MK Ultra brainwashing program: Former patients fight for settlement (1985) - The Fifth Estate

at Stanford University near San Francisco dr. Harvey Weinstein is an associate professor of psychiatry and he also counsels students tell me some more about dr. Weinstein is a Montreal er who attended medical school at McGill University but he refused to do his postgraduate work in psychiatry at McGill's Allen Memorial Institute because there his father had been used as a human guinea pig he says he became a psychiatrist to unravel the horror of what happened to his dad Louis Weinstein my father was a 49 year old Montreal businessman who was successful and dynamic and whose life was destroyed by by a series of treatments he was someone who became anxious for a relatively short period of time who went to get some help and whose life was totally shattered by the experience his father was one of the more than 50 patients treated here at the Allen Memorial Institute under a secret program designed to develop brainwashing techniques the Allan has an international reputation as a renowned psychiatric institution but in the late 50s the patients knew nothing of a cascade of mind-control experiments underway including sensory deprivation and worse he went in one winter evening and was put to sleep for approximately two months he was given shock treatments of various kinds gradually building intensity to an intensity in a frequency that was not certainly the routine or standard at the time electroshock is a standard but controversial treatment for extreme depression however at the Allan the shocks were administered not two or three times a week but three or four times a day for weeks on end patients were reduced to vegetables it was called deep patterning and on top of that the patients were given dangerous experimental drugs he was given a whole slew of drugs including amphetamines likely PCP insulin comas barbiturates of all kinds LSD he was then forced to listen to recorded messages it was called psychic driving once the patients were drugged and shocked to breakdown their minds they were bombarded with taped messages for up to 16 hours a day this is how one patient remembers it [Music] at the end of the time my father was someone who was unrecognizable to me or anyone else in the family or his friends he was someone who could not function in this world whose perspective didn't extend beyond the next five minutes who had no recollection of the past and almost no recognition of the present the CIA was behind it documents pried loose in 1979 showed that through a front organization the Central Intelligence Agency funded what was called the MKULTRA project in Montreal it was run by dr.

Ewen Cameron Cameron had a worldwide reputation as chairman of Miguel's Department of Psychiatry and president of both the American and world Psychiatric Association's attracted by Cameron's reputation dr. Mary Morel went to study psychiatry under him instead Cameron persuaded her to become a patient at the Allan he drugged her shocked her massively erased 10 years of her memory and even today she has difficulty remembering some names and faces he decided to ignore all principals all medical ethics and medical principles he used when he be going colleagues me how low can get it wasn't as though Cameron didn't know what he was doing dr. Cameron was present at the Nuremberg trials so I find that for someone who in 1945 1946 was involved in in in evaluating and considering what the Nazis had done to helpless people in concentration camps was five or six years later invading people's brains that was more than enough for a huge lawsuit launched five years ago by Louis Weinstein and eight other of Cameron's Canadian patients at the Allan they sued the CIA for ruining their lives and we're willing to settle for as little as two hundred and fifty thousand dollars each but the case has gone nowhere in fact the CIA has tried to dismiss them with twenty five thousand dollars each as a mere nuisance settlement we got a lot of stuff the case is being carried by Joseph raw a prominent american civil liberties lawyer so far raw has received no fees and in fact his firm has spent ten thousand dollars out of pocket what he needs most is cooperation and documents from the Government of Canada when the Fifth Estate case presentation came out in January of 84 we got call after call from the government what can we do to help you alerted them they never made the slightest doubt that we were right they were saying what can we do to help what can we do to speed it up we told them then why didn't something happen that is the same question you asked me before about motivation all I can tell you is nothing did happen external affairs ministers Joe Clark raised the issue with US Secretary of State George Shultz last May Shultz promised to review the issue and passed it on to the State Department's legal adviser the Canadians had high hopes for a settlement but after Clark went home raaah got stonewalled again and he blames the Canadian government for not following through what makes you think that it makes a pinch of anything you choose whether the Canadian government stands up in Haller's or not if the Americans don't want to settle because the Americans don't want to settle because they're getting such a free ride they would have to settle if the Canadian government says for example I could settle this thing if I could be and it could have Joe Clark's position for it and for a day I'll settle it why don't you do here I call up George Shultz I'd say George I hate to do this but the pressure on me is terrible I'm gonna go to the World Court at The Hague in 30 days if this case isn't settled I'll tell you this case will be settle to the United States is so red-faced about the way they've treated the hate that they're not gonna be able to let let another and let now I go the communist government went they raised Hellmouth and how I went they'd settle they'd settle in a minute what about documents from Canada I understand there was an apology offered by CIA agents to Canadian intelligence office that's absolutely right but they wanted a critical piece of evidence well it's your it's an admission of guilt there's no question about the outcome ultimately the question is one of time we have a 79 year old plaintiff he's very ill is he gonna live to see it or some of the other plaintiffs gonna live to see it I'm I gotta live to see it it's a good question and it depends the answer depends not on us because the court case will take another five or ten years it depends on whether the Canadian government I don't even know which ones in power cuz one of them has been as little helpful as the other Canadian government really gets to work on this and tells the US government they mean it either by saying they'll go to the Hague or something similar to that External Affairs Minister Clark writes to us that he's still deeply concerned and intends to raise the issue once again with Schultz when they meet in Calgary next week but for the victims and their families time is running out Harvey Weinstein's father is 79 now and failing I think it's important that that people understand what was happening to these Canadians and to my father in particular because you hear words like deep patterning and psychic driving and those are the words that dr.

Cameron used in his papers and they're sound very clinical but don't give one a sense of the horror of this process robert Logie of Vancouver another victim was deep patterned he was injected with LSD put to sleep for 23 days hit with the massive electric shocks and brainwashed with the recorded messages I've never been able to sleep without medication since the sleepiness I went through years and years and years of severe depressions I dream about it I all met all my waking hours to think about it it's uh it's eating me up Janine who art of Montreal went through the same chamber of horrors she had comfort treatment of common depression after childbirth and that treatment destroyed all of her plans not being with my family not being able to follow a career not being able to study anymore which I wanted to do very much I would say that cost me my life some of the most brutal drug and electroshock treatment was administered to Val Orlick au of Winnipeg the wife of new democratic MP David Orlick Oh mrs.