'manchurian candidates' to gather in connecticut

from danger room: For some, the horrors of the CIA's secret, Cold War-era mind control research has never really ended. Next month in Connecticut, self-described victims of MK ULTRA will attend “The Eleventh Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference.” There, attendees will discuss their memories of being unwitting participants in the CIA's experiments, which often involved slipping LSD to ordinary people.

Are all the people who attend the meeting really victims of MK ULTRA? No, as the organizer himself notes. Some are suffering from other, no doubt serious, mental issues. But as Jeff Stein elegantly points out in a piece for Congressional Quarterly, that's not the point. There were very real victims of MK ULTRA, and the CIA's decision to destroy most of the records means we will never have a final accounting. "CIA Director Richard M. Helms ordered the destruction of boxes upon boxes of documents, including the treatment records of unknown numbers of 'patients' agency 'doctors' experimented on in psychiatric hospitals (including a wing of Georgetown University Medical Center), and secret locations, including military bases," Stein writes.

The more contemporaneous issue is that the U.S. government is again being accused of using mind altering drugs. "Just as in the 1970s, however, as I wrote in April, evidence to the contrary is mounting," Stein writes. "The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick also tracked down former prisoners at Guantanamo who said their minds were destabilized by repeated drug injections."