CIA Linked To Medical Torture Of Indigenous Children And Black Prisoners, According To Documents

It's been over 70 years since Project MK-Ultra began, and we still may never learn the entire truth of what went down behind the scenes. The illegal experimentation that the CIA conducted continued for 20 years. It was commonly believed that MK-Ultra subjected individuals such as patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and prostitutes to torture. Now, it has come to light that the CIA also extended these heinous acts to indigenous children and black prisoners.

Between 1867 and 1996, thousands of indigenous children were stolen from their parents by the Canadian government and were forced to reside at Indian residential schools for an extended period of time. Many of them were subjected to horrible abuse. In the past couple of years, about 1,300 unmarked graves – most of which belong to indigenous children – were discovered on the grounds of Canada's former residential schools.

The Kanien’kehà:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers), a group of indigenous women, are making good progress in their lawsuit against several entities, including the Canadian government, McGill University, and the Royal Victoria Hospital in Quebec. The parties agreed to allow archeologists and cultural monitors to search for unmarked graves that the Mohawk Mothers believe are buried at the hospital's location.

In October 2021, evidence emerged that linked the disappearance of indigenous children to MK-Ultra experiments by CIA-sponsored scientists. Lana Ponting, a Caucasian Winnipeg resident, testified in 1958 at Quebec's Superior Court. She said that Allan Memorial Institute doctors abused her at 16 by holding her against her will and drugging her with LSD and other substances. They electrocuted her and made her listen to subliminals, including one recording that repeatedly affirmed that she was either "a bad girl" or "a good girl."

Ponting testified that "some of the children I saw there were indigenous." She befriended an indigenous girl named Morningstar, who faced the same abuses and was harassed because of her race. Ponting explained that she snuck out at night and saw "people standing over by the cement wall" with shovels and flashlights. She and the other children heard rumors that dead bodies were getting buried on the property – Ponting believes some were indigenous people.

In 2008, the Squamish Nation included the Allan Memorial Institute in a list of potential sites containing unmarked graves. The CIA, U.S. charitable organizations, and the U.S. and Canadian military allegedly played a role in these crimes. In the books The Search for the Manchurian Candidate and Poisoner in Chief, CIA archivists found a hidden box of MK-Ultra financial records in 1977 that show the institute was home to "Subproject 68." The project's leader was Ewen Cameron, the man Ponting accused of raping her. The experiments under Cameron intended to "depattern" people's minds by using violent methods that Cameron dubbed "psychic driving."

"I feel like we’re closer to having our future generations heard, our past generations heard, and whatever has happened to our children that they have purpose,” said Kwetioo after she and the other Mohawk Mothers won an injunction to halt construction near possible grave sites. The mothers have been working hard to collect archival documents relating to experiments conducted at McGill University.

Yet, the indigenous children weren't the only marginalized group to undergo MK-Ultra abuse. In Orisanmi Burton's upcoming book, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, he details the "little-known program of prison-based scientific experimentation that intersects with the Mohawk Mothers struggle."

In 1966, a collaboration between Allan Memorial Institute and then New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller brought a team of McGill consultants to establish programs and conduct research at the Dannemora State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in New York. The institution confined prisoners transferred from other facilities after they were deemed "insane." The partnership developed methods for preventing these prisoners from making repeat offenses. The program, however, hosted “experimental studies of various aspects of criminal behavior," and many of the program participants were black.

Anthropologist Phillippe Blouin was able to locate exchanges from 1957 to 1963 between Cameron and Canadian psychiatrist Bruno Cormier relating to a proposal for the Pilot Centre for Juvenile Delinquency, which would have included laboratories "for psychological studies, for work in genetics, for endocrinological investigations, for sociological studies, both within the unit and also for field work." Cormier suggested that the center should not be limited to rehabilitation, stressing that "research of this kind should bring light on all behavioral problems” with the potential to “bridge the research gap between juvenile delinquency and adult criminality.”

After these discussions, New York officials selected Cormier to lead Allan Memorial Institute's partnership with the New York prison system, thanks to a German physician named Ludwig Fink. Fink assumed the role of an assistant director and later became the director of the Dannemora Hospital after practicing psychiatry in the 1940s in Iran and India. By 1969, Fink and McGill's consultants trained prison guards in hypnosis and aversion therapy techniques, resulting in scenes a witness described as "quite revolting both for those who watched and those who took part."

You would think these practices were banned long ago, but investigative hypnosis is still present and used at some offices today. This year, Texas Legislature passed a bill banning hypnosis-induced statements from being introduced as trial evidence. Hypnosis techniques were used nearly 2,000 times over the course of 40 years, according to a Dallas Morning News investigation in 2020. It sent multiple people to death row, including one man who was executed in 2022.

Going back to Fink, the physician apparently had a "Therapeutic Community" program similar to Cameron's efforts to destroy human consciousness to rebuild it. The process "takes you back to a kind of kindergarten level and then brings you back up," a think tank director told Congress. Fink also cited the autobiography of Malcolm X and goes over the "growing number of aggressive, assertive black males" in prison.

The Mohawk Mothers affidavit also discusses psychologist Ernest G. Poser, whose research at McGill investigated “cross-cultural differences in tolerance to physical pain using deceptive means and what seemed like torture instruments.” This suggests that the psychologist “studied patients’ reactions to hypnotic suggestion during methohexitone-induced sleep" to brainwash subjects. Poser also experimented on prisoners in New York and investigated whether "sociopaths" could suffer from adrenaline deficiency that keeps them from learning from “fear-producing experiences.”

Poser and a student named Deborah G. Sittman injected their subjects with adrenaline and electrocuted them. Another student of Poser proposed another heinous experiment in which incarcerated individuals would be strapped to an electroshock therapy device and told they were in a competition where the "loser" would receive a specific shock level set by his opponent.

In September 1971, 1,300 incarcerated individuals rebelled in New York's Attica prison. Most were black, and a few were Mohawk, including John Boncore “Dacajeweiah” Hill. The partnership between New York and McGill ended shortly after the protests, and the Dannemora State Hospital was rebranded as the Adirondack Correctional Treatment Education Center. It became a "new" location for behavior therapy called the Prescription (Rx) Program.

Prisoners' rights organizations had letters that accused prison authorities of drugging prisoners' food and water to turn them into "zombies." According to a government panel, the program elicited “the specter of the resocialization, rethinking, and brainwashing camps of totalitarian societies.” This reminds me of when Kanye West revealed text messages between him and former drug researcher turned celeb trainer Harley Pasternak. Pasternak allegedly threatened Kanye by stating he'd send him to an institution where he'd be sent back to "Zombieland."

While these documents reveal the horrors of MK-Ultra projects and their marginalized victims, there's still so much we don't know. "Researchers targeted and assaulted vulnerable populations who were incapable of granting consent and who were viewed as disposable," writes Burton on Truthout. "Their allegations were unlikely to be taken seriously, and their avenues for redress were limited because they were institutionalized and from marginalized groups: indigenous people, black people, poor people, disabled people, children, prisoners, women, and girls. This scientific violence was shaped by living legacies of colonialism and slavery, violence that continues to find expression in the ongoing 'war on terror.'"

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