Tuesday, January 09, 2007

A dark moment in Canadian history

Via Raw Story managing editor Larisa Alexandrovna's At-Largely blog, here is a fascinating but horrifying CP story -- Canadian victim of CIA brainwashing seeks class-action against government:
Janine Huard says she was a young mother of four with mild post-partum depression when she checked herself in for psychiatric treatment at a Montreal hospital more than five decades ago. . . . On and off over more than a decade at McGill University's renowned Allan Memorial Institute, Huard says she received massive electroshocks and was fed more than 40 experimental pills a day . . . "I came out of there so sick that my mother had to live with me for 10 years," Huard says. "I couldn't take care of my children any more.". . . The ordeal came at the hands of Dr. Ewen Cameron, an Edinburgh-educated, New York-based doctor who pioneered "psychic driving," by which he believed he could erase the memories of patients and rebuild their psyches without psychiatric defect.
The idea intrigued the CIA, which recruited Cameron to experiment with mind control techniques beginning in 1950 . . . Cameron gave patients LSD and subjected them to massive and multiple electroshock treatments. Some underwent sleep deprivation or total sensory deprivation.
Others were kept in drug-induced comas for months on end while speakers under their pillows broadcasts messages for up to 16 hours a day.
Apparently the story of the CIA experiments in Canada has been known for a number of years -- in fact, some of the victims have already been compensated, but victims like Huard haven't received any compentation yet because they were not considered to have been sufficiently damaged by the so-called 'treatments'. But all this was news to me. The Wikipedia entry says:
The CIA appears to have given [Dr. Cameron] the potentially deadly experiments to carry out since they would be used on non-U.S. citizens.
We have a history of this.

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