Just How Evil Can a Psychiatrist Be?

     The U.S. House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets is about to find out. Their exploration into the CIA’s MKUltra program that ran from 1953 to 1973 began during the first session yesterday.

     “Administering drugs to people without their knowledge or consent, subjecting humans to psychological torture, and using prisoners and hospital patients as non-consenting research subjects are crimes against humanity,” Committee Chairwoman Anna Luna said in her opening remarks.

     The wide circle of psychiatric mind control crimes they are investigating keeps revealing psychiatrist Jolly West at its center.

     In 1953 CIA Director Allen Dulles had authorized a mind control program, and Dr. Sydney Gottlieb was its architect. Jolly West was then the chief psychiatrist at the Lackland AFB Psychiatric Hospital. He proposed to Gottleib conducting experiments on unwitting human subjects from military personnel, prisoners, and patients at his psychiatric hospital using LSD and hypnosis to alter their true memories or mental data and replace them with implanted ideas. He could then alter the attitudes and the beliefs the morals of “previously loyal individuals” and turn them against anyone or anything, a handy skill for the CIA.

     But first, “These experiments must eventually be put into practical trials in the field,” West wrote…in other words, first practice mind control on the general populace to make sure it worked.

     Gottlieb agreed. West was contracted with the CIA to initiate the first of these human experiments. Three years later West announced to Gottlieb that by administering LSD and hypnosis he had learned how to replace true memories with false memories in a human mind, without a person’s knowledge.

     Thirteen years later Charles Manson convinced his cult followers to murder a pregnant Sharon Tate and several others in a two day killing spree. Manson had been a patient for months prior to that at Jolly West’s San Francisco clinic where West was “studying the hippie culture.”

      It has never been determined how many other Charles Mansons might have been wandering around out there on the loose in this country or overseas where West’s human experimentation was also being done. No wonder Allen Dulles and Sydney Gottlieb tried to destroy all the documentation about MKUltra’s activities after they closed it down in 1973.

     The current House Subcommittee now has new material available to them as well as pertinent expert witnesses, and the committee aims to expose as they can about this shameful chapter of US history when a psychiatrist was given free reign to conduct his crimes against humanity.

     West himself was simply a cruel and evil man. In 1962 he overdosed Tusko, a bull elephant at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City, with LSD in one of his experiments, and Tusko died. Total deaths from all of West’s human experimentation in the MKULtra program are not known.

     While West was conducting his covert human experimentation, however, he was rising publicly to ever more important positions within the psychiatric industry, including being made a trustee of the American Psychiatric Association. He also served as a consultant to a variety of governmental organizations such as the United States Air Force, the Peace Corps, and the United States Information Agency.

     West’s MKUltra program used other psychoactive drugs besides LSD as well as electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, all without the subjects’ consent or knowledge. They also used bribery with promises of reduced sentences for prisoners or of more drugs for addicts to tempt people to be subjects in unspecified trials. There are no records that show how many thousands of “subjects” were used, here and overseas, but many of them were classified in existing documents as “expendables.”

     It took the mind of an evil psychiatrist such as Jolly West to concoct and put into effect so much human destruction. However, when the CIA wanted to learn how to destroy a human mind, they knew exactly where to go.

     To a psychiatrist.