Do You Think You’ll Ever Know, Now That You Have Handed Your Mind to the Machine?

by Edward Curtin / March 26th, 2025

We live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

This propaganda comes in two forms: covert and overt. The latter, and most effective form, comes with a large dose of truth offered rapid-fire by celebrated, authoritative voices via prominent media. The truth is sprinkled with subtle messages that render it sterile. This has long been the case, but it is even more so in the age of images on screens and digital media where words and images flow away like water in a rapidly moving stream. The late sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, updating Marx’s famous quote “all that is solid melts into thin air,” called this “liquid modernity.”

Welcome to Operation Pandemonium

See, these experts purport to say: What we tell you is true, but it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions. You must drink the waters of uncertainty forever lest you become a conspiracy nut. But if you don’t want to be so labelled, accept the simplest explanation for matters that disturb you – Occam’s razor, that the truest answer is the simplest – which is always the official explanation.  If this sounds contradictory, that is because it is. It is meant to be. We induce schizophrenia.

And it is, these experts suggest, because we live in a world where all knowledge is relative, and you, the individual, like Kafka’s country bumpkin, who in his parable “Before the Law,” tries to get past the doorkeeper to enter the inner sanctum of the Law but is never allowed to pass; you, the individual, must accept the futility of your efforts and accede to this dictum that declares that all knowledge is relative, which is ironically an absolute dictum. It is the Law. The Law of contradictions declared from on high.

Many writers, journalists, and filmmakers, while allegedly revealing truths about the U.S. and its allies’ criminal operations at home and abroad, have for decades slyly conveyed the message that in the end “we will never know the truth,” the real facts – that convincing evidence is lacking.

This refusal to come to conclusions is a sly tactic that keeps many careers safe while besmirching, intentionally or not, the names of serious researchers who reach conclusions based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence (the basis for most murder convictions) and detailed, sourced facts, often using the words of the guilty parties themselves, but are dismissed with the CIA weaponized term “conspiracy theorists.”

This often escapes the average person who does not read footnotes and sources, if they even read books. They read screens and the mainstream media, which should now be understood to include much of the “alternative” media. And they watch all sorts of films.

But this “we will never know” meme, this false mystery, is shrewdly and often implicitly joined to another: That we do know because the official explanation of events is true and only nut cases would believe otherwise. Propaganda by paradox. Operation chaos.

The JFK Assassination and the Release of Files

There are so many examples of this, with that of President Kennedy’s assassination being a foundational one. In this case, as with the current phony Trump release of more JFK assassination files, the ongoing “mystery” is always reinforced with the implicit or explicit presupposition that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, but yet implying that there are more mysteries to explore forever because “people” are paranoid. (Trump’s position, as he recently told interviewer Clay Travis, is that he has always believed Oswald assassinated Kennedy, but he wonders if he may have had help.) They are paranoid not because of government and media lies, but because “popular culture” (not highbrow) has created paranoia. To spice this up, there is often the suggestion that President Kennedy was assassinated on the orders of the Mob, LBJ, Cuba, or Israel, when the facts overwhelmingly confirm it was organized and carried out by the CIA. A. O. Scott’s recent front page article in The New York Times in response to the JFK files release – “J. F. K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?” (the title appropriately taken from a very fast-paced Billy Joel song and video) – is a perfect example of such legerdemain.

Thus the ruse to keep debating the assassination, get the latest documents, etc. to satisfy “people’s” insatiable paranoia. To pull out CIA fallback stories 2, 3, or even 4 when all else fails. Dr. Martin Schotz, the JFK researcher, rightly compares this to George Orwell’s definition of Crimestop:

‘Crimestop’ means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, or misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the powers that be]… and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. ‘Crimestop’, in short, means protective stupidity.

It’s the crazy people’s fault, not Scott’s or those who back him up at The Times, a newspaper that has been lying about the JFK assassination from day one. The same goes for the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, et al., and so many key events in U.S. history. It is a game of creating mental chaos by claiming we do know because the official explanation is correct but we don’t know because people have been infected with paranoia. If only people were not so paranoid! Unlike us at The Times, goes the implicit message.

The Epistemological Games of Certain Filmmakers

It is well known that people today are watching far more streaming film series and movies than they are reading books. That someone would lucubrate with pen in hand over a footnoted book on an important issue is now as rare as someone without a cell phone. The optical-electronic eye-ear screen connection rules most lives, mental and sensory. Marshall McLuhan, if a bit premature while referring in 1962 to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest – wrote sixty-three years ago in The Gutenberg Galaxy:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. [my emphasis] So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

Four years ago this month, I wrote an article – “You Know We’ll Never Know, Don’t You?” – about a new BBC documentary film series by the acclaimed British filmmaker, Adam Curtis, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World.”

The series is a pastiche film filled with seven plus hours of fleeting, fragmented, and fascinating archived video images from the BBC archives where Curtis has worked for decades, accompanied by Curtis’s skeptical commentary about “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere.” These historical images jump from one seemingly disconnected subject to another to reinforce his point. He says it is “pointless to try to understand the meaning of why things happen.” He claims that we are all living as if we are “on an acid trip.”

While not on an acid trip which I have never taken, I was reminded of this recently as I watched a new documentary – Chaos: The Manson Murders (2025) – by the equally famous U.S. documentary filmmaker, Erroll Morris, a film about the CIA’s mind control operation, MKULTRA, and its use of LSD. As everyone knows, the CIA is that way-out hippie organization from Virginia that is always intent on spreading peace, love, and good vibes.

While the content of their films differs, Curtis’s wide-ranging and Morris’s focused on Manson and the book by Tom O’Neil, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, I was struck by both filmmakers tendency to obfuscate while titillating their audience with footage and information that belies their conclusions about not knowing. In this regard, Curtis is the most overt and extreme.

Morris does not use Curtis’s language, but he makes it explicit at Chaos’s end that he doesn’t believe Tom O’Neil’s argument in his well-researched book that Charles Manson was part of a CIA mind-control experiment led by the psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Jolyon “Jolly” West. West worked in 1967 for the CIA on MKULTRA brainwashing projects in a Haight Ashbury clinic during the summer of love, using LSD and hypnosis, when Manson lived there and was often in the clinic with his followers.

On April 26, 1964, West also just “happened” to visit the imprisoned Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police Department, and when West emerged from the meeting, he immediately declared that in the preceding 48 hours Ruby had become “positively insane” with no chance that this “unshakeable” and “fixed” lunacy could be reversed. What happened between the two men we do not know – for there were no witnesses – but one might assume West used his hypnotic skills and armamentarium of drugs that were integral to MKULTRA’s methods.

MKULTRA

MKULTRA was a sinister and secret CIA mind-control project, officially started in 1953 but preceded by Operation Bluebird, which was renamed Operation Artichoke. These operations started right after WW II when U.S. intelligence worked with Nazi doctors to torture Russians and others to reveal secrets. They were brutal. MKULTRA was run by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and was even worse. He was known as the “Black Sorcerer.” With the formula for LSD, the CIA had an unlimited amount of the drug to use widely, which it did. It figured prominently in MKULTRA mind control experiments along with hypnosis. Tom O’Neil sums it up thus:

The agency hoped to produce couriers who could imbed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins. . . . MKULTRA scientists flouted this code [the Nuremberg Code that emerged from the Nuremberg trials of Nazis] constantly, remorselessly – and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to ‘induced pain’ and ‘psychosis.’ They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t do the trick, they’d try master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields. [my emphasis]

In 1973 during the Watergate scandal, CIA Director William Helms ordered all MKULTRA documents destroyed. Most were, but some were forgotten, and in the next few years, Seymour Hersh reported about it and the Senate Church Committee went further. They discovered records that implicated forty-four universities and colleges in the experiments, eighty institutions, and 185 researchers, Louis West among them. The evil cat and its large litter were out of the bag.

MKULTRA allegedly ended in 1973. But only the most naïve would think it did not continue under a different form. In 1964, McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message.” The new medium that was developed in the decades since has been effectively pointed straight at the brain as you watch the screens. And the message?

Tom O’Neil’s Powerful Case

While admitting that he has not conclusively proven his thesis because he has never been able to confirm Manson and West being together, O’Neil amasses a tremendous amount of convincing circumstantial evidence in his book that makes his case very strong that they were, and that Manson’s ability to get his followers to kill for him was the result of MKULTRA mind control and the use of LSD, which he used extensively and which was introduced by the CIA and used by West. Both men had an inexhaustible amount of the mind-altering drug to use on their victims.

This is the subject of Morris’s film, wherein he interviews O’Neil on camera, who explains the extraordinary fact that Manson was able to mesmerize his followers to kill for him without remorse or shame. They “couldn’t get him out of their heads,” even many years later. This was, of course, the goal of MKULTRA – through the use of brainwashing and drugs – to create “Manchurian Candidates.” This case has much wider ramifications than the sensational 1969 Hollywood murders for which Manson and his followers were convicted; for clearly Mansion’s “family” that carried out the murders on his orders appeared in every way to be under hypnotic control. How did a two-bit, ex-con, pipsqueak, minor hanger-on musician learn to accomplish exactly what MKULTRA spent so many years working on?

Yet at the end of his film, Morris makes a concluding comment without even a nod to the possibility that O’Neil is correct. He says he doesn’t believe O’Neil. I found it very odd, jarring, as though O’Neil had been set up for this denouement, which I think he had. But at the same time I recognized it as Morris’s method of setting up and then undermining the narrative protagonists in his films that are ostensibly about getting to factual truths but never do; they are stories about how all we ever have are endless interpretations and the unknowable, confounded by human fallibility. Everything is lost in the fog of Morris’s method, which is no accident.

Frank Olson

I then found an interview that O’Neil did in 2021 in which he said he pulled out of Morris’s film proposal because Morris wanted to make a film that combined the Frank Olson story (a CIA biologist) with his about Manson. In the interview, O’Neil said he knew Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, who has spent a lifetime proving that the CIA murdered his father in 1953, but he didn’t explain why he pulled out of the project. However, he appears extensively throughout Chaos, being interviewed on camera by Morris, only to be undermined at the end. Why he eventually agreed to be part of the project I do not know.

I am certain he has seen Wormwood (2017), Morris’s acclaimed (they are all acclaimed) Netflix film series about the biologist/ CIA agent Frank Olson and his son, Eric Olson’s heroic lifelong quest to prove that the CIA murdered his father because he had a crisis of conscience about the agency’s use of torture, brainwashing, LSD, and U.S. biological weapons use in Korea, much of it in association with Nazis. The evidence is overwhelming that Frank Olson did not jump from a NYC hotel window in 1953 but was drugged with LSD to induce hallucinations and paranoia, smashed in the head, and thrown out by the CIA. [Read this and view this] Despite such powerful evidence available to him before making Wormwood, in another example of Morris’s method, he disagrees with Eric Olson’s decades of conclusive research that his father was murdered.

Conclusion

Filmmakers like Adam Curtis and Erroll Morris are examples of a much larger and dangerous phenomenon. Their emphases on the impossibility of knowing – this seeming void in the human mind, an endless acid trip down a road of kaleidoscopic interpretations – is much larger than them. It is deeply imbedded in today’s society. One of the few areas in which we are said to be able to know anything for certain is in the area of partisan politics. Here knowingness is the rule and the other side is always wrong. Fight, fight, fight for the home team! Here the nostalgia for “knowledge” is encouraged, as if we don’t live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

With the arrival of the electronic digital life, “knowledge” is now screening. If you don’t want to confirm McLuhan’s prediction – “as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside” – it behooves everyone to step back into the lamplight to read and study books. And take a walk in nature without your machine. You might hear a little bird call to you.

FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies. Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.

 

The story of how the CIA conducted secret LSD experiments on unwitting US citizens

The decade-long MK ULTRA program used unwitting candidates for mind-control tests

© AFP / SAUL LOEB

After World War II, the possibility of gaining control over a person’s mind became one of the top pursuits for intelligence services. Amid never-ending spy games, the capacity to make someone tell the full truth during an interrogation, or to wipe out a subject’s personality and impose another – perhaps, a controlled one – became quite attractive to secret services.

In 1979, former US State Department officer John Marks published a book called “The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’,” which focused on the CIA's mind-control experiments and is based on agency documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The term ‘Manchurian Candidate’ emerged from a title of a novel by Richard Condon, first published in 1959, which tells the story of a US soldier brainwashed and turned into an assassin by the Communists. Back then, the fear that America’s rivals might use such techniques was not only a fictional fantasy, but a matter of very serious concern.

This is how John Marks describes it: “In 1947 the National Security Act created not only the CIA but also the National Security Council – in sum, the command structure for the Cold War. Wartime [Office of Strategic Services] leaders like William Donovan and Allen Dulles lobbied feverishly for the Act. Officials within the new command structure soon put their fears and their grandiose notions to work. Reacting to the perceived threat, they adopted a ruthless and warlike posture toward anyone they considered an enemy – most especially the Soviet Union. They took it upon themselves to fight communism and things that might lead to communism everywhere in the world.”

Read more

 ‘You live like an animal’: Why can't the world win the fight against FGM?

‘Defensive orientation soon became secondary’

In 1975, this US Senate select committee, chaired by Democratic senator from Idaho Frank Church, looked into the possible intelligence abuses committed in the past. It was part of a so-called ‘Year of Intelligence,’ a series of investigations into the operations which included “illegal, improper or unethical activities,” as the resolution establishing the Church committee put it.

Actually, there were reasons for the US public to question the secret services’ methods. After the Watergate scandal, it was disclosed that the CIA had a direct role in what happened. While describing the CIA’s activities in his article for the New York Times, journalist Seymour Hersh mentioned other agencies’ operations targeting American citizens. The CIA itself only released the documents on the matter in 2007.

So, the Church committee had quite a lot of work to do. The members held 126 full committee meetings, 40 subcommittee hearings and interviewed some 800 witnesses. After having searched through 110,000 documents, the committee published its final report in April 1976. It also issued a document called “Alleged Assasination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” detailing the intelligence’s plans to kill several top figures like Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro.

The main report contains a huge chapter dedicated to the use of chemical and biological agents by the intelligence agencies. “Fears that countries hostile to the United States would use chemical and biological agents against Americans or America’s allies led to the development of a defensive program designed to discover techniques for American intelligence agencies to detect and counteract chemical and biological agents,” the report says, pointing that the defensive weapon soon turned into an offensive one.

The defensive orientation soon became secondary, as the possible use of these agents, to obtain information from or gain control over enemy agents, became apparent.

Read more

 Will India fall before Omicron's latest wave?

The report goes on to explain that the programs were so sensitive that “few people, even within the agencies” knew about their existence, and “there is no evidence that either the executive branch or Congress were ever informed.” As a result, scores of people suffered some damage and at least two of them died due to the experiments.

One grim example is the case of American tennis player Harold Blauer. In 1952, he voluntarily entered the New York State Psychiatric Institute because he was suffering from depression compounded by divorce. The institute had a classified contract with the Army for research of potential chemical warfare agents. As part of an experiment that he knew nothing about, Blauer was given a series of derivatives of a psychedelic substance called mescaline, and died. In 1987, a US court ruled that the Government had covered up its role in the man’s death. A Judge ordered the authorities to pay $700,000 to Blauer’s family.

Unwitting candidates

Since the late 1940s, the CIA ran several projects involving chemical and biological agents. From 1947 to 1953, a project called CHATTER researched “truth drugs” – something that, according to the Church commission’s report, was a response to “reports of ‘amazing results’ achieved by the Soviets.” Animals and humans underwent tests involving a plant called anabasis aphylla, an alkaloid scopolamine and ​​mescaline.

In 1950, a project dubbed BLUEBIRD was approved. Its aim was to investigate mind-control methods that prevent personnel from “unauthorized extraction of information” and that give the user the means to control an individual using special interrogation techniques. A year later, the project was rebranded as ARTICHOKE. Apart from its defensive purposes, it now included research into “offensive interrogation techniques” involving hypnosis and drugs. There’s no certain information about when the project ended. According to the Church commission’s report, the CIA insisted that ARTICHOKE had been scrapped in 1956 – however, there was evidence that the “special interrogation” it studied had been used for several more years.

There was also MKNAOMI, which investigated biological warfare agents, their storage, and devices for their diffusion. It was scrapped after president Richard Nixon put an end to America's offensive biological weapons program in 1969.

MKULTRA

The CIA’s main mind-control research program, which turned out to be a real shock when discovered, was MKULTRA, headed by Dr Sidney Gottlieb. Launched in 1953 and discontinued a decade later, the program involved testing human behavior control with the likes of radiation, electroshock, psychological and psychiatric tools, harassment substances and paramilitary devices. The project had a special branch, MKDELTA, to oversee tests conducted abroad.

For the most part, people now know about MKULTRA because it involved LSD – a psychedelic drug created in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. On April 19, 1943, Hofmann accidentally took LSD himself and discovered how strong the effect might be (this day is now known as ‘Bicycle day,’ as Hofmann was riding a bike when he experienced the first-ever ‘trip’ on LSD, commonly known as ‘acid’). Sandoz Laboratories began marketing the drug under the name ‘Delysid’ four years later, and in 1948 it came to the US.

Read more

 The day America lost its status as the ‘ultimate defender’ of human rights

The CIA knew about LSD’s effects, and relied on it so much that, in 1953, there was a plan to purchase 10 kilograms of LSD, some 100 million doses worth $240,000, for experiments.

The CIA, posing as a research foundation, made deals with universities, hospitals and other institutions to get the materials and substances it needed. The tests were performed on human subjects, with or without their knowledge. Even those who volunteered to take part in the research were unaware of the real purpose behind it. The CIA considered that the secrecy aspect was needed as, in a potential operation, the targeted subject would certainly be unwitting.

Several tests involving LSD were conducted in the army. It was also used abroad during interrogations of alleged foreign spies.

The hallucinogen was also tested on prisoners, sometimes on those with drug addictions. Several volunteer inmates from “Lexington Rehabilitation Center” – a prison for addicts serving sentences for drug violations – were given hallucinogenic drugs in exchange for drugs they were addicted to.

American organized crime boss James ‘Whitey’ Bulger took part in MKULTRA in 1957, while being held in prison in Atlanta. In 2017, he described his experience in an article for the OZY media outlet. According to Bulger, he realized that he had been taking part in the CIA experiments only years later, when he read The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’.

Whitey Bulger was recruited for the experiment together with several other inmates. According to his article, he was told it was a medical project aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. “For our participation, we would receive three days of good time for each month on the project,” Bulger wrote. “Each week we would be locked in a secure room in the basement of the prison hospital, in an area where mental patients were housed.” All the candidates were given massive doses of LSD and then tested for their reactions.

This is how Whitey Bulger described it: “Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state. Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.” He said the experiments caused him long-lasting sleeping problems and nightmares.

Read more

 Biden’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ is another propaganda tool

Death of Dr Olson

In November 1953, a group of CIA employees (including Sidney Gottlieb), together with scientists from the US’ biological research center called Camp Detrick, gathered in a cabin in Maryland for a conference. The group included Dr Frank Olson, an expert in aerobiology. At some point, the CIA members decided to conduct an experiment on unwitting candidates, so Gottlieb’s deputy Robert Lashbrook added LSD to a bottle of Cointreau liqueur, which was served after dinner. Olson tasted it.

When Olson returned home, family members noticed that he was depressed. Two days later, Olson complained to his chief Vincent Ruwet about his bad condition and what he experienced. Ruwet contacted Lashbrook, and they took Olson to New York, to meet a doctor close to the CIA, who was experienced in LSD. In New York, Olson felt so bad that he even refused to fly back home to spend Thanksgiving with his family. Later, Lashbrook claimed that during the last dinner they had together, the man looked “almost the Dr Olson… before the experiment.” According to Lashbrook’s testimony, at 2:30am he was awakened by a loud “crash of glass,” and saw that Olson had fallen to his death from the window of their room on the 10th floor. Olson’s family, however, refused to believe it was a suicide, and claimed that the aerobiology expert had been murdered.

Despite all this, the tests involving unwitting people continued. The CIA employees could meet a candidate in a bar, take them to a ‘safe house’ and administer the drug through food or drink – and then wait for the reaction. Sometimes the candidates felt ill for days afterwards.

The project was scrapped in 1963. A decade later, Gottlieb destroyed most of the documents regarding MKULTRA, so its real scale will never be known.

While MKULTRA remains just a Cold War-era ghost, research into new weapons and into methods of countering them has never stopped – and will never stop, according to ex-CIA-officer-turned-whistleblower John Kiriakou, while countries all over the world are paying “billions and billions of dollars” for it.

Kiriakou believes that it’s never ethical to experiment on a human being without that person’s complete understanding of what is happening – and without an agreement to be a part of the experiment. “These things shouldn’t be secret; if they are secret, they shouldn’t be done,” he told RT. “Ethically and legally you can’t experiment on a human being without an agreement.

“When I was in college, I didn’t have enough money to pay for rent for one month. I saw an advertisement from a pharmaceutical company saying that they want to experiment with these new drugs on young healthy people that they’ll give $500 if you agree to take these drugs over the course of a weekend, and then they draw your blood and they measure the absorption rate of the medication,” Kiriakou recalls. “So I did it. It made me sleepy, I got my $500 and I went home. I knew what I was doing, I agreed to allow them to experiment on me. It was uncomfortable and I felt gross, but my eyes were open.”

When we are talking about chemical or biological research, it’s a good thing until it serves peaceful purposes, he says. “In the end, a lot of good can come of it, especially when countries are cooperating with one another,” Kiriakou concludes. “But in wartime, and especially when the public isn't informed of these things, it can be a frightening prospect, because we have to just trust in our governments not to use them offensively as weapons.”

By Anastasia Safronova, RT editor

SEE  

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=MKULTRA

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=LSD

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CIA

#MKULTRA

After learning of Whitey Bulger CIA LSD tests, 
juror has regrets

1 of 10
Janet Uhlar sits for a photo at her dining room table with an arrangement of letters and pictures she received through her correspondence with imprisoned Boston organized crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger, Friday, Jan. 31, 2020, in Eastham, Mass. Uhlar was one of 12 jurors who found Bulger guilty in a massive racketeering case, including involvement in 11 murders. But now she says she regrets voting to convict Bulger on the murder charges, because she learned he was an unwitting participant in a secret CIA experiment in which he was dosed with LSD on a regular basis for 15 months. (AP Photo/David Goldman)


EASTHAM, Mass. (AP) — One of the jurors who convicted notorious crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger says she regrets her decision after learning that he was an unwitting participant in a covert CIA experiment with LSD.

Bulger terrorized Boston from the 1970s into the 1990s with a campaign of murder, extortion, and drug trafficking, then spent 16 years on the lam after he was tipped to his pending arrest.

In 2013, Janet Uhlar was one of 12 jurors who found Bulger guilty in a massive racketeering case, including involvement in 11 murders, even after hearing evidence that the mobster was helped by corrupt agents in the Boston office of the FBI.

But now Uhlar says she regrets voting to convict Bulger on any of the murder charges.

Her regret stems from a cache of more than 70 letters Bulger wrote to her from prison. In some, he describes his unwitting participation in a secret CIA experiment with LSD. In a desperate search for a mind control drug in the late 1950s, the agency dosed Bulger with the powerful hallucinogen more than 50 times when he was serving his first stretch in prison — something his lawyers never brought up in his federal trial.

“Had I known, I would have absolutely held off on the murder charges,” Uhlar told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “He didn’t murder prior to the LSD. His brain may have been altered, so how could you say he was really guilty?” At the same time, Uhlar says she would have voted to convict Bulger on the long list of other criminal counts, meaning he still would likely have died in prison.

Uhlar has spoken publicly about her regret before but says her belief that the gangster was wrongly convicted on the murder charges was reinforced after reading a new book by Brown University professor Stephen Kinzer: “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.” The book digs into the dark tale of the CIA’s former chief chemist and his attempts to develop mind control techniques by giving LSD and other drugs to unsuspecting individuals, including colleagues, and observing the effects.
“It was encouraging to know I wasn’t losing my mind, thinking this was important,” Uhlar said. “It told me, this is huge. I mean, how many lives were affected by this? We have no idea.”

Gottlieb’s secret program, known as MK-ULTRA, enlisted doctors and other subcontractors to administer LSD in large doses to prisoners, addicts and others unlikely to complain. In Bulger’s case, the mobster and fellow inmates were offered reduced time for their participation and told they would be taking part in medical research into a cure for schizophrenia.

“Appealed to our sense of doing something worthwhile for society,” Bulger wrote in a letter to Uhlar reviewed by the AP.


Letters addressed to Janet Uhlar that she received through her correspondence with imprisoned Boston organized crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger, sit on her dining room table, Friday, Jan. 31, 2020, in Eastham, Mass. Before he died, though, Bulger engaged in extensive correspondence with Uhlar, writing her more than 70 letters, including several that detailed his unwitting role in the MK-ULTRA experiments. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

But nothing could have been further from the truth.

“The CIA mind control program known as MK-ULTRA involved the most extreme experiments on human beings ever conducted by any agency of the U.S. government,” Kinzer said. “During its peak in the 1950s, that program and it’s director, Sidney Gottlieb, left behind a trail of broken bodies and shattered minds across three continents.”

After Bulger was found guilty by Uhlar and the other jurors, a federal judge sentenced him to two life terms plus five years. But his life behind bars ended a little more than a year ago, at age 89, when he was beaten to death by fellow inmates shortly after arriving in his wheelchair at the Hazelton federal prison in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. No criminal charges have been filed.

Although much had been written about the CIA’s mind control experiments before Bulger’s trial, Uhlar said she knew nothing about them until she began corresponding with the renowned gangster following his conviction.

Uhlar started writing Bulger, she said, because she was troubled by the fact that much of the evidence against him came through testimony by former criminal associates who were also killers and had received reduced sentences in exchange for testifying against their former partner in crime.

“When I left the trial, I had more questions,” she said.

After Bulger started returning her letters, Uhlar noticed he often dated them with the time he had started writing in his tight cursive style. “He always seemed to be writing at one, two, or three in the morning and when I asked him why, he said it was because of the hallucinations,” Uhlar said.

When Uhlar asked him to explain, Bulger revealed what he had already told many others: that since taking part in the LSD experiments at a federal prison in Atlanta, he’d been plagued by nightmares and gruesome hallucinations and was unable to sleep for more than a few hours at a time.

“Sleep was full of violent nightmares and wake up every hour or so — still that way — since ’57,” he wrote.

“On the Rock at times felt sure going insane,” he wrote in another letter, referring to the infamous former prison on Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay, where he was transferred from Atlanta. “Auditory & visual hallucinations and violent nightmares — still have them — always slept with lights on helps when I wake up about every hour from nightmares.”

The mobster also recalled the supervising physician, the late Carl Pfeiffer of Emory University, and the technicians who would monitor his response to the LSD, asking him questions such as, “Would you ever kill anyone? Etc., etc.”

That question struck a nerve with Uhlar. After hearing from Bulger about MK-ULTRA, “as if I should have known about it,” she visited him at a Florida federal prison on three occasions to discuss the experiments and started reading everything she could find about them.

At one point, she reviewed the 1977 hearings by the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence, which was looking into MK-ULTRA following the first public disclosures of the top-secret program.

The hearings included testimony from CIA director Stansfield Turner, who acknowledged evidence showing that the agency had been searching for a drug that could prepare someone for “debilitating an individual or even killing another person.”

“That’s just horrifying, in my opinion,” Uhlar said. “It opens up the question of whether he was responsible for the murders he committed.”

According to at least two of the several books written about Bulger and his life of crime, associates including corrupt former FBI agent John Morris said they assumed Bulger would use the LSD experiments to mount an insanity defense, if he were ever caught and tried.

But in 2013 Bulger’s Boston attorneys, J.W. Carney Jr. and Hank Brennan, unveiled a novel defense in which they admitted Bulger was a criminal who made “millions and millions of dollars” from his gangland enterprise, but was enabled by corrupt law enforcement officers, especially those in Boston office of the FBI.

Neither Carney nor Brennan would comment on their decision — attorney client privilege outlasts a client’s death. But Anthony Cardinale, a Boston attorney who has represented numerous organized crime defendants, said he would have opted for an insanity defense, in part because of the abundant evidence against Bulger.

“I would have had him come into court like Harvey Weinstein, all disheveled, and in a wheelchair,” he said.

Still, Cardinale acknowledged there would have been challenges to presenting an insanity defense, including the fact that Bulger spent 16 years outwitting several law enforcement agencies, before he was captured in 2011 in Santa Monica, Calif., where he’d been living quietly with his longtime girlfriend while on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.

“The problem is, he lived for a very long time on the lam in a very secretive and a very smart way,” Cardinale said. “But that doesn’t diminish the notion that, based on the LSD experiments, and the doses he was experiencing, he could have convinced himself of things that were not true, including that he had immunity from prosecution and could do whatever he wanted.”

To his dying day, Bulger insisted he’d received criminal immunity from a deceased federal prosecutor who once headed the New England Organized Crime Strike Force.

John Bradley, a former Massachusetts federal prosecutor and assistant district attorney, agreed that defense lawyers would have faced high hurdles waging an insanity defense, noting that most end in convictions.

“The flip side is that jurors are sometimes swayed by morality more than legality,” he said. “The whole shtick that the government played a role in creating this monster, uses him as an informant and then goes after him — that’s an argument that could affect one or two jurors.”

And it only takes one to vote not guilty on all the criminal charges to produce a hung jury, Bradley noted, forcing prosecutors to decide whether to retry a case.

Given Bulger’s decades as a crime boss who corrupted the Boston office of the FBI, paying cash and doing favors in exchange for information that helped him thwart multiple investigations, a retrial would have been a near certainty. Nevertheless, Cardinale said, a hung jury in the Bulger case “would have been a monster victory” for the defense.

Even if Bulger were convicted on the other criminal charges and received a sentence that would have kept him behind bars for life, a refusal to find him guilty on the murder charges would have meant anguish for family members of his victims.

“As in any case involving a tragic murder, a conviction of the perpetrator helps family member obtain closure and move on with their lives,” said Paul V. Kelly, a former federal prosecutor who has represented the family of one of Bulger’s murder victims. “An acquittal of Whitey Bulger on the murder charges would have just caused additional pain and anguish.”

Uhlar has written about the Bulger trial in “The Truth be Damned,” a fictionalized account she published in 2018 and advertises on her website. She also gives occasional talks on the trial at community centers and libraries.

During her correspondence and visits with Bulger, Uhlar said, she grew fond of the gangster, though he often warned her that he was a criminal and “master manipulator.” When asked if Bulger might have manipulated her, she said, “I’ve asked myself that many times. I’ll finish reading a letter and say, ‘Could he have?’ “

Bulger often wrote to Uhlar as if she were a friend, even joking with her. But in one letter he also enclosed a more menacing message inscribed to her on the back of a photo taken of him on “the Rock,” at a time when he was fending off LSD-induced nightmares while contemplating his return to Boston’s violent criminal underworld.

“At end of Alcatraz, getting more serious and capable of about anything,” he wrote. “Hard time makes hard people.”

___

AP investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.

Follow Associated Press investigative reporter Michael Rezendes at https://twitter.com/mikerezendes

'Cult making kids kill': Mysterious online figure linked to at least 2 school shootings

Photo by Philipp Katzenberger on Unsplash

Jordan Green

February 06, 2025
RAW STORY

Before 17-year-old Solomon Henderson fatally shot a fellow student and then took his own life at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee last month, he left a trail of documents and social media posts that revealed his immersion in a swirl of violent white supremacy, occultism and edgy far-right memes.

He name-dropped a parade of white supremacist mass murderers and school shooters, while resharing terror manuals that goad impressionable and troubled teenagers like himself to gamify violence by encouraging efforts to improve on their predecessors’ lethality.

Henderson’s writings and social media posts also referenced “groomers” and “handlers.” Among the half-dozen nicknames Henderson dropped, one has been flagged for its association with three separate deadly attacks.

“Nitro groomed me,” Henderson wrote on his Bluesky account one day before he took a gun to school and killed a 16-year-old student. And in a diary that he left behind, Henderson mentioned Nitro, also known as “Nitrogen,” as being among his “top ‘groomers.’”

Henderson’s writings brim with dehumanizing tropes and grotesque descriptions of violence, suggesting, at least in part, that the purpose of his propaganda was to shock and alarm parents, teachers and other authority figures.

Carla Hill, director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told Raw Story in an email that Henderson’s post “may have been a trolling effort” or “perhaps an inside joke.” She added: “We have no evidence that Nitro played a direct role in guiding or mentoring Henderson. What is more likely and perhaps notable is that Henderson had to have been in online spaces either with Nitro or where he was discussed, because he was familiar with him and versed in his activities/reputation perhaps.”

While the exact role played by the “groomers” and “handlers” cited by Henderson remains unclear, the nicknames and social media accounts are likely to provide investigators with leads on a potential network of operators — part of a global network — who may be working behind the scenes to instigate terrorism.
by Taboola
Sponsored LinksYou May Like

Advance Your Career with a Nursing Degree—Flexible Online Programs for Aspiring Healthcare Heroes!Pursue your passion for healthcare with a flexible nursing degree. Study at your own pace, anytime, anywhere.toptip
Learn More





“They think we’re satanic pdf groomers. Part of super Mkultra cult making kids kill,” Henderson wrote in an X post that tagged Nitro in mid-December last year, referring to a CIA mind-control experiment. “They [sic] people are f---ing stretching. I’m just trolling; I barely know her.”

Henderson was talking about Natalie Rupnow, a 15-year-old who fatally shot a fellow student and teacher at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, WI before taking her own life. Rupnow’s attack turned out to be eerily similar to the one Henderson himself would carry out about a month later.

But privately, according to a diary entry from the same period, Henderson suggested he was much more closely connected to Rupnow.

Henderson took note of an X post by Rupnow shortly before she carried out her attack. In the post, Rupnow displayed a photo of herself making a hand sign. Henderson wrote in his diary that he recognized the gesture as the “white power symbol” used by Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who slaughtered 51 Muslims in an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019.

Rupnow followed the photo with a post linking to a Google Docs version of her manifesto, although she neglected to make it public.

“Livestream it,” Henderson wrote in reply.

Later, he expressed excitement in his diary that Rupnow had followed two of his X accounts.

For his part, the person who goes by the name Nitro admitted to being in an online voice chat with Rupnow, and, according to the Center on Extremism, distributed a hoax version of her manifesto on X.

Nitro’s identity remains unknown, but based on an apparent recording of his voice reviewed by Raw Story, he appears to have an English accent and confirmed in the recording that he was in the time zone for the United Kingdom. An X post uncovered by the Center on Extremism indicates Nitro is 17 years old — the same age as Henderson was — and that he is a person of Russian heritage. The post displays a photo of a balloon that says, “Happy 17th Birthday” in Russian, while another X account uses a Russian flag in the bio.

An archived version of another X account shows Nitro telling another user that he planned to “get into contact with my FSB friends,” suggesting that he knows people who work for Russian intelligence.

Henderson’s dismissive post came in response to a post by another X user tagging the FBI and calling on the agency to detain Henderson and “Nitro” based on their apparent foreknowledge of Rupnow’s attack.

Three days later, Henderson posted a link in his diary to a video recording of Nitro giving an interview to an unidentified reporter about the Rupnow shooting. Nitro livestreamed the interview in a Discord group chat as four other anonymous users listened in and typed comments in the chat to help him script his responses.

There was no mistaking in the exchange that took place before the call started that Nitro’s intention was to misdirect the reporter.

“This is going to be fun,” Nitro told the other users in the group chat. “The greatest psy-op ever.”

In a comment in his diary accompanying the link, Henderson remarked that Nitro was “trolling” the reporter, adding a homophobic slur and the text acronym for “laugh out loud.”

During the interview, Nitro admitted that he and Rupnow had interacted in a Discord group chat, while presenting himself as an amused bystander. Based on the coaching from the other members of the chat and their celebratory post-interview assessment, it’s clear what they intended to present as a red herring to explain the motivation behind the attack.

About 10 minutes into the interview, a user with the screen name “Chud King” encouraged Nitro to talk about a concept called “radfem Hitler,” and that was the theme Nitro emphasized during the interview.

“So, radfem Hitler — it’s this really insane bats--- crazy misandrist, like racist woman on Twitter,” Nitro told the reporter. He added that when Rupnow started following the account that supposedly promoted radical feminism and Hitler worship, “that’s kind of when she spiraled.”

Another user in the group chat goes by the name Kristiyan on Discord and X.

In recent X posts, Kristiyan identifies himself as a pan-Slavist. He laments that Eastern Europeans “have this idiotic aggressive pettiness towards the people who are the most similar to them, which is how they end up conquered and taken over by total aliens.

Two days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Kristiyan expressed disdain for Russian far-rightists who welcome the new U.S. president, writing, “The US will remain an enemy, and I’m grateful things are that way.”

Following Nitro’s phone call with the reporter seeking information about the Rupnow shooting, Kristiyan commented with wry satisfaction: “Journalist owned.”

In addition to playing up the “radfem Hitler” concept as a driver of the attack, Nitro also attempted to minimize connections between Rupnow and another attacker — an 18-year-old named Arda Küçükyetim, who stabbed five people at an outdoor café in the northwestern Turkish city of Eskisehir in August.

“Nobody actually knows about this Arda guy outside of probably people in Turkey, right?” Nitro said. “Nobody’s ever heard of him. He’s such a nothing-burger.”

The reporter asked Nitro whether Rupnow had ever mentioned Küçükyetim.

“No,” Nitro responded.

What Nitro didn’t mention was that both he and Rupnow were in a Telegram chat that had been set up in advance so they could watch Küçükyetim livestream his attack.

Hill at the Center on Extremism told Raw Story that her team found a Telegram chat group where Küçükyetim posted his manifesto. An associate known as “Hansen” then posted a link to a livestream of a promised attack. While the members of the chat group were waiting for the attack to begin, Hill said, Rupnow joined the chat through an invitation link, indicating she had a preexisting relationship with at least one other participant.

Afterwards, members of the chat group critiqued the attack.

By the standards of the accelerationist movement, where success is measured in kill counts, it was a disappointment to them: No one died.

“A for effort,” Nitro wrote in the chat.

“At least he did it,” Hansen said.

Rupnow concurred.

“Credit given for that at least,” she wrote.

This story is the second in a three-part series exploring how violent online subcultures provide the opportunity for teenagers attracted to accelerationism and inceldom to network and encourage one another to carry out terrorist attacks. Read Part 1 here.