The Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, part of the House Oversight Committee, announced a hearing on the CIA’s MKULTRA experiments.
“The intelligence community has covered up the nature and classification of the MKULTRA experiments for decades. Americans have been misdirected repeatedly and deserve transparency and accountability from the CIA. The intelligence community’s unwillingness to deliver the truth has fueled dangerous conspiracy theories and eroded public trust in the federal government. This hearing aims to explore the history of the MKULTRA experiments, how they have impacted Americans’ wellbeing, and how the intelligence community can win back trust,” said Chairwoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL).
The hearing, to be held next Tuesday, will examine the project’s history. “Members will also analyze the intelligence community’s unwillingness to declassify information related to MKULTRA and how the lack of transparency has reduced Americans’ trust in government institutions,” the Committee explained.
According to a document dated to the 1980s, MK-Ultra was the “code word for a secret CIA project which took place between 1953 and 1964 in which unsuspecting people were used in mind-control experiments that left them emotionally crippled for life.”
The late Sen. Daniel Ken Inouye (D-HI) said of the CIA program during the 1977 joint hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research: “The Central Intelligence Agency drugged American citizens without their knowledge or consent. It used university facilities and personnel without their knowledge. It funded leading researchers, often without their knowledge.”
“These institutes, these individuals, have a right to know who they are and how and when they were used,” he said at the time. “As of today, the agency itself refuses to declassify the names of those institutions and individuals, quite appropriately, I might say, with regard to the individuals under the Privacy Act.”
