The Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held a hearing on “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project,” where Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) declared that the CIA committed crimes against humanity through the program.
“This hearing is about the crimes committed by the Central Intelligence Agency against American citizens, and the decades of secrecy used to conceal them,” Luna said. “The American people deserve a complete and truthful record.”
Describing the project as a “deliberate, systematic governmental operation that subjected American citizens, prisoners, hospital patients, veterans, ordinary people to LSD, electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, psychological torture without their knowledge or consent,” Luna said the program was “authorized by the very top of U.S. intelligence apparatus.”
MK-Ultra comprised of “at least 149 subprojects, operated across more than 80 institutions and involved 185 non-government researchers,” Luna declared, and records revealed that the CIA contributed $375,000 to a hospital research arm so the agency could use patients as experimental subjects.
“The CIA’s own Inspector General said in 1963, his classified report concluded that the program had exceeded the agency’s legal chapter, and covert testing on unwitting subjects, placed the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy,” she added, further declaring that administering drugs to people without their consent and subjecting people to “psychological torture, and using prisoners and hospital patients as non-consenting research subjects” are “crimes against humanity.”
The House Oversight Committee published key takeaways from the hearing. “In 1953, the CIA created the MKULTRA program to develop mind control techniques due to fears that the Chinese and Soviets had such capabilities,” the Committee said, explaining that one of the primary testimonies given was from Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs at Brown University Dr. Stephen Kinzer, who declared, “MKULTRA conducted the most extreme experiments on human beings that have ever been carried out by a U.S. government agency. By any standard, they qualify as medical torture. These experiments took place in prisons, clinics and safe houses in the United States, in Europe, in Asia, and even in Latin America. Officers of MKULTRA were authorized to travel to foreign countries, preferably those under formal or informal U.S. occupation, and ask the local CIA station to provide them with expendables [or] human beings who would not be missed if they disappeared.”
Testimonies were also provided by Investigative journalist Tom O’Neill and former Scientific Program Official for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi.
