Stephen Lendman

MK-ULTRA was the code name for a secret CIA mind control program, begun in 1953, under Director Allen Dulles. Its purpose was multifold, including to perfect a truth drug for interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War. It followed earlier WW II hypnosis, primitive drugs research, and the US Navy's Project Chatter, explained by its Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request as follows:

It began "in the fall of 1947 focusing on the identification and testing of drugs (LSD and others) in interrogations and the recruitment of agents. The research included laboratory experiments on both animal and human subjects. The program ended shortly after the Korean War in 1953."

It was run under the direction of Dr. Charles Savage of the Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, MD from 1947 - 1953, after which CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence continued it under the name Project Bluebird, its first mind control program to:

● learn how to condition subjects to withstand information from being extracted from them by known means;
● develop interrogation methods to exert control;
● develop memory enhancement techniques; and
● establish ways to prevent hostile control of Agency personnel.

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John V. Walsh

Nobel laureates sign on to "harsher" Iran sanctions – and more

Is there nothing that is safe from debasement by the propaganda machine of the U.S. and Israel? A full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times of Feb. 7 provides the answer. Sponsored by Elie Wiesel’s modestly named Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity and signed by 44 Nobel laureates, 35 of them in the physical sciences, it urges brutal and lethal actions against Iran.

Before getting to the cruel prescriptions that Wiesel and his recruits offer for Iran, let us consider their reasoning, such as it is. In a single brief topic sentence they assert their central claim that the Iranian government "whose irresponsible and senseless nuclear ambitions threaten the entire world continues to wage a shameless war against its own people." Two charges are fired off in this brief sentence, and it is all too easy to conflate them. So let us take them one at a time, as is the habit in science when one wishes for clarification.

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Henry Porter

The Independent's article sanctioning torture is built on logical flaws, grotesque views and a contempt for democracy

The columnist Bruce Anderson runs up the flag for torture in today's Independent with a column that does no credit to the paper.

Anderson makes much of the ticking bomb dilemma – the idea that it is morally preferable to torture someone who can tell you where and when a dirty bomb might go off rather than allowing thousands of innocent people to be killed. He recalls that before 9/11, he debated the issue in front of some lawyers and argued that the government would not only have a right to use torture: it would have a duty to use it.

The liberal lawyer Sydney Kentridge got up and challenged Anderson with this: "Let's take your hypothesis a bit further. We have captured a terrorist, but he is a hardened character. We cannot be certain that he will crack in time. We have also captured his wife and children."

Anderson happily admits that he could not think his way round this. "I have come to the conclusion that there is only one answer to Sydney's question. Torture the wife and children. It is a disgusting idea. It is almost a tragedy that we even have to discuss it, let alone think of acting upon it." -So Anderson appears to recommends torturing innocent women and children to make a man talk.

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Abel Bult-Ito

Disturbing photos of children

Iraqi and visiting doctors, and a number of news reports, have reported that birth defects and cancers in Iraqi children have increased five- to 10-fold since the 1991 Gulf War and continue to increase sharply, to over 30-fold in some areas in southern Iraq. Currently, more than 50 percent of Iraqi cancer patients are children under the age of 5, up from 13 percent. Children are especially vulnerable because they tend to play in areas that are heavily polluted by depleted uranium.

The Pentagon has been using radiooactive weapons for at least a decade and a half with full complicity of at least three White House administrations and Republican and Democratic congressional legislators. Conservatively, at least 300 tons and 1,700 tons of depleted uranium were used in the Gulf War and the current Iraq War, resectively. This is about 70 grams of depleted uranium per Iraqi citizen, and if inhaled or ingested, it is enough to kill them all.

Is this not radioactive genocide, especially when our troops used and continue to use most of the depleted uranium munitions in densely populated areas such as Baghdad and Fallujah? Depleted uranium has a half-life of billions of years. Consequently, Iraq will be a wasteland forever and essentially uninhabitable for anyone.

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