A new Senate report on the CIA’s extensive use of torture to extract information from Muslim patsies in Guantanamo Bay and sundry other agency ‘black sites’ reveals Washington’s sheer sadism.
Russia Today’s summary of the damning Senate investigation highlights the CIA’s systemic use of torturous brutality on prisoners held in agency-run jails across the globe.
The Senate’s report acknowledges that the CIA caused an Afghan man, Gul Rahman, to essentially freeze to death in a prison cell at one of their torture centers north of Kabul. RT writes that, “Sometime that November [in 2001], a low-level CIA officer at COBALT ordered that Rahman be stripped naked, except for a sweatshirt, and ‘shackled to the wall of his cell in a position that required the detainee to rest on the bare concrete floor,’ according to the Senate committee.”
A particularly cringe-worthy revelation is that the CIA practiced “rectal feeding” where prisoners on hunger strikes were force-fed through their rectum in order to keep them alive. The RT commentary cited above writes that, “At least five CIA detainees were subjected to ‘rectal rehydration,’ or rectal feeding, the Senate report reads, in order to keep prisoners alive who allegedly otherwise refused to eat.”
The CIA also played upon prisoners’ fears to induce them to talk. According to the Senate report, a Saudi man named Abu Zubaydah who had severe entomophobia was put into a confinement box, which was then filled with insects. “In order to try and break them down during interrogations,” the RT summary further explained, CIA officers would threaten to harm prisoners’ family members, often telling them rape and death is what awaited their loved ones if they didn’t start talking. Sleep deprivation was a common tactic as well as prolonged standing, water boarding, ice water baths, suspending prisoners from the wall or ceiling by their limbs, and other inhumane methods.
Despite repeated and incessant violations, CIA officers who participated in the torture program were never reprimanded or punished by the agency, revealing that agency higher-ups were not only negligent but also complicit on every level. “There was no accountability,” the Senate report conceded.
In a display of demented hubris, former President George W. Bush defended the CIA torturers outed in the report, describing them as “patriots.” Former Vice President Dick Cheney, whose unbridled malevolence rivals that of Josef Stalin, damned the new report as “full of crap” and said that the CIA’s torture program was “perfectly justified.” “I’d do it again in a minute,” he told CNN.
Today there are many names for drug substances that we commonly refer to as “hallucinogens,” “psychedelics,” “psychoactives,” or “entheogens,” et al. But it hasn’t always been that way. The study of the history and etymology of the words for these fascinating substances takes us, surprisingly, right into the heart of military intelligence, and what became the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA mind control program, and reveals how the names themselves were used in marketing these substances to the public, and especially to the youth and countercultures.[1]
The official history has it that the CIA personnel involved in MKULTRA were just dupes, kind of stupid, and, by their egregious errors, the psychedelic revolution “happened” – thwarting their efforts. The claim is that these substances “got out of the CIA’s control.” Words like “blowback” and “incompetence” are often tossed around in such theories regarding the CIA and military intelligence, but without much, if any, supporting evidence.
It’s almost impossible today to have a discussion regarding the actual documents and facts of MKULTRA and the psychedelic revolution without someone interrupting to “inform” you how “it really happened” – even though most often they have never studied anything on the subject.
As we get started, I would like to propose that we question this idea of blowback: Who does it benefit to believe that it was all an accident and that the CIA and military intelligence were just dupes? Does it benefit you, or them? It might be uncomfortable for a moment for some of us to admit that maybe they (the agents) weren’t so stupid, and maybe we were the ones duped. Sometimes the best medicine is to just admit “hey, you got me” and laugh it off. For those of you who’ve heard these blowback theories and haven’t considered the possibility that the CIA created these movements intentionally, this article may be challenging for you, but stick with it, as it will be worth your while.
Now we’re ready. Because, defenses aside, a more honest, and less biased, inquiry into the history and facts reveals, startlingly, something quite different from the popular myths. This paper reveals, for the first time, how the opposite of the official history is true, and that the CIA did, in fact, create the psychedelic revolution and countercultures – intentionally.
As I’ll show in this article, the goal had changed and they wanted a name that would help sell these substances to the masses as sources of spiritual enlightenment rather than insanity. In their book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, we see doctors Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert explain:
Of course, the drug dose does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. The nature of the experience depends almost entirely on set and setting. Set denotes the preparation of the individual, including his personality structure and his mood at the time. Setting is physical — the weather, the room’s atmosphere; social — feelings of persons present towards one another; and cultural — prevailing views as to what is real. It is for this reason that manuals or guide-books are necessary. Their purpose is to enable a person to understand the new realities of the expanded consciousness, to serve as road maps for new interior territories which modern science has made accessible.[2]
—Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert
But what was the purpose of all of this? They state “The nature of the experience depends almost entirely on set and setting.” As we’ll discover on this etymological trip, it was all about marketing – the CIA’s marketing – regarding set and setting. Sound like a “whacky conspiracy theory” yet? As we’ll soon discover, it’s not. The CIA’s MKULTRA program was very real, was exposed before Congress in the Rockefeller and Church Commissions, and was all over the news media in the 1970s. But that was 40 years ago and this is now. So why should we care? Because much of the program wasn’t revealed in the 1970s and persists to the present, and it affected just about everyone. It wasn’t limited to just a few thousand victims of the CIA’s secret human experiments. There were actually many more victims – millions more. You may have been one of them.
As we’ll see, this idea that the psychedelic revolution and counterculture were intentionally created affects most of us: the youth caught up in drug use, the parents, the anti-war movement, those involved in the psychedelic revolution or in politics; as well as artists, or people who use these substances for spirituality, or even anyone who’s ever spoken the word psychedelic. It affects us because, as we’ll see, that’s what it was meant to do.
In the early years of research into these drugs, psychology researchers and military intelligence communities sometimes called them, aside from “hallucinogen,” by the name “psychotomimetic” –which means psychosis mimicking. The word hallucinogen, “to generate hallucinations,” came just a few years before psychotomimetic. The same year that psychotomimetic was created we also saw the creation of the word “psychedelic” – which means “to manifest the mind.” The last stage of this etymological evolution, as we’ll see, was the word “entheogen” – which means “to generate god within.” We’ll return to hallucinogen and these other words in the course of our journey.
While these words may have told what these substances do in the intelligence community’s collective understanding, accurate or not, they are loaded with implications. Suggestibility, otherwise known as “set and setting,” is one of them. The study of the history of these words, their etymology, reveals how MKULTRA researchers covered up and kept covered up – until now that is – this aspect of the MKULTRA mind control program.
Today we interview JAN IRVIN from GNOSTIC MEDIA. An independent researcher in the field of ethno-mycology and the history of psychedelics, Jan has presented some of the most ground breaking research in alternative sphere in years, particularly in the field of psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, and DMT the active ingredient in ayuhuasca.
In becoming the publisher of John Allegro’s seminal book ‘The Sacred Mushroom & The Cross’ Jan found connections between the LSD gurus of the 60’s counter culture and a myriad of government and intelligence groups. Prominent among them R. Gordon Wasson, a JP Morgan Banker who led Jan into a whole new area of research in the psychedelic arena.
Jan presents a new understanding of our present drug culture, especially with the resurgence of psychedelia and new age sentiment. For more on Jan Irvin check his podcast and website Gnostic Media http://gnosticmedia.com
We’ve been tracking the dirty work of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for several decades now — a Federal government agency that claims its main charge to be administering U.S. foreign assistance around the world: “USAID is the lead U.S. Government agency that works to end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize their potential.” (via usaid.gov)
The reality of USAID is something very different. USAID is also a traditional CIA front organization, allowing the agency access to an array of places and things around the globe.
On August 11th of this year, 21WIRE’s report on USAID’s secret operation against Cuba detailed how the agency “established a fake HIV prevention workshop in Cuba where their young recruits worked to turn young people against the Castro regime.”
The author of the report, Stuart J. Hooper, expands:
“After undertaking a few short seminars, these young people were expected to do the work of a seasoned CIA officer, which is something that could have easily gotten their vastly inexperienced and unprepared selves into severe trouble with Cuban authorities.”
Not exactly the hallmark of a humanitarian agency promising to end global poverty.
IMAGE: CANVAS trained and managed Egyptian protestors as early as 2009 in preparation for the fabled ‘Arab Spring’ in 2010-2011. These professional agitators-for-hire globe-trot, and openly promote their CFR-sponsored agenda.
“We know that it was not Egyptian and Tunisian students working in a political vacuum, but the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), a professional consultancy, who took students from the Middle East and trained them overseas as early back as 2009.”
Within the vast entanglement of government and non-government (NGO) subcontractor culture, you’ll not be surprised to know CANVAS is part-funded and supported by globalist foundations like George Soros’s Freedom House and Open Society Institute, as well as CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy and, of course, the full frontal USAID.
IMAGE: Globalist foundations promoting democracy and freedom have been active in fomenting uprisings all over the planet, including the ‘Occupy’ movements. Their creative consultants are well-versed in NLP tactics for the crowd.
Now, we have the matter of the apparent brutal beheadings of two American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff.
According to a recent article in the The Weekly Standard, in 2009, just three years before his capture in Syria, Foley worked for USAID-funded development projects in Baghdad. And then in 2011, he “moved to Libya” briefly where he was eventually kidnapped and held for over a month. Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg writes:
“This guy has a resume that reads more like a James Bond film script than that of a journalist with a teaching background. He works for USAID in 2009 in Iraq, then he finds himself kidnapped in Libya two years later by Gaddafi forces. Then, after all of this, he finds himself captured in Syria, only to be beheaded two years later by ISIS (the terror organization funded by our ally Saudi Arabia).”
What else was James Foley doing for USAID?
IMAGE: While the masses train their eyes on the sickest of social media, set pieces continue to be placed under their noses.
“Whether or not the Foley video was staged to solicit a certain public reaction to it, for example – launching US air strikes in Syria, it’s obvious that there is some dark arts in action in the way Western media are touting these videos in public. They are actively aiding and abetting the most hideous forms of exhibitionism – for example the decapitation of James Foley, called “execution” and not what it really was in terms of a billion dollar US media marketing campaign – an open air murder by a psychopath and war criminal. In the end, their is zero moral value in re-disseminating this kind of pornography through the multi-billion broadcast media complex, yet they are doing more and more push-marketing of this material each year.”
USAID and others like it clearly operate in these hot zones very much in plain sight. Yet our eyes and our media simply don’t want to look away from the news feed — and that’s what keeps them in their trade.
We led this report with USAID’s secret operation against Cuba, and this is where we will close it.
The Associated Press investigation that blew the cover off the “fake HIV prevention workshop” also discovered that USAID and its contractor (yes, yet another layer), Creative Associates International, continued the program despite U.S. officials issuing warnings to government contractors:
“U.S. officials privately told their government contractors to consider suspending travel to Cuba after the arrest of contractor Alan Gross, who remains imprisoned after smuggling in sensitive technology. A lawyer for Gross said Monday that his client cannot take life in prison much longer and has said his goodbyes to his wife and a daughter.”
How reckless can a Federal agency and its contractors be? Answer: Creative Associates cited the workshop as a “success story.”
“The group’s final report said the workshop would be used as a blueprint across the island.”
“But Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona and longtime critic of USAID’s Cuba projects, said, “These programs are in desperate need of adult supervision. If you are using an AIDS workshop as a front for something else, that’s … I don’t know what to say … it’s just wrong.”
There’s plenty more to say – and it starts with you.
PN 