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Agency "Seeking" Mind Control Weapons via Alex Constantine's Blacklist
by Alex Constantine on 8/26/08 by Tom Burghardt
A new report from the National Academy of Sciences' National Research
Council (NRC) argues that the Pentagon should harvest the fruits of
neuroscientific research in order to enhance the "warfighting"
capabilities of U.S. soldiers while diminishing those of enemy
personnel.
The 151-page report issued by a 16-member blue ribbon
commission, "Cognitive Neuroscience Research and National Security,"
was quietly announced in an August 13 National Academy of Sciences
Press Release.
Commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon spy
shop, the study asserts that the U.S. intelligence "community" must do
a better job following cutting-edge research in neuroscience or as is
more likely, steering it along paths useful to the Defense Department.
According to the NRC,
A 2005 National Research Council report described a methodology for
gauging the implications of new technologies and assessing whether they
pose a threat to national security. In this new report, the committee
applied the methodology to the neuroscience field and identified
several research areas that could be of interest to the intelligence
community: neurophysiological advances in detecting and measuring
indicators of psychological states and intentions of individuals, the
development of drugs or technologies that can alter human physical or
cognitive abilities, advances in real-time brain imaging, and
breakthroughs in high-performance computing and neuronal modeling that
could allow researchers to develop systems which mimic functions of the
human brain, particularly the ability to organize disparate forms of
data. ("National Security Intelligence Organizations should Monitor
Advances in Cognitive Neuroscience Research," National Academy of
Sciences, Press Release, August 13, 2008)
Unlocking the secrets of the brain is projected as the next growth
industry for the military, academia and corporate grifters hoping to
land huge Pentagon contracts. As defense analyst Noah Shachtman
reported in Wired, the "Army has given a team of University of
California researchers a $4 million grant to study the foundations
of "synthetic telepathy." Unlike "remote viewing" research funded by
the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency between 1972 and 1996,
variously known as "Grill Flame," "Sun Streak" and finally, "Star Gate"
before the plug was pulled, the Army-U.C. Irvine joint venture are
exploring thought transmission via a brain-computer mediated interface.
Recently New Scientist reported on a series of bizarre experiments at
the University of Reading in the UK. Researchers there have connected
300,000 disembodied rat neurons suspended in "a pink broth of nutrients
and antibiotics" to 80 electrodes at the base of the growth medium. As
journalist Paul Marks informs us, the "rat neurons have made--and
continue to make--connections with each other." The voltages sparked by
the firing cells are displayed on a computer screen.
Welcome to the "brave new world" of neural prosthetics and the
militarists who are exploiting science and technology for new weapons
applications.
Declaring that emerging technologies such as brain imaging and
cognitive and physical enhancers are "desired by the public," NRC
avers "such forces act as strong market incentives for development."
But as Rick Weiss cautions on the Science Progress blog,
But even more interesting to me is the report's discussion of the
emerging market in brain-targeted, performance-degrading techniques.
Some experiments, it turns out, suggest that magnetic beams can be used
to induce seizures in people, a tempting addition to the military's
armamentarium. More conventionally, as scientists discover new
chemicals that can blur thinking or undermine an enemy's willpower, and
as engineers design aerosolized delivery systems that can deliver these
chemicals directly to the lungs (and from there, the brains) of large
groups of people, the prospect of influencing the behavior of entire
enemy regiments becomes real. ("Minding Mental Minefields," Science
Progress, August 15, 2008)
The use of so-called calmative agents as non-lethal weapons are already
under development. As Antifascist Calling reported last month in "The
Calmative Before the Storm," the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons
Directorate (JNLWD) are carrying out experiments into what it
euphemistically calls "Human Effects Research" and developing
an "Advanced Total Body Model for predicting the effects of non-lethal
impacts."
Apparently the DIA has taken this a step further and will now explore
the possibility of creating aerosolized pharmacological agents that can
disrupt and perhaps influence, the mental functioning of targeted
populations abroad, enemy soldiers or dissenting citizens here in the
United States.
Neil Davison, a researcher with the Bradford Disarmament Research
Centre (BDRC) at Bradford University in the UK, wrote an important 2007
study, "'Off the Rocker' and 'On the Floor': The Continued Development
of Biochemical Incapacitating Weapons." Davison examined the historical
differentiation made by weaponeers between "off the rocker" agents such
as LSD, PCP and psilocybin in their allegedly weaponized forms
versus "on the floor" agents such as sedatives, opiate analgesics and
anesthetic chemicals.
During the "golden age" of the CIA and U.S. Army's quixotic search
for "mind control" agents during the 1950s and 1960s, researchers were
seeking a reliable mechanism that would unlock the secrets of the
mind--and gain control over witting or unwitting subjects--for
intelligence and counterintelligence purposes. Hundreds, if not
thousands, of unethical experiments were carried out on psychiatric
patients, civilians and soldiers. The results were subsequently
suppressed on grounds on "national security."
While the majority of CIA MKULTRA files were ordered destroyed by
former Agency Director Richard Helms in 1973, the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence held landmark 1977 hearings and issued a
report, "Project MKULTRA, The CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral
Modification." As Senator Ted Kennedy discussed in his opening remarks,
Some 2 years ago, the Senate Health Subcommittee heard chilling
testimony about the human experimentation activities of the Central
Intelligence Agency. The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over
30 universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing
and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on
unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native
Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the
administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." ...
We believed that the record, incomplete as it was, was as complete as
it was going to be. Then one individual, through a Freedom of
Information request, accomplished what two U.S. Senate committees could
not. He spurred the agency into finding additional records pertaining
to the CIA's program of experimentation with human subjects. ... The
records reveal a far more extensive series of experiments than had
previously been thought. Eighty-six universities or institutions were
involved. New instances of unethical behavior were revealed.
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. (emphasis added)
While the CIA's MKULTRA project and related Army ventures carried out
at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
(USAMRIID) at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, may have failed to develop
specific agents that could be wielded as a "mind control" weapon, the
research did result in the development of abusive interrogation
techniques that can only be characterized as torture.
As Antifascist Calling queried in "Neuroscience, National Security &
the 'War on Terror'," "If behavioral psychology was handmaid to the
horrors perpetrated at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and CIA
transnational 'black sites,' what new nightmares are in store for
humanity when advances in neuroscience, complex computer algorithms and
a secretive national security state enter stage (far) right?"
Apparently horrors of the "mind control" variety, particularly when it
comes to applications for ever-newer and more insidious
interrogation/control techniques to be used on "enemy combatants" or
dissenting malefactors in the heimat.
According to the NRC and the corporate-academic grifters involved in
the research, cognitive warfare should be sold as a "more humane"
method of advancing imperialist objectives. As the report baldly
states, the equation "pills instead of bullets" will be the preferred
marketing technique employed for "selling" the program to the American
people. As anthropologist Hugh Gusterson wrote,
The military and scientific leaders chartering neuroweapons research
will argue that the United States is a uniquely noble country that can
be trusted with such technologies, while other countries (except for a
few allies) cannot. They will also argue that these technologies will
save lives and that U.S. ingenuity will enable the United States to
dominate other countries in a neuroweapons race. When it is too late to
turn back the clock, they will profess amazement that other countries
caught up so quickly and that an initiative intended to ensure American
dominance instead led to a world where everyone is threatened by
chemicalized soldiers and roboterrorists straight out of Blade Runner.
(The militarization of neuroscience," Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, 9 April 2007)
But as the world looked on in horror at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay,
this "uniquely noble country" guided by "ethical principles," resorted
to repugnant methods such as sensory deprivation, near drowning
and "self-inflicted pain" techniques (short-shackling and the like) to
achieve control over defenseless prisoners.
As the NRC would have it, academics in thrall to corporate funding and
state agencies staffed by war criminals now expect us to believe
that "ethics" will guide those exploring pharmacological methods to
obtain more insidious means to subjugate humanity.
Weiss reports that the NRC notes in its report, the motivation, or lack
thereof, to fight, is of great concern to Pentagon bureaucrats and
policy makers. "So one question," for military-corporate-academic
funded research "would be, 'How can we disrupt the enemy's motivation
to fight?' Other questions raised by controlling the mind: 'How can we
make people trust us more?' 'What if we could help the brain to remove
fear or pain?' 'Is there a way to make the enemy obey our
commands?'...As cognitive neuroscience and related technologies become
more pervasive, using technology for nefarious purposes becomes easier."
But as is usual with all such screeds, the psychoanalytic theory of
projection comes in handy when deciphering the monstrous intent of
Pentagon weaponeers. It is all-too-clear whether we are discussing
nuclear, biological, chemical or contemporaneously, cognitive weapons
that Western proponents of preemptive war, always couch their acts of
violent imperialist aggression in purely defensive terms.
In this light, Freud and his followers have defined projection as a
form of defense in which unwanted feelings are displaced onto another
person, and where aggressive impulses then appear as a threat from the
external world. In the case of corporate defense and security grifters,
their militarist pit bulls and the academic sycophants who fuel their
deranged "cognitive warfare" fantasies, the other--a nation, a
dispossessed class or a bogeyman such as "international terrorism"--are
always the external harbingers of apocalyptic death and destruction,
when in reality such fantasies are wholly reflective of their own
desire to aggressively dominate and plunder other nations.
Therefore, the NRC maintains, and note the ideologically-skewed
reference to the eternal verities of "the market," the Holy Grail of
capitalism in its hyperimperialist phase:
The fear that this approach to fighting war might be developed will be
justification for developing countermeasures to possible cognitive
weapons. This escalation might lead to innovations that could cause
this market area to expand rapidly. Tests would need to be developed to
determine if a soldier had been harmed by a cognitive weapon. And there
would be a need for a prophylactic of some sort. (NRC, op. cit.)
Who, pray tell, is driving this "escalation" and counting on academia
to produce "innovations" in "this market area"? One might also quite
reasonably inquire: Who profits?
As Christopher Green, the chairman of the NRC investigative panel
championing neuroweapons research avers in a roundtable discussion
sponsored by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Big Pharma is
global. Drug discovery research is both ponderous (not as much as arms
control, however) and increasingly beyond the control of governments
and the public. The development of cognitive enhancers and anti-aging
aides during the next two decades (the time needed for drug discovery
to become successful) will be...ethically worrisome. But it will be
beyond opprobrium. Drugs will be developed and marketed, and not
necessarily under the auspices of traditional Western controls and good
laboratory practices. ("The potential impact of neuroscience research
is greater than previously thought," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
9 July 2008) [emphasis added]
While Green claims he is opposed to developing drugs "with safe and
efficacious properties for military use," the NRC study, after all, was
funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency, hardly a "neutral party"
when it comes to "enhanced interrogation techniques" and other horrors
of this horrible system!
One must also dissect the linguistic formulations and assumptions
deployed by those advocating this line of research. By referring to
neuroweapons production as a "market area," those contemplating
unleashing devilish pharmacological forms of warfare on unsuspecting
populations behave, in you'll pardon the pun, as if they were
brainstorming the release of a new video game or suite of luxury
condominiums in an American city "ethnically cleansed" of its urban
poor!
Green and his acolytes claim that "battlefield commanders of all
nations hold sacrosanct the right to determine the applications" of
weapon deployments that may cause "collateral damage" to civilian
noncombatants. Therefore, Green argues that "if governments or
scientists were to try to develop a system to pre-screen
neuroscientific cognitive manipulators, which would be HIPAA approved
and tested, and robust in its core science, success would be as likely
as it was with mines and cluster-bombs--meaning not likely."
Translation: full-speed ahead!
While the NRC allege that their approach to monitoring neuroweapons
research is "ethical," the committee ponders whether "the concept of
torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is
possible that someday there could be a technique developed to extract
information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side
effects."
Other than the hollowing-out of one's personality and the unique traits
that make us human, that is. "Paging Winston Smith, white courtesy
telephone!"
While Nazi theories of Aryan superiority may have been displaced by a
uniquely American ultranationalist, though no less predatory
utilitarian praxis, behind the glittering technological promises
trumpeted by today's biotech weaponeers lurk the same murderous mental
constructs that guided Indian hunters and slave traders of yore.
Only this time, we're all Manchurian candidates.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco
Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly, Love &
Rage and Antifa Forum, he is the editor of Police State America: U.S.
Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.
Original headline: Defense Intelligence Agency Seeking "Mind Control"
Weapons
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9931
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