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Recruiting Timothy Leary for the War on Terror

Posted by Paul Brennan in Main

October 12, 2006 9:10 AM

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Over at TPMmuckraker.com, Justin Rood is shouting "Hey Mabel!"

Old-fashioned journalists have a term for bizarre, interesting and/or disturbing little articles -- "Hey Mabel" stories, they call them. And the New York Sun's Josh Gerstein had a doozy of a "Hey Mabel" in yesterday's paper.

In a new court filing on behalf of alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla, his lawyers allege that government interrogators forced him to take LSD, Gerstein reported.

"Additionally, Padilla was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations," he quotes the filing.

Now, There are some important details that aren't explained: Padilla's lawyers don't say what effects the prisoner reported to make them conclude it was LSD or PCP, nor do they report how many times such a drug or drugs were administered. And as any self-respecting child of the D.A.R.E era knows, LSD and PCP typically produce wildly different behavior (neither of which is particularly helpful if you're trying to get information out of someone).

Still -- if their charge is accurate, it's disturbing and bizarre. Of course, the U.S. government pioneered research into LSD in particular in the 1950s and 60s. CIA officers even tested the drug by surreptitiously dosing each other, leading at least one acid-tripping spook to run in a paranoid frenzy through Washington D.C. and over a bridge into Virginia, where his co-workers later found him cowering under a fountain.

But through experiences like this, the government concluded the drug was worthless as an interrogation tool, a means to "flip" Communist agents, or anything else their Cold War minds had feverishly dreamed possible. Is it possible that they're experimenting with mind drugs again? That sounds completely outlandish. But when you look at history, and then look at the Padilla filing, it's hard to rule out.


We knew the Bush administration's policies have a strong hallucinatory element, now we need to know if hallucinogens are part of its policies as well.

 

Comments (1)

  1. The Blotter » Spook-Hunting says:
    October 18, 2006 13:10

    [...] Here at the CIA we're not afraid to get our hands dirty - as long as we're wearing scary black gloves so as to leave no prints, of course! When you're not running guns and drugs to various exotic locales, intimidating former CIA contractors or helping assassinate iconic Argentinian-born revolutionaries with monosyllabic names, you might even get to try and influence U.S. foreign policy. And don't worry; if the White House or the President himself doesn't listen to your legitimate warnings about imminent terrorist threats to America, or how Saddam didn't have WMDs, you can always kick back by waterboarding prisoners in one of our numerous secret prisons scattered across the globe. Did I mention we even give out LSD? Recently our West Coast recruiter Mike Mau, during an Oct. 17 recruitment seminar at Cal State Fullerton, described our situation like this: [...]

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