LSD, Murder and the CIA
Frank Olson, Enemy Combatant
http://www.counterpunch.org/swanson03262010.html
By DAVID SWANSON
March 26 - 28, 2010
If you haven't read "A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson
and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments," by H.P. Albarelli Jr., I
recommend doing so right away. Read every word, cover to cover. You
will initially conclude that I, and Albarelli, are crazy. This is the
story of one simple murder that asks who done it and doesn't answer
the question for over 700 pages, because every time a new character
enters the story the author introduces him with a background that
includes how his grandparents were conceived and where his field of
work originated. But there is method to the madness, trust me. Bear with it.
By the time you've finished, Albarelli will tell you who killed
Olson, and you'll grasp that who killed Olson is not really the
point. This is a story of the CIA's lawless rampages of murder and
mayhem, which began when the CIA began and have continued to this
day, with a possible minor let-up in the mid-1970s. What did occur
for certain in the mid 1970s was an unusual fit of journalism by the
U.S. media and of oversight by the U.S. Congress. Both freakish
activities were short lived but produced most of what we know to this
day about the goings-on in a major branch of our government, the
Central Intelligence Agency.
In the absence of oversight or accountability, sadism and stupidity
compete for domination. The CIA and the military in the 1950s
invested heavily in researching every form of mystical mumbo-jumbo
that could be found, and every form of drug. LSD was among the wonder
drugs that were going to
either prevent military violence or reveal people's secrets, or both.
And if we wanted to test the effects of something like LSD, what
better way than to dose people with it, without their knowledge, and
observe their behavior? We could use mental patients locked in
hospitals, or prisoners, or soldiers. Sure, some would kill
themselves or others, but this was science! We could put LSD into the
air and the food of an entire French village, stand back, and watch
the horror. Or how about testing anthrax on a U.S. factory? Would
people suffer as a result of these experiments? Sure! Would people
die? Sure, but what did that matter when God and Country were on the
line? After all, we were poisoning people to protect their right to
be poisoned by us!
There may be a tendency to take seriously claims that medical ethics
had not evolved in the 1950s to the point of forbidding
experimentation on people without their consent. That's utter
nonsense and ignores the Nuremberg Code of 1947. In fact, morality
has DEVOLVED in U.S. political thinking since the 1950s. We would
have been shocked in the 1950s in this country to learn that our
government was developing biological and chemical weapons, that it
was testing them on human beings including Americans, that it was
torturing prisoners, and that it was killing people who got in the
way or knew too much or presented an inconvenience. Now we consider
all such activity an ordinary part of running a good old fashioned
totalitarian democracy. In 1953 Frank Olson was a murder victim. In
2010 he would simply have been decreed an enemy combatant. He would
have been cuffed, hooded, and locked away.
Nowadays we have so many Frank Olsons we don't know what to do with
them all. New innocent victims are ordered released from Guantanamo
at least every week. We can't be expected to write 800-page books
about each of them. Can we? And why should we, when nothing illegal
has been done? Habeas corpus is no more. Warrantless spying is
routine. Torture is a respectable tool our rulers use if they see
fit. And when we use white phosphorus to melt the skin off some
children in one of our illegal wars, the loudest cry is to keep the
war going. The CIA is now openly understood to run torture programs
so gruesome that the idea of drugging people with any sort of drug is
so mild by comparison as to seem immediately acceptable.
And the CIA's new alchemic brew of stupidity and sadism does not
involve crop-dusting villages with LSD. The brave new answer to war
is drone strikes. Just as stupid. Just as sadistic. Just as illegal.
But nowhere near as secret. We're open about our crimes these days.
Frank Olson's murder is like a nuclear bomb in an 18th century naval
battle. It stands out because of its context. If it had occurred last
week, we'd have already forgotten it.
--
David Swanson is the author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial
Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press.
He can be reached at: [email protected]
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
