I've got dozens of books on how the government (during the 1950s) used brainwashing and mind control to get people to comply with orders. Most of the techniques included sleep deprivation, drugs and chemicals, food deprivation, social control, extreme temperatures, and other things which resulted in hallucinations, fear, compliance, body changes (including sensory changes like sound, taste, vision), and numerous other effects. I've done enough research to know that what happened in the 50s was legit and really happened. However, I'm curious if it's still being done today, just under different terms. Knowing what we know now, isn't "TORTURE" in Guantanamo Bay almost technically the same thing as brainwashing/mind controlling someone in a governmental situation? Just curious. I've got this 6-hour documentary called "The Sleep Room" which explains brainwashing in great detail. Has anyone seen this?

Thought I'd share a few excerpts from a book: "A Question of Torture By Alfred W. McCoy" ISBN: 0-805-8041-4, Published By: Henry Holt and Company, LLC Pages 39-40 A team of four Harvard University psychiatrists conducted a similar but larger experiment in 1957 that the CIA found promising, though still limited. Although these researchers cited concern for polio patients as the project’s justification, their experiment, like many, was funded by the ONR’s covert behavioral program (Nonr 1866 [29]). And even they admitted the findings were relevant to “brainwashing.” Instead of immersion in water, this test’s seventeen paid volunteers were “placed in a tank-type respirator with a specially built mattress” arranged “to inhibit movement and tactile contact.” To create an atmosphere of sensory monotony, the respirator’s motor ran constantly for “a dull, repetitive auditory stimulus” and low “artificial light was minimal and constant.” After seventeen hours, one subject, a twenty-five-year-old dental student, “began to punch and shake the respirator,” his “eyes full of tears, and his voice shaking,” as he struggled in vain to break out of the iron lung until an attendant released him. At least four volunteers terminated from “anxiety and panic,” and only five subjects remained for the experiment’s full thirty-six hours. Among the seventeen subjects, half had hallucinations and all suffered “degrees of anxiety.” Apparently addressing their covert patrons, the Harvard psychiatrists concluded that “sensory deprivation can produce major mental and behavioral changes in man,” and recommended its capacity to induce psychosis as “more ‘natural’ than pharmacological and physical methods currently used” – not, of course, in polio treatment, but if we can finish their sentence, in CIA torture. In the words of the agency’s later interrogation manual, this Harvard study “confirmed earlier findings” that: 1. the deprivation of sensory stimuli induces stress; 2. the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects; 3. the subject has a growing need for physical and social stimuli; and 4. some subjects progressively lose touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations, and other pathological effects. Page 42-43 A respected researcher and past president of the American Psychiatric Association, [Dr. Ewen] Cameron claimed, in scientific papers, that he had duplicated “the extraordinary political conversions… in the iron curtain countries, “ in one case “using sleeplessness, disinhibiting agents [drugs], and hypnosis.”…. As Cameron explained in the American Journal of Psychiatry, he had used “an adaptation of Hebb’s psychological isolation” by bombarding patients with endless repetitions of taped messages about parental rejections or incestuous longings while they were in drug-induced “clinical coma,” or in “hypnosis under stimulus drugs” such as LSD. The combined effect produced a state “analogous to… the breakdown of the individual under continuous interrogation.”

I haven't seen "The Sleep Room", but I have read a great deal about MK Ultra and seen several specials on it. Most files related to MK Ultra have been destroyed, but enough has survived that Freedom of Information Act requests have proved that it existed and was very real. Your description of what was involved sounds accurate. As I understand it, the program was designed to learn about what worked and what didn't work for controlling people. The methods were often brutal. Who knows what the government has been doing since MK Ultra shut down. I doubt the field was utterly abandoned, although I think they realized that "mind control" is a nebulous word. You can control people's behaviors through social norming and mass media more easily than through brutal techniques, and brutal techniques can produce backlashes that get ugly. People don't like to be forced to do anything. They like to be persuaded. It's an important difference. Thanks for bringing this up. I don't believe we've ever talked about MK Ultra on Inraptured before.

Sleep deprivation up to 11 days was still in use by the CIA recently: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-interrogate10-2009may10,0,4934919,full.story Darius Rejali's "Democracy and Torture" had a chapter on phamarcological interrogation (you can probably preview a bit of it at Google Books or something), and he notes that fell off in popularity in the 70s/80s--not just by the CIA (which could be explained by the CIA just learning to be sneakier about it) but across the world, everywhere from the KGB to banana republics. Part of that is that the capabilities of drug-based torture never managed to meet expectations. Yes, you can screw with people's heads, but that actually tends to make the things coming out of their mouths less likely to true, not more. But that's not the whole story, because that's the case with all torture--none of the various techniques for torturing people actually have a good track record for interrogating people if you're interested in the truth rather than false confessions. So your intuition that mind control and torture are basically equivalent is true on several levels (and I should hope that here, of all places, people would understand that both are the moral equivalent of wartime rape). Rejali's thesis is that pressure from external monitors--the domestic press in democracies, or human rights NGOs in dictatorships--has forced governments to find undetectable methods of torture. Drug-based torture fell off in popularity because drug detection has become more advanced, and torturers were afraid that they would be found out. Sleep deprivation, though, doesn't really leave any physical or chemical marks, so all that prevents its use is our own moral scruple, should we happen to have any.

My wifey says your permanent press file design is a lot like what the government uses on people. For the record I am stating that my so has had experience with MK ultra or other aspects of mental control that is used by certain parts of the government.

Amazing info that has been left behind.

Much of the CIA/OSS work on MKULTRA was actually done in Canada and the "ego-driving" process developed there, while very damaging to the subjects, was still NOT successful in creating the "perfect spy" and the "perfect secrecy method," which was the primary task of the program - to create a spy and/or assassin who would not even consciously be aware of the mission until a trigger was given and they would prosecute said mission. At the mission's conclusion, the spy would then completely forget everything that happened. This was also to be applied to people involved in secret projects, couriers and others so that torture and other interrogation methods would not be successful.

The project, as far as reaching those goals, was completely unsuccessful. Unfortunately, the fallout from those programs in the forms of the people used in the testing of various methods and who were damaged by those methods are still with us today.

However, under the current laws of the United States, including the Uniform Code of Military Conduct, such attempts at mind-control are completely illegal.

So, if someone comes to you and says they are a victim of a government brainwashing program and they are under 55 years of age, look at their claims with great skepticism.

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