CIA's 'Experiments' Are History, Until They Aren't
Lana Ponting's lawsuit against the Canadian government concerning her alleged unwitting participation in the CIA's MK-Ultra program at 16 is a chilling reminder. The BBC report focuses on the victim, which is crucial, but it glosses over the historical context that makes such programs, well, *programs*. This wasn't an isolated incident; declassified documents (like the 1975 Church Committee
Report) revealed MK-Ultra was a massive, decades-long project involving mind control, torture, and drug experimentation on thousands of unwitting citizens and foreign nationals. To frame this as a past evil without acknowledging the systemic issues that enabled it—and whether those systems have truly been dismantled—is a classic media sleight of hand. We’re told the CIA 'experimented' on a
teenager, as if it was a rogue scientist. Yet, the agency has a well-documented history of these 'experiments' globally, funding psychological warfare and 'behavior modification' research at universities and hospitals without consent. (Remember Project Artichoke, MK-Naomi, or the Tuskegee Syphilis Study by a different government agency? The pattern is 'trust the institutions,' until they're
caught.) How many other 'experiments' are currently underway or conveniently buried, awaiting another lawsuit decades from now? One might wonder if the real headline shouldn't be 'CIA's Alleged Past Evils Could Be Today's Classified 'Research'.'