Winnipeg woman brainwashed in Montreal psychiatric hospital hopes new year brings new compensation

 – What were called “depatterning experiments” later became an international scandal when it was revealed Cameron was covertly funded by the CIA as part of their MKUltra mind-control program.

– Cameron believed in using sleep deprivation, electroshock treatments and hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD to “depattern” the mind and wipe out mental illness.

– Compensation in the ’90s

In 1992, about 77 of Cameron’s former patients were given $100,000 by the federal government. 

Winnipeg woman brainwashed in Montreal psychiatric hospital hopes new year brings new compensation 

Lana Ponting hopes Montreal class action lawsuit will be certified this year
Kristin Annable · CBC News · Posted: Jan 02, 2020

Lana Ponting was just 16 when she was given LSD and methamphetamine in a series of brainwashing experiments by a world-renowned psychiatrist in 1958.

“I didn’t even know half the time who I was,” Ponting said. “It was almost like a jail. It was horrible.”

The 78-year-old Winnipegger spent a month at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal under the care of Dr. Ewen Cameron.

Medical records say Ponting was fed a cocktail of drugs that also included barbiturates and anti-psychotics used to “explore” her. She was tied up and fed the drugs while doctors observed her behaviour and reactions.

What were called “depatterning experiments” later became an international scandal when it was revealed Cameron was covertly funded by the CIA as part of their MKUltra mind-control program.

But it wasn’t just the CIA who funded Cameron. Canada’s federal government provided Cameron with more than $500,000 between 1950 and 1965 — $4 million in today’s dollars.

Ponting has never been financially compensated for her experience and 62 years later, she wants an apology from Ottawa.

“And I do want compensation because I think mentally and physically, I suffered a lot,” she said.

Class action seeks compensation

Ponting hopes compensation will come if a Montreal-based class-action application is certified this year.

The application was filed in January 2019 in Quebec’s Superior Court on behalf of anyone who underwent Cameron’s “depatterning treatment” at the institute between 1948 and 1964.

The lawsuit also would include anyone whose family member or dependant underwent depatterning at the institute.

Lawyers on the case believe there could be hundreds of potential class members….

Cameron believed in using sleep deprivation, electroshock treatments and hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD to “depattern” the mind and wipe out mental illness.

However, it was later reported that his methods had lasting impacts on patients, sometimes erasing his patient’s memories…..

Compensation in the ’90s

In 1992, about 77 of Cameron’s former patients were given $100,000 by the federal government. Hundreds more who applied for the compensation were rejected, because they needed to have proper medical records to prove they were tortured to a certain extent, and they needed to apply by a specific date.

Ponting said she never applied for the compensation because she wasn’t aware it was being offered…..

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/mkultra-allan-winnipeg-cameron-1.5410817

ACLU sues psychologists over CIA interrogation tactics, Rise in child abuse investigations linked to fears of witchcraft

ACLU sues psychologists over CIA interrogation tactics  
The Associated Press  ERIC TUCKER Oct 13th 2015

WASHINGTON (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday sued two former Air Force psychologists who designed a CIA program that used harsh interrogation techniques to elicit intelligence from suspected terrorists, saying the pair endorsed and taught torture tactics under the guise of science.

The lawsuit comes 10 months after the release of a damning Senate report that said the interrogation techniques had inflicted pain on al-Qaida prisoners far beyond the legal limits and did not yield lifesaving intelligence.

The suit accuses the psychologists, James E. Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, of developing an interrogation program that relied on beatings, sleep deprivation, starvation, waterboarding and other methods that caused physical and psychological suffering on prisoners in CIA custody….

The suit was filed in federal court in Washington state on behalf of three former CIA prisoners. One, Gul Rahman, was interrogated in a dungeon-like Afghanistan prison called the Salt Pit, subjected to isolation, darkness and extreme cold water, and was later found dead of hypothermia. The other two men, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, are now free.

The lawsuit was brought under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows noncitizens to sue in U.S. courts over human-rights violations. A 2010 Associated Press report, citing former U.S. officials, said the CIA promised to cover at least $5 million in legal fees for the psychologists if the program ran into trouble.

The suit repeats many of the allegations that surfaced in an exhaustive Senate investigation issued last year. It found sweeping flaws with the CIA’s approach to interrogations.

The complaint alleges that the psychologists, despite having no practical interrogation experience or specific background in al-Qaida, devised a program for the CIA that drew from 1960s experiments involving dogs and the theory of “learned helplessness.” In making their case to the CIA, the psychologists argued that just as abused dogs will become passive and compliant, humans subject to “uncontrollable pain” would “become helpless and unable to resist an interrogator’s demand for information,” according to the lawsuit.

The pair, who worked as independent contractors for the CIA, formed a company that was ultimately paid $81 million and which as of April 2007 directly employed 11 of the 13 interrogators used by the agency, the complaint states. The men were also themselves involved in some of the interrogations….
http://www.aol.com/article/2015/10/13/aclu-sues-psychologists-over-cia-interrogation-tactics/21248565/

Rise in child abuse investigations linked to fears of witchcraft
Ruth Gledhill Christian Today Contributing Editor 12 October 2015

Police are investigating increasing numbers of cases where children are being assaulted because of suspicions about witchcraft.
This year so far, 27 cases of ritual child abuse have or are still being investigated by the Metropolitan Police, including two allegations of rape. This compares to to 24 in 2013, 19 in 2012 and nine in 2011. There have ben 148 referrals to the Met since 2004….

Allegations included a child being swung around and smacked on the head to “drive out the devil” and youngsters being dunked in water, according to an investigation by the BBC.

Deaths linked to ritual child abuse include Kristy Bamu, 15, tortured and drowned by his sister and her boyfriend in 2010 and Victoria Climbie in 2000, whose aunt and boyfriend had believed she was possessed and who were found guilty of murder.

Det Supt Terry Sharpe said ritualistic abuse was a hidden crime.
“Abuse linked to belief is a horrific crime which is condemned by people of all cultures, communities and faiths. A number of high-profile investigations brought the issue of ritual abuse and witchcraft into the headlines, but it is important that professionals are clear about the signs to look for.”
Some families genuinely believed the victim had been taken over by the devil or an evil spirit, he said.
“Regardless of the beliefs of the abusers, child abuse is child abuse.”….
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/child.abuse.linked.to.witchcraft.on.the.rise/67340.htm

The CIA Didn’t Just Torture, It Experimented on Human Beings

The CIA Didn’t Just Torture, It Experimented on Human Beings

Reframing the CIA’s interrogation techniques as a violation of scientific and medical ethics may be the best way to achieve accountability.

Lisa Hajjar December 16, 2014

Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.

At the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed interrogation and detention protocols that they and others applied to people imprisoned in the agency’s secret “black sites.”

In its response to the Senate report, the CIA justified its decision to hire the duo: “We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program.” Mitchell and Jessen’s qualifications did not include interrogation experience, specialized knowledge about Al Qaeda or relevant cultural or linguistic knowledge. What they had was Air Force experience in studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as well as a curiosity about whether theories of “learned helplessness” derived from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies….

The “war on terror” is not the CIA’s first venture into human experimentation. At the dawn of the Cold War, German scientists and doctors with Nazi records of human experimentation were given new identities and brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip. During the Korean War, alarmed by the shocking rapidity of American POWs’ breakdowns and indoctrination by their communist captors, the CIA began investing in mind-control research. In 1953, the CIA established the MK-ULTRA program, whose earliest phase involved hypnosis, electroshock and hallucinogenic drugs. The program evolved into experiments in psychological torture that adapted elements of Soviet and Chinese models, including longtime standing, protracted isolation, sleep deprivation and humiliation. Those lessons soon became an applied “science” in the Cold War.

During the Vietnam War, the CIA developed the Phoenix program, which combined psychological torture with brutal interrogations, human experimentation and extrajudicial executions. In 1963, the CIA produced a manual titled “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation” to guide agents in the art of extracting information from “resistant” sources by combining techniques to produce “debility, disorientation and dread.” Like the communists, the CIA largely eschewed tactics that violently target the body in favor of those that target the mind by systematically attacking all human senses in order to produce the desired state of compliance. The Phoenix program model was incorporated into the curriculum of the School of the Americas, and an updated version of the Kubark guide, produced in 1983 and titled “Human Resource Exploitation Manual,” was disseminated to the intelligence services of right-wing regimes in Latin America and Southeast Asia during the global “war on communism.”

In the mid-1980s, CIA practices became the subject of congressional investigations into US-supported atrocities in Central America….
http://www.thenation.com/article/193185/cia-didnt-just-torture-it-experimented-human-beings#

CIA Torture Report: Chinese Communist Methods, Waterboarding, Sleep deprivation, Exposure to cold, Physical isolation, Sensory deprivation, Physical degradation

“They were interrogated using methods such as waterboarding, slapping, humiliation, exposure to cold, and sleep deprivation.”
“It described how two instructors from the Navy went to the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in 2002 to teach 24 guards there about methods used by Chinese communists during the Korean War, against American POWs.”

also:  Mind Control Documents & Links

Congress Clashes Over Release Of CIA Torture Report
December 08, 2014  Lauren Hodges

Leaders on Capitol Hill are at odds regarding a report on CIA methods — including torture — used to extract information in the so-called war on terror.

Chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has been fighting for the release of her 480-page executive summary of the report since April of this year, and it finally was scheduled for a reveal this week….

NPR’s Sam Sanders reported Sunday that “officials who’ve seen the report say it details sleep deprivation, confinement and waterboarding.”

On Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR’s Mara Liasson spoke with host Rachel Martin about the Obama administration’s view of the release.

“The administration supports releasing the report. And the State Department says Kerry told Feinstein that the timing of the release was her choice. But the administration is concerned about how the report would affect ongoing efforts against ISIS, the Islamic State terrorist group, and the safety of Americans who are being held hostage around the world. And it wants those issues to be taken into account.”….
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/07/369262235/congress-clashes-over-release-of-cia-torture-report

U.S. on alert for release of report on CIA’s use of torture
The Canadian Press By Alexander Panetta December 8, 2014

WASHINGTON – For months, there’s been a battle in the shadows of Washington over a report on torture by the CIA.

The covert conflict saw the CIA spy on Congress. Intelligence officials quietly argued against the report’s release, on the basis that it would endanger American lives. The White House eventually stepped in, mediating negotiations about what to include — and what to black out.

It’s being made public now.

A congressional committee that studied the use of torture during the Bush era is poised Tuesday to release a 480-page executive summary of its findings, a heavily scrutinized and edited synopsis of a broader 6,000-page document compiled by a Senate panel….

The CIA admitted to snooping on Senate staffers’ computers while they prepared the report. At first, the agency denied accusations of domestic espionage against the elected body. Eventually, it confessed and apologized, ascribing its actions to the belief that staffers were consulting unauthorized documents.

Still, that failed to mollify members of Congress. Several called for the CIA director’s resignation for what they described as a violation of the country’s basic democratic order….

The report into the CIA comes six years after the Senate released a study into the military — and offered a glimpse into how its interrogation techniques were developed after 9-11.

It described how two instructors from the Navy went to the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in 2002 to teach 24 guards there about methods used by Chinese communists during the Korean War, against American POWs.

The Chinese method came to be rebranded as Biderman’s Principles, after the academic who researched the Korean War practice. He boiled it down to an eight-step program: physical isolation, followed by sensory deprivation, exhaustion and discomfort, threats, occasional rewards, powerlessness, physical degradation, and the enforcement of arbitrary rules.

According to the 2008 Senate report, the Navy trainers handed out a chart on those coercive techniques to the personnel at Guantanamo Bay.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/u-braces-release-long-awaited-report-cias-torture-221653528.html

CIA torture report: US raises security ahead of release  8 December 2014
The report appears to conclude CIA officials lied about the programme to Bush administration officials….

The full 6,000-page report, produced by the Senate Intelligence Committee, remains classified.

The 480-page summary is being released by Democrats on the panel.

President Barack Obama halted the CIA interrogation programme when he took office in 2009, and has acknowledged that the methods used to question al-Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture.

During the presidency of George W Bush, the CIA operation against al-Qaeda – known internally as the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation – saw as many as 100 suspected terrorists held in “black sites” outside the US.

Analysis: Jon Sopel, BBC North America editor

What more can we learn about the CIA’s interrogation programme from this heavily redacted report? Based on leaks, Tuesday’s release seems to answer three major questions:

First. Were the interrogation methods – torture if you like – more extensive and more brutal than previously admitted? It looks like the conclusion is yes.

Second. Did these interrogation techniques deliver life-saving intelligence to the US? That answer appears to be no.

Third. Were CIA officials at the time honest with the White House on what the programme was getting up to? Again, no….

They were interrogated using methods such as waterboarding, slapping, humiliation, exposure to cold, and sleep deprivation….
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30383924

Sexual threats, other CIA methods detailed in Senate report
By Mark Hosenball and Jeff Mason   WASHINGTON Mon Dec 8, 2014

(Reuters) – Graphic details about sexual threats and other harsh interrogation techniques the CIA meted out to captured militants will be detailed by a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the spy agency’s anti-terror tactics, sources familiar with the document said.

The report, which the committee’s majority Democrats are expected to release on Tuesday, describes how senior al Qaeda operative Abdel Rahman al Nashiri, suspected mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, was threatened by his interrogators with a buzzing power drill, the sources said. The drill was never actually used on Nashiri.

In another instance, the report documents how at least one detainee was sexually threatened with a broomstick, the sources said….

The report, which took years to produce, charts the history of the CIA’s “Rendition, Detention and Interrogation” program, which Bush authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bush ended many aspects of the program before leaving office, and Obama swiftly banned so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which critics say are torture, after his 2009 inauguration.

The committee’s bottom-line conclusion is that harsh interrogations did not produce a single critical intelligence nugget that could not have been obtained by non-coercive means.

That conclusion is strongly disputed by many intelligence and counter-terrorism officials, who say that there is no question such interrogations led to major breakthroughs….

While the Justice Department had authorized techniques like sleep deprivation, controls and supervision of such methods were sometimes lax when the CIA began detaining and interrogating militants starting in August 2002, said sources familiar with the interrogation program.

A more rigorous system of monitoring how the techniques were used was in place by early 2003, the sources said….
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/12/08/us-usa-cia-torture-idUKKBN0JM24I20141208

Mind Control Documents & Links
proof mk-ultra exists
This page includes information on mk-ultra, the CIA, mind control, Operation Paperclip and the Nazis, the 1995 congressional hearings, the 2010 veterans vs CIA court case,  Artichoke, the CIA Supreme Court cases, Ewen Cameron and the Sleep Room and the MK/Naomi project.
https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/mc-documents-links/

Exclusive: Senate probe finds little evidence of effective “torture”

Exclusive: Senate probe finds little evidence of effective “torture”
By Mark Hosenball Reuters 4/28/12

A nearly three-year-long investigation by Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats is expected to find there is little evidence the harsh “enhanced interrogation techniques” the CIA used on high-value prisoners produced counter-terrorism breakthroughs.

People familiar with the inquiry said committee investigators, who have been poring over records from the administration of President George W. Bush, believe they do not substantiate claims by some Bush supporters that the harsh interrogations led to counter-terrorism coups.

The backers of such techniques, which include “water-boarding,” sleep deprivation and other practices critics call torture, maintain they have led to the disruption of major terror plots and the capture of al Qaeda leaders….

Other coercive techniques included sleep deprivation, making people crouch or stretch in stressful positions and slamming detainees against a flexible wall.

The CIA started backing away from such techniques in 2004. Obama banned them shortly after taking office….
http://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-senate-probe-finds-little-evidence-effective-torture-051456121.html

CIA Psychologist’s Notes Reveal True Purpose Behind Bush’s Torture Program

EXCLUSIVE: CIA Psychologist’s Notes Reveal True Purpose Behind Bush’s Torture Program  22 March 2011 Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye, t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report

Dr. Bruce Jessen’s handwritten notes describe some of the torture techniques that were used to “exploit” “war on terror” detainees in custody of the CIA and Department of Defense.

Bush administration officials have long asserted that the torture techniques used on “war on terror” detainees were utilized as a last resort in an effort to gain actionable intelligence to thwart pending terrorist attacks against the United States and its interests abroad.

But the handwritten notes obtained exclusively by Truthout drafted two decades ago by Dr. John Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who was under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of the government’s top-secret torture program, tell a dramatically different story about the reasons detainees were brutalized and it was not just about obtaining intelligence. Rather, as Jessen’s notes explain, torture was used to “exploit” detainees, that is, to break them down physically and mentally, in order to get them to “collaborate” with government authorities. Jessen’s notes emphasize how a “detainer” uses the stresses of detention to produce the appearance of compliance in a prisoner.

….However, according to the Senate Armed Services Committee report “SERE resistance training … was used to inform” Yoo and Bybee’s torture memo, specifically, nearly a dozen of the brutal techniques detainees were subjected to, which included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, wall slamming and placing detainees in a confined space, such as a container, where his movement is restricted.
http://www.truth-out.org/cia-psychologists-notes-reveal-bushs-torture-program68542

Statement of Senator Carl Levin on Senate Armed Services Committee Report of its Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 11, 2008

Contact: Senator Levin’s Office….
“On February 7, 2002, President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. Following the President’s determination, techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions, used in SERE training to simulate tactics used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions, were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody.”
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=305734

SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY ….The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.

….On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention. The President’s order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. While the President’s order stated that, as “a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva Conventions,” the decision to replace well established military doctrine, i.e., legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions, with a policy subject to interpretation, impacted the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody.
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2008/Detainees.121108.pdf

Scientists Claim CIA Misused Work on Sleep Deprivation

also: Sex, Death and the Gods – video (Indian girls sold for sex at puberty)

“the maximum allowable period of sleep deprivation allowed under the CIA interrogation program was 264 hours, though no detainee was deprived of sleep for more than 180 hours, or 7½ days….he detainees were kept awake by being forced to stand, sit or recline in uncomfortable positions, with shackled limbs. At the same time, detainees could undergo stressful treatments, including significant dietary restrictions and violence, like waterboarding and walling.”

Scientists Claim CIA Misused Work on Sleep Deprivation
By Michael Scherer  Washington  Apr. 21, 2009 German and French researchers whose work has been cited by the CIA and the Justice Department to help justify the legality of harsh interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation, condemned the Bush Administration on Tuesday for misusing their scientific findings.

“It is total nonsense to cite our study in this context,” said Dr. Bernd Kundermann, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Marburg.
“I’m disappointed, upset, consternated and even hurt at seeing this,” said Dr. S. Hakki Onen, a sleep specialist and geriatrician with the Hôpital Gériatrique A. Charial, part of the Hospices Civils de Lyon in France. “To see [the research] used in this manner is upsetting because [the CIA’s] goals run counter to the therapeutic intent of our effort … In publishing clinical findings like this, you’re aware you lose control of them, because they can be read and even abused by people who may have other objectives in mind.”

Kundermann and Onen are the second and third European sleep scientists to speak out this week against the CIA’s use of published academic literature on sleep deprivation. On Monday, James Horne, a British researcher who was also cited by CIA medical experts in recently declassified memos, called the agency’s medical reasoning “nonsense.”….

According to the Justice Department memos, the maximum allowable period of sleep deprivation allowed under the CIA interrogation program was 264 hours, though no detainee was deprived of sleep for more than 180 hours, or 7½ days. Only three detainees had been subjected to sleep deprivation for more than 96 hours. The detainees were kept awake by being forced to stand, sit or recline in uncomfortable positions, with shackled limbs. At the same time, detainees could undergo stressful treatments, including significant dietary restrictions and violence, like waterboarding and walling.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1892897,00.html

Sex, Death and the Gods – video
Interview with filmmaker Beeban Kidron, plus exclusive clips from her new film. Sex, Death and the Gods explores the complex world of India’s devadasi, girls devoted to a goddess and then sold for sex at puberty

Beeban Kidron’s film about the devadasi, Storyville: Sex, Death and the Gods, will be shown on BBC4 on Monday 24 January at 10pm
Lindsay Poulton and Joanna Moorhead
guardian.co.uk Friday 21 January 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/video/2011/jan/21/sex-death-gods-video