Episode 85: "Journey into Madness"

Doctors are taught to do no harm. What causes them to shirk this duty and engage in medical torture and mind control? Gordon Thomas asks this question in his book Journey Into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse.

⚠️ Warning: due to the nature of this episode and the information uncovered by Gordon Thomas, please exercise caution. We will be discussing medical torture, abduction, human experimentation, etc.

Links:

https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Into-Madness-Control-Medical/dp/0553053574

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Buckley

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Gottlieb

https://www.amazon.com/Devils-Chessboard-Dulles-Americas-Government/dp/0062276174

Need more? You can visit the website at: https://consaracytheories.com/ or my own site at: https://saracausey.com/. Don't forget to check out the blog at: https://consaracytheories.com/blog. 

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Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses Gordon Thomas's book "Journey Into Madness," which explores the dark alliance between medicine, politics, and torture. The book delves into the Beirut hostage crisis, the history of MK Ultra, and the involvement of doctors in state-sponsored torture. It highlights the stories of William Buckley, tortured and executed by Hezbollah, and Dr. Ewen Cameron's MK Ultra experiments, which included LSD and electroconvulsive therapy. The discussion also touches on the ethical dilemmas faced by doctors who violate their oaths and the psychological manipulation techniques used.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Journey Into Madness, Gordon Thomas, Beirut hostages, medical torture, mind control, MK Ultra, Allen Dulles, William Buckley, Ewen Cameron, LSD experiments, CIA, brainwashing, psychological torture, Hippocratic Oath, political prisoners.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about Gordon Thomas's book journey into madness. The full title to give you an idea of exactly how far down the rabbit hole we're going, journey into madness, the true story of secret Charlie, India, alpha, mind control and medical abuse on the back cover, the journey into madness begins today in Lebanon with the mystery surrounding the Beirut hostages, and with a horrifying insight into their whereabouts and probable fate, travels back in time to probe The history of the dark alliance between medicine politics and the T word reveals how since the 1950s doctors in both east and west have ignored the sacred oaths of their profession and helped in government sponsored research into methods of medical torture and mind control tells the chilling stories of patients who survived a Charlie India Alpha funded research program conducted by one of the most eminent psychiatrists of the post war period. Wow, just wow. We could stop right there and be horrified. Choose your frosty and potentially hard beverage of choice, and we will saddle up and take this ride immediately after the Table of Contents, Thomas has chosen to reproduce the Hippocratic oath as well as the physicians Oath of the Soviet Union and the Islamic physicians oath, and they all say variations of the same basic theme, do no harm. Promote healing. Look out for the best interests of your patients, act with integrity and virtue. So one of the questions that Thomas probes in this book is, what causes a physician to go against their own scruples, to go against the oaths that they have taken mean, ostensibly, a person spends all of that time in medical school not because they want to inflict torture and harm and mind control and medical abuse. So what's that turning point? What is it that a person says to themselves to justify that kind of behavior, because something goes on in the human mind to make somebody say, Yeah, all right, I'm sworn oath to do no harm, to uphold certain ethics, but I'm just going to torture people. Now, that's creepy and it's weird. The book is copyrighted 1989 so it is dated by today's standards. I mean, on the back cover, when he's talking about the Beirut hostages in Lebanon that's been years ago. But still, the question remains, what is it that motivates somebody to forego the oath that they've taken? What? What is it that somebody says to themselves to make medical torture and brainwashing? Okay, how does that happen to set the stage for all of this, he offers what he calls perspectives a note to the reader, and he opens up with this quote from a man who was the father of a son who had been tortured to death. The Dead only count when they leave a testimony that's chilling in this perspectives note he writes, while political T word has been capturing widespread attention for some time, almost nothing has been made public of how doctors today use their knowledge and skills in its support, yet they regularly medically examine political prisoners before questioning to assess the degree of torture to be used. They attend interrogations to treat the direct physical effect of the torture they have approved so that the investigation can continue. They recommend how much further torture can be applied. Physicians employed in state sponsored T word also falsify autopsy reports, Mm, hmm, and provide fake medical certificates for persons those doctors know were tortured to death, a common description is cardiac failure or pneumonia on those certificates, physicians who are members of T word organizations provide or themselves use drugs to force hostages into video recordings, confessions, exhortations and genuinely pathetic pleas that have become a regular feature on TV newscasts. End, quote, ooh, that's just sickening.

 He spends quite a bit of time in the book going through the story of William Buckley. Not William F Buckley the pundit, but William Buckley and I want to. Divert for a second over to Wikipedia, just so we can get a tidier summary of this story. So on the Wikipedia page, we find William Francis Buckley was a United States Army officer in the Special Forces and a Charlie India Alpha station chief in Beirut from 1984 until his kidnapping and execution in 1985 Buckley's cover was as a political officer at the US Embassy. He was kidnapped by the group Islamic Jihad in March 1984 and held hostage and tortured by psychiatrist Aziz al above. Hezbollah. Letter later claimed they executed him in October, 1985 but another American hostage disputed that, believing that he died five months prior, in June, he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery and is commemorated with a star on the memorial wall at the agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. I'm going to scroll down now to the tab about kidnapping, and please understand we're talking about really terrible, graphic subject matter. I will put a large disclaimer on the write up for this episode, because I don't want somebody to be caught off guard. If you just find this episode one day by accident, you're like, oh, okay, journey into madness. And then you realize there's going to be some very sadistic descriptions in this episode. I just don't want anybody to be surprised by that and traumatized, because it's pretty awful subject matter. So under the kidnapping tab on Wikipedia, on March 16, 1984 Buckley was kidnapped by Hezbollah from his apartment building when he was leaving for work. This is detailed, you know, fairly graphically as well in journey into madness. Army Major General Carl Steiner had warned Buckley that he was in danger, but Buckley told him that. Quote, I have a pretty good intelligence network. I think I'm secure. End quote, however, according to Steiner, Buckley continued to live in his apartment and travel the same route to and from work every day. It was thought that one of the reasons he was kidnapped, along with two other Americans at different times in Beirut was because of the upcoming trial of 17 Iranian backed militants that was about to begin in Kuwait. He was apparently tortured over the 15 months of his capture using drills to his joints and general beating with blunt force instruments, his torturer went on to a happy family life and second marriage. End quote, wow, wow, wow. So where section one of Gordon Thomas's book focuses a lot on Beirut, the kidnapping and execution of Buckley, and then the horrific methodology of Dr al abub. Book Two, which he calls to this time takes us to the good old US of A and our old buddy, Allen Dulles. Doesn't that bastard just seem to have his fingers in a lot of deep, dark, awful, terrible pies. He talks about Alan and his wife Clover having one of their little she she fancy Georgetown parties with the best food and the best wine and beautiful decor. And this particular evening, in March of 1953 there's some celebration that Stalin has passed away. There's quite an interesting guest list at this party, which includes Buckley, by the way, of course, he was alive and well at this point in time. But something else that I find interesting, that Thomas takes some pains to point out, is this idea of the stud squad, and I'll read just a little bit for you here. Dotted among the guests were a number of young men in dark lounge suits. They were the pick from the latest crop of agency recruits. Their role was to take care of the unattached girls until Dulles made his choice. They were known as the stud detail Clover intensely resented their presence. They were a reminder that her husband remained feckless. There was, however, one exception, a slim man whose looks reminded her of Montgomery Clift, the same pensive, slightly hunted look and eyes that concentrated hard on what was being said William Buckley had become the one stud squad member she accepted ever since they had met at an agency Christmas party. End Quote, you know, I don't, as I've said many times before, especially as it relates to all of the gossip and the smear campaigns that go on against JFK consenting adults. I don't care two people, a group of people, for that matter. I mean, ethically and morally, it may be something that I find gross, but if you're talking about consenting adults, hey, do you want to do this activity with me and you're over the age of 18? Yes, I do want to do this activity. Are you also over the age of 18? Yes, we are. We are all adults, and we all consent to be here doing this activity. It's not my business, as I said, ethically. I may disagree with it. I may feel like, morally, if two people make a commitment that they're going to be monogamous to each. Other, they should honor it. I mean, somebody's stepping out, they don't need to be doing that. Yet. Again, we're talking about consenting adults. It's not my business, but I find it interesting. The reason why I bring this up, and the reason why it kind of tickled me a bit as I was reading this book, is because so much of the what I believe to be, what RFK Junior has publicly said that he believes to be an agency sponsored smear campaign, is that JFK was a philanderer. He was 24/7 penis, that's all he ever did. He never read a book, he never took a bath, he never ate a sandwich. He never played with his kids. No, 24 7 365, penis, that's it.

So isn't it interesting that old Allen Dulles has a stud squad so that he can have procurers find some unattached women for him to sleep with at night. Hmm, isn't it funny that the thing that Jack always gets accused of doing is something that Gordon Thomas is writing about. Allen Dulles doing things that make you go, hmm. Thomas talks quite a bit about Dr Ewen Cameron, so I'm going to go back over to Wikipedia and take a look at his Wikipedia page, just so we can get a little bit more tidy summary of all of this. Donald Ewan Cameron was a Scottish born psychiatrist. He is largely known today for his central role in unethical medical experiments. I will butt in and say, I think that's putting it lightly. And development of psychological and medical torture techniques for the Charlie India Alpha. He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association, Canadian Psychiatric Association, American psychopathological Association, society of Biological Psychiatry and the world psychiatry Association. Cameron was involved in administering electro convulsive therapy and experimental drugs, including poisons such as curaray and hallucinogens such as LSD to patients and prisoners without their knowledge or informed consent. Some of this work took place in the context of project MK Ultra, program for developing mind control and torture techniques, psychoactive poisons and behavior modification systems. Decades after his own death, the psychic driving technique he developed continued to see extensive use in the torture of prisoners around the world. Wow, just a couple of paragraphs there, and it's like, oh so creepy. They also talk about in his early life, he was the oldest son of a Presbyterian minister. So again, you just sit back and wonder, what, what causes somebody to go in this direction, like, what?

Hmm, it's just, it's highly disturbing. There's also a tab mental illness as a social contagion, the idea that mental illness could spread just like a cold or a flu. If you're around somebody that has a mental illness, it can leap onto you as well. We get into the tab MK Ultra sub project 68 I'm going to read there. During the 1950s and 1960s Cameron's work attracted the interest of the Charlie India alphas MK Ultra Mind Control Program, which began funding his work under MK Ultra sub project 68 he is unrelated to another Charlie India Alpha psychiatrist Alan s Cameron, who helped pioneer psychological profiling of world leaders during the 1970s and was not associated with the behavioral modification research program. Cameron had hoped to correct schizophrenia by erasing existing memories and reprogramming the psyche. He commuted from Lake Placid New York to Montreal every week to work at McGill Allen Memorial Institute, and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 to carry out MK Ultra experiments there, known as the Montreal experiments. In addition to LSD, he experimented with various paralytic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy at 30 to 40 times the normal power. I'll butt in and say some of these experiments are described in pretty graphic and horrifying detail in Thomas's book, journey into madness. It is not for the faint of heart. His psychic driving experiments consisted of putting a subject into a drug induced coma for weeks at a time, up to three months, in one case, while playing tape loops of noise or simple statements. These experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the Institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postnatal depression, many were permanently debilitated after these treatments. Such consequences included incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents. His work was. Inspired and paralleled by the psychiatrist William Sargent, who was also involved with the intelligence services, though not with MK Ultra and experimented extensively on his patients without their consent, causing similar long term damage. Sid Taylor stated that Cameron used curare to immobilize his patients during his research. After one test, he noted, although the patient was prepared by prolonged sensory isolation, 35 days and by repeated de patterning, and although she received 101 days of positive driving, no favorable results were obtained. Patients were tested in the radio telemetry Laboratory, which was built under Cameron's direction, here, patients were exposed to a range of RF and electromagnetic signals and monitored for changes in behavior. It was reported that none of the patients sent to the radio telemetry lab showed any signs of improvement. In 1980 the Canadian investigative news program The Fifth Estate interviewed two former patients of Cameron's who were among several of his ex patients who were at that time, suing the Charlie India alpha for the long term effects of Cameron's treatment. In her book, in the sleep room, the story of the Charlie India Alpha brainwashing experiments in Canada, author Anne Collins explored the history of Cameron and Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute. This was made into a TV mini series directed by Ann Wheeler in 1998 called the sleep room, which also dramatizes the lawsuit of Cameron's ex patients against the Charlie India alpha, the son of one of Cameron's patients. Noted in a memoir that, other than Ed broadband and Sven Robinson no Canadian MP, brought up the issue in the House of Parliament. Naomi Klein states in her book The shock doctrine that Cameron's research and his contribution to MK Ultra were not about mind control and brainwashing but to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from resistant sources. In other words, torture. She then cites Alfred W McCoy, stripped of its bizarre excesses, Cameron's experiments, building upon Donald o hebb's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the Charlie India alpha's two stage psychological torture method. Cameron is the subject of Stephen Bennett's film imminent monsters, which was funded by BBC Scotland and creative Scotland, whether or not Cameron was aware that funding for his experiments was coming from the Charlie India alpha is unclear. It has been argued that he would have carried out the same experiments if funding had come from a source without ulterior motives. End quote, wow. Wow. Sometimes that's all you can say. It's hard to even know where to go from there. One thing I will say is that we learn, not only in Gordon Thomas's book, but also in David Talbott book The Devil's chess board, is that Allen Dulles knew what kind of obscene behavior was going on with Dr Cameron, and actually suggested that his own wife go to see Dr Cameron for treatment. She decided not to, but it's like, Man, you've got to be a next level, cold hearted bastard to know what's going on and to tell your wife, hey, maybe you should go to this guy. You're having some depression, you're having some problems, you're upset that I'm cheating on you all the time. Well, go see a medical torturer and maybe he'll make you forget all about it. What he also talks about Sidney Gottlieb, who became known as the poisoner in chief. That needs to be its own separate podcast episode. But just suffice it to say, for this episode, I'll go back to Wikipedia. We're on Sydney Gottlieb's page under the government career tab. Gottlieb's first government position was at the Department of Agriculture, where he researched the chemical structure of organic soils. He later transferred to the FDA, where he developed tests to measure the presence of drugs in the human body. Gottlieb grew bored with this work and sought a more challenging position. On July 13, 1951 Gottlieb had his first day of work at the Charlie India alpha then Deputy Director for plans. Allen Dulles hired him on Ira Baldwin's recommendation. Baldwin had founded and run the bio warfare program at Fort Detrick years earlier, and it kept Gottlieb in his orbit throughout the years. Gottlieb, who had advanced knowledge of poisons, was making his entrance in the early years of the Cold War. In the years after World War Two, American paranoia about the infiltration of communist ideology whipped the country into a nationalistic fervor to protect American culture and political dominance from a supposed impending Soviet takeover. Then they get into the stories about brainwashing. This belief drove the Charlie India alpha's early forays into mind control operation. And led to justifications of countless horrific acts, often with no oversight or accountability. They talk about Project Bluebird, which also that needs to be its own separate episode. I'm going to scroll down. Dulles formally approved project MK Ultra on April 13, 1953 his brother John Foster Dulles was tapped for Secretary of State, giving even further diplomatic cover to the project. On April 10, Dulles described the program and others like it in a speech to alumni at Princeton, referencing the new battlefield of brain warfare and the battle for controlling the human mind. He disguised his program by describing it as something the Soviet Union was doing, rather than something he was pioneering himself. Hmm, imagine that Gottlieb selected multiple researchers, scientists and ex OSS members, to work for him under MK Ultra sub projects those contracted conducted experiments on Gottlieb's behalf and reported their findings to him. He sponsored physicians such as Donald Ewan Cameron and Harris Isbell in controversial Psychiatric Research, including non consensual human experiments. Gottlieb administered LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs to unwitting subjects and financed Psychiatric Research and Development of techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything. I'm just going to stop right there, just for a second, techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything. He was named as the person who gave army bacteriologist Frank Olson LSD at an MK Ultra retreat, leading to Olson's mental spiral and death a week later. I'm going to also butt in again and say Frank Olson and the whole fucked up story there. That needs to be its own episode as well, because there's some information about him in journey into madness, but I'll get there in a minute. If you continue through this horrifying information about Gottlieb, you'll see all of his various attempts to come up with poisons and things to, I mean, quite literally, blow someone's mind. It's, it's horrifying. I mean, there's just, there's not enough negative, derogatory adjectives for all of this. I'm going to jump over for a second to David Talbots book The Devil's chess board, because he tells a sort of shorter version, easier to understand, version of the story of Frank Olson. Essentially, he's dosed against his will, without his real knowledge of what's going on. He's dosed with LSD starts to have mental problems from that, obviously. So tells his doctor that he believes the Charlie India alpha is trying to poison him.

He falls to his death from the Statler Hotel, which is now the hotel Pennsylvania, and someone places a phone call from the hotel room to his doctor to say, well, he's gone. And then the doctor responds, well, that's too bad. And then the calls disconnected. So fast forward in time, the body is exhumed and a second autopsy is performed. Because, of course, you know how this goes. The cover up autopsy is going to tell you that, oh, the guy just, you know, had mental problems and he threw himself out the window. That's how he decided to commit suicide, and that's real sad and everything, but there's no foul play. So what David Talbot talks about in the devil's chess board is the panel with one dissenter found evidence that Olson had suffered a blunt force trauma to the head and a chest injury before his fall, evidence that was called rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide. And one of the doctors tells the press, I am exceedingly skeptical of the view that doctor Olson went through the window on his own. Yeah, I would say I'm pretty skeptical of that as well. So in journey into madness. You get a lot of gory details. People being put into altered states and having to listen to these statements being played over and over and over again through tape recorder. Cameron, getting information from people and then using that information against them, using that information to manipulate them and torture them. People losing their grip on reality, not being able to remember their own spouse. Divorces ensuing, because they get home and they have sexual dysfunction, or they they no longer know who their spouse is anymore, and don't want to be touched by this person. It's really horrifying. So yes, you you get the physical gnarly details of people being tormented with hammers and drills and oh, here's how much pain the human body can take before the person will pass out. You can take them just to the verge of loss of consciousness, and then torture them some more. Then you also get them the mental psychological warfare that happens here. It. Is so gruesome and grizzly.

So let's go back to the original question, what causes a doctor, somebody who goes through all those years of medical school, presumably because they want to help people, not because they start out being some sort of sadistic psychopath, although maybe a few do, what causes that person to go against their oath to do no harm and participate in state sponsored torture? One thesis is the idea that they don't actually believe they're doing anything wrong. They believe that they are being of service. This is the bad person. We're doing something to a bad guy, to an opponent, to a combatant. This person means to do harm to us. So it's not really unethical to do harm to them. Another excuse is, well, I was just following orders. Remember, that's a big one. We heard a so called Nazi defense during World War Two. It wasn't that I wanted to do something wrong, it was I was just following orders. I didn't have any will of my own. I had to do this evil, terrible thing because I was just following orders. Judge for yourself.

The main thing that I would say is, if you decide to check out journey into madness, you need to really understand what you're getting yourself into. Even though the book is more than 30 years old, it hasn't lost any of its potency, believe me, it is really deeply disturbing. I would normally tell you to stay a little crazy, because on my daytime broadcast, I always sign off by seeing by saying, Stay safe and stay sane. I think that might be a more appropriate way to close out this episode to remind you to stay safe and stay sane, and I'll see you the next time around.

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