Washington Post and The Atlantic reported accounts of forced drugging by detainees. And a secret report on forced drugging of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has been suppressed.
And then there are the “Manchurian Candidate” questions. Just how far has mind control research advanced since the days of MK-Ultra?
Writing in U.S.News & World Report just a month ago, Jason Koebler noted this:
A future of brain-controlled tanks, automated attack drones and mind-reading interrogation techniques may arrive sooner than later, but advances in neuroscience that will usher in a new era of combat come with tough ethical implications for both the military and scientists responsible for the technology, according to one of the country’s leading bioethicists.
