(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Some 70 years after the CIA conducted secret brainwashing experiments on unsuspecting, innocent civilians—including some that involved the use of dangerous, psychotropic drugs like LSD—victims are still attempting to hold the U.S. government responsible for its actions.
Victims who were experimented on in Canada appear to be fighting an uphill battle.
After having their lawsuit against the U.S. government dismissed last year by a judge in Montreal, Quebec, an appeal hearing took place last week.
According to reports, lawyers for the U.S. government reiterated their position that the CIA should be immune for its actions. Appeals court justices reserved their decision for a later date.
“On Thursday, a lawyer representing the United States government told the Quebec Court of Appeal that the country should be immune from prosecution and that any lawsuit against the U.S. government should be filed in that country,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported last Thursday.
The lawsuit in question stems from CIA-sponsored experiments that took place at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute under psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron.
Court records from the lawsuit describe Dr. Cameron’s “Montreal Experiments” as consisting of extreme mind-control brainwashing experimentation on “unwitting” patients by methods of such as drug-induced comas, intensive electroconvulsive therapy, “psychic driving,” sensory deprivation, and the administration of a cocktail of drugs to suppress nerve functionality and activation.
Historian Wendy Painting provided more details about Dr. Cameron’s experiments in her book, Aberration in the Heartland of the Real, showing that the Canadian doctor was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the CIA-front organization Human Ecology Fund at Cornell University.
“His subjects consisted mostly of depressed homemakers that checked in for nerves and anxiety; for which they received large doses or LSD, Thorazine, Seconal, and high-voltage electroshocks, as Cameron sought to obliterate their memories and fully regress them into infantile states,” Painting wrote.
“Afterwards, Cameron placed them in sensory isolation rooms, keeping them in drug-induced comas for months at a time, all the while playing nonstop recorded messages as a way of reprogramming their underlying personality structures, in a process Cameron called ‘psychic driving,’” she added.
In 1992, the Canadian government reportedly offered compensation payments of C$100,000 (US$78,000) to 77 former patients of the institute who had been reduced to a childlike state.
But lawyers for victims said last week that the U.S. government still needs to be held accountable.
“We don’t think that Canadian citizens who are injured on Canadian soil are required to go to the United States to sue,” said class-action lawyer Jeff Orenstein, according to CBC.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
