Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Aren't you guys on the line?
I've got Kelly B. Vallejos.
She is the executive editor of the American Conservative Magazine.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Kelly?
It's great to be back, Scott.
Very happy to have you here and writing about something that's very important, Antiwar.com.
I'm sort of the editor of that thing.
Yes.
So, but luckily I am too young and new, even though I've been there for a long time.
Now, this story goes back to be exactly a part of part of this.
At least the FBI denies that they ever investigated me because they were made to answer that in court.
So that's good.
But they did investigate Eric Garris and Justin Raimondo, the late Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com.
And they did so under the auspices of their intelligence powers, their counterintelligence powers, rather than their police powers, which of course require a much higher threshold of evidence for action.
And so anyway, could you please tell us the story and then all about these great new developments here?
Did I mention the article?
I should have probably mentioned the article, Kelly.
FBI must destroy memos calling Antiwar.com a threat.
Correct.
Yeah, like you said, the story goes way back to at least 2004.
And as you remember, Scott, the timing, you know, those early years after 9-11, after the FBI was granted these sweeping law enforcement authorities to spy on Americans, created the conditions in which you had tens of thousands of people working for the government.
I'm not overstating that number.
Tens of thousands of people working for the government, whether they were agents or contractors, who were essentially spying on Americans.
I mean, it was a bureaucracy that was just fueled by all the fear after 9-11, by all the money that was coming into Washington and by these new sweeping law enforcement powers, which allowed the government to spy on Americans without warrant.
And, you know, whether it be their phones, their email, their electronic communications, you have it, you name it.
So what happened was, is that they were going after, and we have specific examples, journalists and activists starting with the antiwar protests following 9-11.
Well, Eric Garris and Justin Raimondo were alerted in 2011 by a reader who had been gumshoeing his own research on FBI spying, and he did a bunch of FOIA requests, and he found out that the government had been collecting information on Eric and Justin and Antiwar.com sometime during 2004 and afterwards.
And it's not entirely clear what prompted the FBI's attention, but we have some idea when you look into the actual memos and documents that they had been collecting and cultivating.
What happened was Eric and Justin immediately hired a ACLU lawyer.
They sued the FBI to get their hands on all of the documents, and when they did, they were able to see what exactly they were looking at and why.
And, you know, it's clear that there were a couple things that drew their attention.
One was Justin's coverage of what we know as the dancing Israeli story, which is a curious story.
Following 9-11, the day of 9-11, there were reports from neighbors in, I believe it was, I'm going to say Brooklyn.
I don't have it in front of me.
It was either Brooklyn or— In New Jersey, across the way there.
Yeah, and basically they called the police because there were a bunch of men hooting and hollering and dancing around and celebrating, watching the two towers fall across the river.
And the police went.
They took these guys in.
They ended up questioning them for two months, and they were Israeli.
They had been—they had driven to that particular rooftop apartment that day in a van.
They were supposedly working for a moving company.
There was all sorts of other suspicious things going on.
And they were released after two months but deported back to Israel.
And the FBI had investigated these guys, and Justin wrote about it, you know, with the idea that they were part of maybe some sort of spy ring, which there were many reports around that time about Israeli spies in the United States.
It wasn't something that Justin made up.
But he wrote about it, and supposedly that drew some attention from the government.
In another instance, Eric had called the FBI in San Francisco because AntiWar.com had been threatened the day after 9-11 with a guy saying that he was going to shut down the whole website because of their coverage of 9-11.
Eric called the FBI like any good citizen.
Well, I mean, what happened—I think it was like the next day after.
That was the next day.
And everyone was going crazy, including him, and he was getting all kinds of threats.
And this one was real specific, and he kind of panicked.
I think the way he tells the story now is he's kind of embarrassed.
He panicked and called them and forwarded them this email.
And, you know, like, oh no, someone's threatening me.
So I think on any other day he would not have followed through with that, you know.
Well, and what happened was they got lost in translation that Eric was calling because he had been threatened, and it had been translated in a memo subsequently that AntiWar.com was threatening the FBI.
So that was on file.
So you had that, and there were several other notations and observations about who was looking at— you know, there was a person of interest in their cached file on their computers.
It was seen that they had looked at AntiWar.com in the preceding several days.
There was some Nazi rally in which one of the guys had been passing around, I think, a leaflet that mentioned a piece on AntiWar.com about U.S.-Middle East policies.
Somehow that—you know, that was a threatening offense.
So collectively the FBI said, well, we have enough here that we might want to open an investigation into whether or not AntiWar.com is a threat.
An agent of a foreign power.
And was there any kind of predicate for that at all?
For what?
Was it an honest, mistaken pretension of a view that maybe there was something foreign behind AntiWar.com?
Did they suspect that, or did anything that— I mean, do they have an excuse for claiming to believe that at least?
You know, what I had surmised from reading the documents myself was that these were little tiny tidbits.
You know, oh, they were passing around AntiWar story at a rally.
Some neo-Nazi had— But, I mean, was there any kind of foreign connection?
Like, oh, he knows Taki Theodor Kropoulos or whatever that guy's name is.
No.
Or anything like that?
I've seen.
Now, they're heavily redacted.
Not that that guy's a terrorist or anything, but I'm just saying he's from out of town.
I don't know.
It seems like they would have to have some kind of basis for pretending to think that there's a foreign power behind AntiWar.com.
I guess that's the part I never really heard, whether they had even made a good— or attempted to make an excuse for thinking that, you know?
You know, and what I think, and I had mentioned this in my piece that's up today, is that, you know, they— back at the moment in time that we're talking about, 2004, was a time period that people who spoke out against the war pretty much drew attention to themselves as either being, you know, a far-left, anti-Bushy type or an anti-government type.
So I think, you know, there was like a little wiggle room in between.
You were either for or against.
Yeah.
That's pretty much true.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
They were usually the— there were people on the fringes of, you know, popular culture and society at the time.
So the entire mainstream was on board with these wars.
And so, you know, to write about it, to march down the street about it, to make a big deal was drawing attention to yourself.
And Eric and Justin are clearly not, you know, your typical lefty, Birkenstock-wearing, you know, anti-war pacifist types.
But they're really hard skeptics and critics of U.S. foreign policy, and they have been since, you know, the 90s.
So they probably—the FBI is probably like, what's going on with these guys?
You know, we got some neo-Nazis and other people drawing attention.
You know, they put up—they had put up some terror watch lists that had been, you know, publicly, you know, available in the public domain.
They seemed like subversives, I guess, to the FBI.
Whatever you want to make of it, they drew the attention of law enforcement.
And then law enforcement goes and they check their driver's records.
They check them on LexisNexis, all sorts of available, you know, public sources.
You know, so they were trying to find something on these guys, and they really couldn't.
It was clear when you read these documents that they were weak.
You know, they're heavily redacted, but what I read, it was just— it looked like busy work by agents who wanted to justify their new authorities and their big budgets, and they were all twisted around.
And, you know, so it was—they caved early on.
They gave all these, you know, documents to Eric and Justin under this lawsuit.
But what was remaining after all of these years was there were two documents that the— Before the two documents there, it's important that, you know, you mentioned the ACLU took up the case here.
Yeah.
And the reason for that really was because I think the way I had heard it at least was that they knew that this had happened before, but that this was the first time that because of these documents they could prove that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Powers, that the Counterintelligence Division had been used against an American journalistic organization.
And so that was a really big deal for them that they would stand up here and try to put the screws to the FBI.
Right.
It's just like during the 60s when they found out, you know, that the FBI and the CIA were tracking all of these anti-war protesters and civil rights activists.
It was, you know, it's a big deal.
And when you have it in writing and you can prove it, everybody knows they're being watched.
But when you can prove it in such stark terms that all it takes is some flimsy excuse for the government to start following and tracking you, you know, it's pretty outrageous.
But I guess it was important in this way that they had it, you know, so they were able to, you know, lodge this lawsuit, get them to turn over all these documents.
And then finally yesterday with the last victory, unless it's appealed, they were able to get the memos expunged.
So the two remaining memos that the FBI actually had a hold of have to be destroyed according to this court of appeals because they have no law enforcement reason to hold on to them.
So that is a big deal because, yeah, sure, they can hand them all over to antiwar.com and FOIA requests.
But if they're still holding these dossiers about these two guys, you know, at the FBI, that's, you know, that's, it's around forever.
So they're supposed to be destroying them.
They can appeal.
But, you know, as far as Eric is concerned, it is a big victory today for antiwar.com.
You know, when they paid the price because right after this was in 2011, I think Justin wrote a story about the, you know, the reports that they had seen that was that were on them and they started losing donors because big donors who got skittish, you know, about giving money to an operation that was under the scrutiny of the FBI following 9-11 for things like writing, dancing, Israeli stories.
They got nervous and they pulled their money and they lost like $75,000 a year for three years, which is huge for a small outfit that runs on a shoestring budget and mostly by individual donations to lose that, to lose their big benefactors like that over a free speech.
It is essentially a free speech issue.
Right.
And of course, you know, the people who can afford to be a major donor are also the same people who have a lot to lose and who want nothing to do with someone else's problems, whether they're justified or not.
Of course they're not, but still it's understandable as unfortunate as it is, but it's all over now, rich people.
It's cool.
They wouldn't dare mess with us now.
So.
Well, that's the thing.
And Scott, you remember, you know, to go out and write the things that Justin did and write the, and have the columnist that anti-war hosted and to be hosting, you know, your radio program at the time, you know, it was, I mean, I hate to put too fine a point on it, but it was kind of a profile on courage back then because you did put yourself out there.
You were exercising your free speech.
Which by the way, we didn't close down.
Justin did die and that sucks, but anti-war.com is still a thing.
So I'm just saying, cause you're in the past tense here.
I wanted to clarify.
But what I mean is that that time it was, it was pretty brave what you guys were doing, are doing.
Yeah.
Whereas now no one even cares.
So it's not as brave.
That's the thing.
And I'm saying that to put some context for some of your readers who might, or listeners who, who, you know, might not have been around at the time to understand what the atmosphere was like.
So it's not surprising that people got skittish that, you know, Eric and Justin had to make big decisions when they hired the lawyer, when they went public with all of this, because, you know, it was like being on the edge.
Another thing that I failed to mention was the FBI noted that Justin had the temerity to go on MSNBC and talk out against the war.
Like they were using that as a, a sort of talking point or a, a data point rather in why he, he, he might be suspect.
And today you're thinking, geez, anybody can go on TV, have a podcast on social media and say whatever they want.
And typically it's particularly about the war and nobody's going to blink an eye.
I've been here, you know, these were weird times.
And for him to draw attention just because he went on MSNBC to talk about how he, you know, he being critical of the war policy, you know.
Yeah.
That's some J Edgar Hoover stuff.
I mean, you gotta, you gotta rewind it back to the event, right?
Some federal agent is watching TV and goes, what, who's this guy Jenkins get on the case of this Raimondo character and, and pursued that out of seeing him on MS, which is Microsoft NBC, the most established network in America.
Yeah.
And it's, it's pretty, and you know what, it just, as an aside, the fact that they had Justin on MSNBC back in the day, I think is pretty cool.
Yeah.
Not sure how he slipped through the cracks that one time, but.
Yeah.
But they would never have somebody like Justin on today because they are so establishment, they are so Democrat.
And, you know, unless, you know, and if Obama or another Democrat, you know, another Democrat gets in the white house, there'll be pro war within two seconds.
So.
Well, and you know, they did, they fired Donahue and Jesse Ventura and I just read and I cannot, I swear I used to be Mr. Footnote, but I'm totally losing my memory.
But I just saw the other day a thing about somebody was talking about their dad was the guy who had hired Jesse Ventura at MSNBC and they both got fired.
He got fired for hiring Jesse Ventura.
So yeah, they were pretty hawkish themselves in that time, but yeah.
Well, just think about it, Scott.
I mean, who was the president at the time when Justin was on there, it was George W. Bush.
So it just, you know, they're, they're, they're as hypocritical as any other corporate elite.
Right.
Well, but I mean, that was during the Bush times too.
I mean, Donahue was the most anti-war guy.
I mean, both of those guys were anti-war and they both got fired.
They both, I think Donahue's show lasted a couple of months.
I think Jesse Ventura's show lasted one or two episodes before they got rid of him.
Cause especially cause he's a Navy SEAL and has that deep baritone and stands six and a half feet tall and everything.
So he makes a really great spokesman for an anti-war position.
Nobody's calling him some liberal or some coward.
He's just here to tell you why not to believe what they say.
That's pretty powerful.
They weren't willing to mess with that at all.
Right.
Totally.
Hey man.
So one time I was driving down the road and I was listening to the Rush Limbaugh show.
It would have been say 1996 probably.
And, uh, the caller says, Hey, Rush Limbaugh, you got to read the New York times from October the 28th, 1993, because in there it's a story about the world trade center and how the FBI could have stopped the attack and then they cut him off.
And so I happened to be on my way to school and went to the library and pulled out the microfiche, true story.
And there's this story and it's by Ralph Blumenthal and it's all about how of course, uh, Ahmed Salem was the FBI informant inside the terrorist ring, but they essentially, you know, wouldn't pay him the 500 bucks a week.
He wanted to be the informant.
So he backed out, he was going to build a fake bomb, but he backed out of the plot and was replaced by Ramzi Youssef, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew who went ahead and blew up the truck bomb in the basement there, which almost succeeded in toppling one tower over into the other in the late afternoon, uh, on October 27th, 1993.
So, um, I went to look that up and, and there it was.
Yeah.
All about the FBI agents saying, yeah, I know.
Sorry we couldn't help and confirming the whole story and everything.
But while I was looking through the microfiche, I also saw the obituary for Sidney Gottlieb.
And I read it and there it was.
This was the guy that tortured Americans to death trying to do his mind control experiments right there in the New York times, October 28th, 1993.
And, uh, so you have this great article as a pretty big segue, right?
I love it.
So here's this article.
I love bringing up that story.
It's an important one.
I love that.
And I love the fact that you went right to the library and got on the microfiche.
I mean, I was on my way there, honestly, but still.
Yeah.
You're cool.
Um, so, uh, yeah, Stanley Gottlieb, he tortured people to death trying to control their brains and you have this great article.
Uh, it's reviewing Stephen Kinzer's new book, uh, the, uh, American empire's doctor death is the name of the article here.
Poisoner in chief is the title of Kinzer's new book.
So tell us all about this here.
Well, I mean, uh, Stephen Kinzer, um, he's a journalist of some renown and he has pulled together this wonderful, um, book about, uh, Sidney Gottlieb who you just mentioned and the CIA search for mind control.
And he's taken a lot of, um, existing information, data reports, interviews, and, and, and, and got some additional fresh interviews and some more declassified information and brought what we, you know, have already known about these mind control experiments in the fifties and sixties up to speed.
And I have to say it was probably one of the most depressing books I've ever read in a long time.
And mostly because, you know, as somebody who is fully aware and not naive about what the government does in my name, uh, it, it reaffirmed a lot of my suspicions and a lot of my, um, you know, just, you know, just a lot of my anger with the government and its arrogance and its immorality in, in, in, and unethical behavior over the last several decades in the, in the name of the cold war and, you know, American primacy across the globe.
And, you know, basically it starts with world war two and there was this, towards the end of the war where the Americans and the British were really concerned that the Japanese and the Germans were developing a germ, a biological warfare program and that they needed to get up to speed.
So we built our own germ warfare program at the super secret camp Dietrich in Maryland.
And after the war, and in which we created a ton of anthrax, by the way, and we're just about to use it when the war ended.
Well, the program never ended.
And this is where, this is really the origin story for the military industrial complex in which you had tons of scientists and soldiers and, and you sort of managers and, you know, who had been fully involved in the development of this program.
Entrenched in building this war machine and didn't really know what to do with themselves after.
So basically the cold war was created in a sense to keep this war machine going.
And this is, and this is probably one of the most frightening aspects of that because our biological weapons program never ended.
It just continued at Fort Dietrich and it was, infused with a lot of Nazi scientists and doctors who were literally brought to this country.
Instead of being sent to prison, they were there by their bios were scrubbed by the CIA.
They were brought under this program called operation paperclip.
Many of them were associated with the, with Nazi human experiments as well as, with Nazi human experiments at the concentration camps that we know of.
This was all done on a super secret basis because Truman had ordered that no one who was involved in those experiments that were connected with a third Reich could come over here, but they did it anyway.
And so you start to see how this sort of you know, the subculture within the intelligence community started operating, you know, sort of rogue in a way, but justifying it because they felt that national security was at stake.
And so the, the ends justified the means.
And this is a common theme for decades to come in the cold war, but it's no, it's, it's, it's, it's not, it's so evident and so you know, I don't know what the word is, but the fact that we were bringing Nazis in here, the hypocrisy, the immorality of it, you know, we were on one hand, we had a popular culture that was, you know, you know, talking about our righteousness and virtue and bringing Nazis to justice in Nuremberg.
And at this subterranean level, we were literally bringing them over as guests and, and settling them in suburbia and comfortable environs, you know, so they could give us all of their secrets.
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Yeah, the limited hangout there as well, Vernon Von Braun helped us with our rocket program, right?
But they don't mention Reinhard Galen and all of the spies in Europe.
And they don't mention, oh yeah, we brought their mind control experts to come and practice torturing Americans for us.
That's what they did.
You know, what they did was they brought these guys over and if they couldn't bring them over, like I mentioned Kurt Blum, who they really wanted because he did all these experiments on prisoners with, you know, with germs and viruses and, you know, the plague.
You know, he literally infected people with the plague at Auschwitz and other facilities during the war.
They wanted to bring that guy in, but he was so toxic that they couldn't get him in.
So what they did was they installed him at one of their camps in Germany called Camp King, and they allowed him to experiment on prisoners there.
And he was able to do things that we weren't able to do here legally in the United States.
Same goes with this guy Hiro Hishi, who's a Japanese scientist.
You know, the fact that the author, Kinzer, had to say, read the following, you know, paragraphs with caution because the experiments that he performed on men, women, and children, Chinese in Manchuria, are something out of, like, the movie Saw.
You know, I mean, it's unbelievable, Scott.
And I almost want to cry right now.
It's so bad.
We actually went and courted this guy to get all of his records, you know, because he literally had tissue samples from people whose organs were taken out of their body while they were still living so they could get the best samples, you know, the freshest samples.
And he had all these little tissue samples, and he turned them all over to American scientists.
And they were all delighted.
Talk about a freaking moral bubble that these people were in.
They were so delighted to get all of his tissue samples so they can learn how all these dastardly things happen and how the body reacts to different viruses and shrapnel and electricity and all this stuff.
And they allowed him to continue his experiments in East Asia.
So, I mean, this is just the first quarter of the book.
And, you know, to get to the mind control stuff.
So all of this sort of evolved, and they realized, and this is under the guidance of Alan Dulles, who became the CIA director, the new CIA director, who said, well, we hear that the Germans and the Russians, particularly the Russians and the North Koreans, are working on mind control experiments.
They're working to find out if they can brainwash people so they can serve as soldiers or they can be basically debilitated or put in a situation that serves as some sort of truth serum so they can tell you your secrets.
There is a mind control gap, and we've got to go out there and we've got to do all of these brainwashing experiments.
So they hired Sidney Gottlieb, who is a chemist, to come in.
He's totally psyched about this idea that they could find this perfect drug that could just destabilize a human being and do whatever they say.
And that was the germ no pundit attended that started it all.
So they put him in charge of a super secret program in which he was able to just create these conditions where they just tested drug upon drug upon drug on prisoners, unwitting Americans, the detainees overseas that they were bringing in after the war.
And those poor guys, they would torture them with all sorts of drugs and electroshock and everything, and then they would just bring them out and kill them out in the back.
The people in America, the United States that they tested on, were usually prisoners who couldn't, you know, they had no choice, or they were unwitting, like, saps who just happened to walk into a situation, got dosed with some drugs, and then the CIA followed them around and monitored how they were reacting.
And this went on for almost 20 years.
And it's just, it blows your mind, again, no pun intended, that the government, these guys were given so much unchecked power under the rubric of national security.
Yeah, this is one of the, as you said, this is one of the things that it helps define your understanding of who the U.S. government is.
These heroes who won World War II who turned right around and started doing biological warfare experiments on their own population in the name of protecting them.
You know, the one that always got me about the MKUltra was sensory deprivation to death.
That seemed to be a theme.
Everything was to death.
That's locked me in a hot car for an afternoon or something, man.
But how long does it take to kill somebody by simply depriving them of any sensory input?
I guess somehow, what, they just feed them through a hole in their stomach or something so they can't enjoy taste even?
Right.
And, you know, Scott, every story that is included in this book, you go, who was around to say maybe that's enough?
Whether it was the amount of LSD that they were dosing people, the sensory deprivation, the electric shock, the other drugs, no one was there to say, hey, I think we're going too far.
It was always like, can we do more?
There's this creepy line in the book, and I wish I could find it, where Gottlieb, you know, the author says, Stanley Gottlieb wanted to find out at what point, you know, at what level of LSD would the brain dissolve?
I'm reading this, and I had to put the book down for a second because I'm like, holy shit.
That's a lot of acid.
Yeah, this guy, he is a civil servant.
He is working for us, and he wants to know at what level the brain dissolves.
He did not care if some, you know, another line.
Go ahead.
Well, this part made me cry.
There was this guy in Paris.
He was an art student.
I think the CIA got wind of him because he had hepatitis and had been treated for it in Paris like a few weeks or months before, and they somehow got this idea that people who had hepatitis would be more susceptible to the effects of LSD.
So this poor sap had hepatitis, was, you know, had been treated for it.
He's there.
He's a bright, you know, promising art student.
He's sitting in a cafe, and this guy he knows, and it doesn't sound like he really liked him particularly, but he was an acquaintance, said, hey, come on over.
I'll buy you a cup of coffee.
I want you to meet a couple of dudes.
He gets over there, and he notices guys are in, like, you know, flannel gray suits.
They look different from the other Parisians.
He sits around.
They get in an argument over politics.
He gets up to leave, and one of the guys says, oh, let me buy you a drink just to show there's no hard feelings.
Gets him a drink, of course, slips him a Mickey.
He says that's the line in the book was that was his last hour of productive life.
They dosed this guy, and then when he tried to make his way into a hospital, the hospital already had an arrangement with these CIA guys.
They managed to dose him some more.
They gave him electric shock.
God knows what else they did to him, and then he never lived a normal life again, and he was only, like, 24.
He lived his life.
He went back to New York.
He never got married, lived with dogs, couldn't have a job.
I mean, I just wanted to cry, and there was just no feeling of remorse, regret, some sort of moral responsibility, and this wasn't the only story in the book.
It's just the one that really affected me, I think.
Well, you know, there's another one speaking of France, or I don't know if this one's in the book or not, where they dosed this whole village, and then they blamed it on moldy bread or something, but there were all kinds of consequences for the people of this small French village who all went crazy for a day or two.
There was all sorts of testing like that where they just felt like, well, we don't have to tell anybody.
There was a passage in the book about how they were testing this germ and to see if they put it in this particular aerosol and sprayed it over the bay in San Francisco.
They dyed it red so they would see how it was diffusing.
They didn't tell the local authorities or anything.
They engaged the military to do it, and they just basically sprayed this whole town with a low-level germ, and a couple people died.
They had some respiratory issues, and the doctors were really flummoxed because they're finding this redness, these red particles in the autopsies, and it wasn't until years later that it came out that it was actually a military test on a biological worker.
I've read about that one before.
There's something marcescens is the name of the germ I think you're talking about.
Does that sound right?
I think so.
I think so.
The part I had heard about that was that in the San Francisco Bay Area to this day there are higher infections of that germ than anywhere else.
Does he say that in there?
It's just I can't wrap my mind around it.
Does Kinzer talk about that, that that infection is still prominent?
No.
No?
He doesn't, and if that's the same case, which it sounds like it is, no, he didn't update it.
I don't remember my source for that anymore.
I'd have to go back and look, but it's implausible at least.
It's going on all the time.
They drove around New York City with fake exhaust pipes essentially pumping out germs.
Then you have the safe houses that they established where they got infiltrated, the whole hippie community, and had prostitutes and ne'er-do-wells.
That's where Ken Kesey started stealing acid and giving it to the hippies.
Yeah, and they'd shanghai these poor schleps.
They'd find on the street, hey, you want to go to a party?
They'd go to a party, and then they'd get all dosed, and they didn't know what happened to them.
Meanwhile, the CIA is looking through these two-way mirrors and recording everything.
This went on for years.
What they'd do is they'd promise the prostitutes heroin to get people in there.
You can't even make this stuff up.
Is Ted Kaczynski in there?
He is not in here, but I noticed in the comments on my story that I guess that he might have been part of one of these experiments at one point.
I think so.
What I had read about that was that the experiment that he was in, which he had not volunteered for in any specific way, was they gave him a huge dose of acid, and then they sat there and berated him and told him he was scum and his father hated him and whatever they could to just completely tear his personality down in the most Marine Corps drill sergeant, full metal jacket kind of a way that they possibly could to just destroy him.
So he turned into Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, after that.
Well, that's what they did.
They were trying to see if they would use the drug and then put them in different circumstances.
On the lighter note, they were trying to figure out what the nexus was between sex and LSD.
So they had all these prostitutes bring these guys in, and with the idea that they dose them, they use them as sort of in a honeypot situation so that these guys would just spill all their trade secrets.
They figured the sex with the LSD would loosen their tongues kind of thing, and so they studied that ad nauseum, which makes you wonder about Gottlieb and these other guys.
They were just these voyeurs who would sit on the other side of the wall watching this stuff, but we don't want to go there.
But then the more darker situation is when they would dose these prisoners or people like Ted Kaczynski, supposedly, where they would put them in situations where they would harangue them or they would give them a bigger amount every day over the period of like two months, so they'd be dosed every day consistently to see if they would talk or if they could be controlled, hypnotized, or they would dose them and then put them into some sensory deprivation situation.
I mean, it was hard core, and when you hear what they did to prisoners, so there was this prison facility in Kentucky that I wrote about where it supposedly was an addiction center, but it was really like a prison, and it was mostly African-American prisoners who really are the most vulnerable of the society, so they had nobody to complain to when this doctor, the head doctor, got all sorts of money from Gottlieb to do these experiments, and a lot of them were addicted souls, so they would be promised, oh, if you do this experiment with us, we'll give you high-grade heroin at the end of it.
People talk about there's so much conspiracy theory in the black community.
Yeah, I wonder what's at the core of that.
What have they ever been through that would tend to support the idea that maybe there's security forces and all it's cracked up to be?
Right, exactly, and this is one of the things that kept coming back to me while I was reading it is we know we have schizophrenia in this society, and it's terrible, and one of the trademarks of schizophrenia is people walk around and say, oh, the government's listening to me, the government's testing me, they put implants into my head or whatever.
Well, you read this book, and you realize that the CIA was actually doing a lot of this stuff.
Yeah, some of those people weren't crazy.
It was really true.
Whitey Bulger, I don't know if you know that story.
No, go ahead.
He was actually one of the people who were tested on in prison in Atlanta.
There was this Atlanta prison that was also notorious for getting all sorts of these MKUltra contracts, and he was in prison at the time, and he agreed to do the experiments because it would give him time served or credits for good behavior, I forget which.
And so he did them, but they didn't tell them.
They said, you will be engaging in an experiment with the idea that we're testing new drugs to help people with mental illness.
He's like, okay, whatever, if it's going to get me out of here sooner.
But they didn't tell them what they were giving them, and basically he was being dosed with a greater amount of LSD every day for several weeks, and he was hallucinating and freaking out and having nightmares, but he didn't tell anybody because he thought if he spoke out, they would think he was crazy and then commit him for the rest of his life.
So he just endured it, and this one, I think it went on for months.
I don't know how you sleep on acid either, I mean, at all.
It wasn't until all this news about MKUltra started coming out in the late 70s that he realized, oh, that's what happened to me.
I mean, he's got his own baggage, but it's funny how this was so widespread is what I'm trying to get at.
And by the way, we should not discourage people from trying a little bit of acid in the right circumstances, but just don't let the government torture you with it, that's all.
There's a whole chapter in here about mushrooms and how there were a couple hippies that had gone down to Mexico and they literally found the magic mushroom.
They were mushroom lovers, they were spiritualists.
They go down, they find the magic mushroom, and of course they write about it, and then everybody goes down to this poor village and exploits the whole thing.
Sidney Gottlieb sees it in a magazine, he's like, we're going down to Mexico.
And they go and they get all these mushrooms, and then they were able to recreate the mushrooms.
And I mean, these guys were on a mission, and they justified everything.
Did you know if he ever took acid or ate mushrooms himself?
He sure did.
That's another whole other thread of this story.
Because it seems like then maybe he would have started giggling and started thinking that, man, maybe what I'm doing is crazy or something.
Because that's what acid is good for, it helps you to wise up, you know?
You would think so, it would help you to wise up, it might make you more compassionate about your fellow man.
But it seemed to have the opposite effect.
They enjoyed it, and he giggled and danced around, and he and his buddies in the CIA would test it, because this is all about national security, this is our mission in the Cold War.
And it seemed to me that they actually enjoyed the effects.
It's just that they weren't reflective enough to say, well, this is something that we don't want to use as a weapon or to exploit people.
This gave them more impetus to go out and find how they could use it as a weapon against other people.
Which, by the way, I mean, that's the whole thing, right?
And this was Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and all that.
They were like, these stupid idiots in their flannel suits, as you put it, what do they know about anything?
Acid is for setting people free with.
It's not a mind control drug.
Yeah, they lost, yeah.
And then so, although, you know, who knows under what circumstances, you know, of electroshock and brainwashing and sensory deprivation, and I don't know.
But so then the question is, did any of this ever work as far as creating, you know, mind control assassins to shoot Ronald Reagan or Bobby Kennedy or anybody?
I mean, or anything like that?
As far as this book goes, and as far as the available information we have, the answer is no.
And Sidney Gottlieb himself, by the end of his career, had pretty much soured on the idea that LSD was the magic drug that was going to afford the United States to, you know, brainwash, build super soldiers, whatever.
He just, you know, but it took almost it took over 15 years of experimenting on other human beings for him to come to that conclusion.
So he shifted, and this is another thread in the book that I really didn't get to, I couldn't get to that much in my piece, but he shifted to poisons.
And he was the chief.
That's the title of Kinzer's book is, you know, Poisoner in Chief was because he was able as a chemist to come up with all sorts of poisons that they would the CIA was using in hopes of being able to assassinate people.
They were poisons that they gave people like spies when they went into other countries that if they got caught, they could take in all sorts of ways to deliver the poison, you know, poison, lipstick, syringes, canisters of shaving cream.
It was, you know, so he was he was working on poisons, and then he was working on gadgets.
And that's like, you know, that is probably the Sidney Godley that is the easiest to stomach is the one that towards the end of the career, he was like Inspector Gadget.
He, you know, he was like Q and James Bond movies, he was creating all of these things of, you know, all sorts of spy craft, you know, tools.
And so it was probably the high points when you go to the spy museum, you know, the milk, the whitewash spy museum in Washington, which, you know, it's going to be all about those kind of things.
You know, there's the spy versus spy with all their tools and gadgets.
You know, Sidney Godley was responsible for all that he led the program.
It's just this darker period right before is what is important to us.
And when and I don't know if we have time, but the creepiest part of the book, I mean, there's so many creepy parts.
But the creepiest element is Godly himself, because he when he retired, he went on some period of redemption and quote unquote, renewal, trying to cleanse himself of all of these sins in which he and his wife went in the weirdest that he and his wife lived like they were hippies through this entire period, like he he was so able to compartmentalize his life.
You know, he he was a sort of had this Zen Buddhist kind of thing going on and got into folk dancing and had goats and no electricity, yada, yada.
But after his retirement, they went to India and started working with lepers.
And he just thought he, I guess, reinvent himself in his twilight years until all this stuff started coming out.
And he was dragged back to Washington for a series of hearings about MK Ultra and the experiments.
And, you know, he was able with a good lawyer.
And, you know, his you know, he had a temperament in which he just refused to answer questions.
I forget.
I don't know.
I don't remember.
And he was never charged with any crime.
But the weirdest thing is this this psychological, this compartmentalization where he was able to live to Sydney Godly's, you know, that it is quite scary that somebody he could he never came to terms of.
Of his horrible, horrible activities in that period.
And if you people did ask him about it and he would act as though I did what I did for my country.
Fine.
That's his final word on it.
So the very interesting character, but very frightening nonetheless.
Yeah.
People are always confusing their government with their country, aren't they?
Yeah.
And that goes with the other guys, too.
Alan Dulles, Richard Helms, all of these figures, these these greatest generation figures who started in the biological weapons program through the mind control experiments, through the poisoning assassination programs, never faced any consequences for what they did, which should make everybody a little bit terrified.
You know, as an American, that these things go on and there's no accountability because the bureaucracy is so huge and they've wrapped themselves in this justification of national security.
Well, that's the thing.
By the time they admit it, it's sort of, you know, there's a show about it on A&E and they're like, yeah, we tested some germs on your grandma, but she's dead anyway.
And so who cares?
You know, they just it doesn't matter.
It just becomes a part of the official lore of America where everybody knows that.
But by the time everybody knows it, it's too late for anyone to really care about it as anything other than a curiosity or a footnote or an interesting sort of topic to discuss, but not anything anyone can do anything about.
Right.
The time was that was that late 70s period when all this was coming out and there was the church hearings, a church commission hearings and all these reforms at the CIA.
And people were outraged at the time.
MKUltra was huge.
People like, holy mac, this is happening.
And all these people started coming to the CIA going, I think I was one of the victims.
You know, it was a big deal.
And that was the moment, the window of opportunity to bring him to justice and others to justice.
And by the way, he destroyed all the records, all but all by a few thousand of them.
But the majority of the records that would have proven all this and it would have made up such a difference and possible convictions he destroyed.
This is pretty big.
And there's just there's a lot to it.
I would suggest to your listeners to get the book because there's just there's so much that we can't even get to on this show.
Yeah.
Well, I was just going to say, I'm so glad you read this thing because I am not going to have the time to do it.
But this has really been great hearing, you know, what you got out of it.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
I mean, I can't say I was happy to do it because, like I said, it was quite a depressing read.
But I'm glad I did it because I like to I like to reaffirm, you know, what I what I know our government is capable of doing.
Because once you start relaxing and you let government kind of do its thing and we get that dumb and happy as Americans in our brave new world, you know, you lose sight of these things.
Yeah.
Well, it's not just that it's that it matters that here there's this important article at the American Conservative Magazine by the executive editor giving, you know, in-depth attention, I guess, to a very important book by a very important author and not saying, oh, isn't this interesting, but pointing out just exactly how important this is and and how terrible it is that that accountability was never applied in this country.
So that itself is something it's its own story.
Your your writing about this is its own event, in a sense, and is important in that way.
You know what I mean?
I agree.
And I'm not tooting my own horn, but I see what you're saying.
The lens through which I wrote it was that this is an outrage.
This is this is moral corruption on the highest degree, where some people who have covered this issue like MK Ultra, it's more been like sort of a circus thing, like, oh, my God, the CIA was tripping people.
Isn't that weird?
Isn't that crazy?
You know, and it's more like it or it's the timepiece, like, oh, goodness, look what they did back in the 60s.
You know, whereas I'm saying that this is something we got to know about now.
So and I don't care how many times we have to revisit it, because it will happen again.
I have no doubt in my mind after reading this book that we can't trust any era of government, because if you can't trust the greatest Americans who saw all the travesties and atrocities of the Nazi regime and turned around and thought the best thing to do was to copycat them, how do we trust anybody in our government ever?
That's what I'm saying.
Thank you, Kelly.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org, antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot US.
