In a presentation to my 10th grade critical thinking class, I linked this story–that a bizarre American intelligence operation might have caused an entire French village to go crazy in the early 1950’s–to numerous other longstanding conspiracy theories about the CIA.

The teacher made some comment about critical thinking needing to involve actual thinking, and that any mention of CIA conspiracy necessarily excluded thought processes (because America just didn’t do that sort of thing).  He told to stop talking and sit down, and admonished the class to beware the seduction of pseudo-intellectual conspiracy theory.

Since then, most of the conspiracy gems I tried to report on as a student have been verified; the 2007 FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) release of the CIA’s “Family Jewels” documents validated a butt-load more.  I haven’t seen that teacher since graduation, and wonder if he ever felt silly for trying to squash the Punky out of me.

French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment

A 50-year mystery over the ‘cursed bread’ of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.

Telegraph Uk; Henry Samuel in Paris

Published: 7:00AM GMT 11 Mar 2010

An American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD

In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.

For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France.

On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of terrifying beasts and fire.

One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.

Time magazine wrote at the time: “Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead.”

Eventually, it was determined that the best-known local baker had unwittingly contaminated his flour with ergot, a hallucinogenic mould that infects rye grain. Another theory was the bread had been poisoned with organic mercury.

However, H P Albarelli Jr., an investigative journalist, claims the outbreak resulted from a covert experiment directed by the CIA and the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

The scientists who produced both alternative explanations, he writes, worked for the Swiss-based Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the Army and CIA with LSD.

Mr Albarelli came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of Frank Olson, a biochemist working for the SOD who fell from a 13th floor window two years after the Cursed Bread incident. One note transcribes a conversation between a CIA agent and a Sandoz official who mentions the “secret of Pont-Saint-Esprit” and explains that it was not “at all” caused by mould but by diethylamide, the D in LSD.

While compiling his book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, Mr Albarelli spoke to former colleagues of Mr Olson, two of whom told him that the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident was part of a mind control experiment run by the CIA and US army.

After the Korean War the Americans launched a vast research programme into the mental manipulation of prisoners and enemy troops.

Scientists at Fort Detrick told him that agents had sprayed LSD into the air and also contaminated “local foot products”.

Mr Albarelli said the real “smoking gun” was a White House document sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses. It contained the names of a number of French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the “Pont St. Esprit incident.” In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Mr Albarelli claims, the US army also drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between 1953 and 1965.

None of his sources would indicate whether the French secret services were aware of the alleged operation. According to US news reports, French intelligence chiefs have demanded the CIA explain itself following the book’s revelations. French intelligence officially denies this.

Locals in Pont-Saint-Esprit still want to know why they were hit by such apocalyptic scenes. “At the time people brought up the theory of an experiment aimed at controlling a popular revolt,” said Charles Granjoh, 71.

“I almost kicked the bucket,” he told the weekly French magazine Les Inrockuptibles. “I’d like to know why.”

U.S. Army counter-intelligence officer Captain Lawrence Rockwood attempted to blow the whistle on the military for criminal negligence during 1994-95’s support mission in Haiti. He claimed that US forces not only turning a blind eye toward gross human rights violations (including torture and murder), but were even actively supporting them. Cpt. Lockwood was court-martialed and eventually kicked out of the service, minus 2/3 of his pay, for his trouble. He said, on the day of his sentencing, “More important than my career, I am concerned that the US Army is attempting to marginalize the Nuremberg principles in the most subtle and quiet manner possible. Indeed, during the seven-day trial, the government side insisted that personal and command responsibility for human rights violations is irrelevant for American military personnel.”

After Lockwood, other soldiers came forward with similar accounts. One wrote under the pseudonym Michael Valentine, and was first published in university and alternative newspapers in the mid-1990’s. His first-hand account, entitled The Belly of the Beast, is chock full of fascinating details and disturbing anecdotes about U.S. complicity in the abuse of the Haitian people. He includes the first iteration I’ve been able to find of the story that crazy Pat Robertson promoted after the Haitian earthquake–that Haitian leaders had made a deal with Satan to help them overthrow their French slave masters in the 19th century, and were now paying the piper for that decision. Seems there’s a CIA angle to the story; find the rest of the story here:

Belly of the Beast

by Michael Valentine

In August of ‘94, just one month before the decision was announced to occupy Haiti, we were instructed to attend an intelligence briefing on Haiti that had been coordinated through the 3rd Special Forces Group staff.

This briefing would be the one and only predeployment intelligence briefing we were to receive. For this presentation, the staff had conscientiously avoided using any of the former Haitian nationals that worked and lived in Fayetteville and Fort Bragg. These included a professor of physics at Fayetteville State University, his wife, a Creole instructor at the Special Forces school, and various Haitian-American soldiers on active duty in Fort Bragg.

To ensure that we had a reliable source for this one and only predeployment brief, our intelligence gurus selected an expatriate, white, American, fundamentalist Protestant preacher. This gentleman had occupied himself for the last 11 years, in a small community outside of Cap Haïtien, salvaging the heathen souls of some 300 local congregants. He was an emaciated, blepharitic man, tall and thin, in a black suit, reeking of Calvinist austerity and burning with years of besieged righteousness.

He began his account with a personal introduction and a brief history of his mission. Then came a brief historical account of the nation of Haiti. The account was perfectly informative as long as it confined itself to events, personalities and dates. What followed his synopsis, however, was a bizarre narrative. He flatly declared that the successful Haitian revolution against the French Army was inaugurated with a bargain. Jean Jacques Dessalines, the Haitian leader of the revolution, according to this preacher, had struck a deal with the devil. With complete seriousness, our intrepid young missionary, explained that Satan himself, disguised as a voodoo deity, contracted with Dessalines to assure him a military victory. In exchange for the victory, Satan was to be given control of the new nation for a period of 200 years.

I’m not sure what surprised me the most at that briefing. The outlandish characterization of the first independent black nation in the Western Hemisphere? The fact that an Intelligence Officer on the Group staff had coordinated for his presence? Or the spellbound attention being paid this crackpot by hundreds of allegedly rational grown men who were in the room listening?

The problem was this. Most of the Special Forces soldiers there had no previous interest in Haiti. Most of them harbored cultural and racial preconceptions of Haiti. All had been exposed to the drumbeat of skewed media coverage of Haiti. Many were fans of both the CIA and Jesse Helms, both of whom were staging a concerted venture to shape foreign policy on behalf of the Cedras regime, by fabricating rumors about Aristide. Almost all of them were thoroughly ignorant of both the history of Haiti and the dynamics of the current crisis…

The takeaway here is that the Pat Robertson tale was probably originated by, and certainly disseminated by, CIA and other US military intelligence as part of an American policy-influence campaign. Over a decade later, the religious right uses the story again to the same desired end.

The big flap over those hacked  global warming emails, which hit the media just in time for the Copenhagen Climate Change summit (with the GOP hoax ambassadors in attendance), was largely a rightwing media creation, with lots of echoes in the mainstream. The stolen emails were not representative of communications among most climatologists, were not written by key researchers, and do not really say what they were reported to have said.

The climatologists at RealClimate.org released a statement about the hacked East Anglia emails, which contained this little toungue-in-cheekiness:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP (medieval warm period), no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no marching orders from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords.

Now, long after the summit, it turns out that there may have been a darker presence behind the email hacking, and a more ambitious agenda:

Climate Emails Hacked by Spies: Interception Bore Hallmarks of Foreign Intelligence Agency

 By Steve Connor, Science Editor; The Independent UK

Monday, 1 February 2010

A highly sophisticated hacking operation that led to the leaking of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia was probably carried out by a foreign intelligence agency, according to the Government’s former chief scientist.

Sir David King, who was Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser for seven years until 2007, said that the hacking and selective leaking of the unit’s emails, going back 13 years, bore all the hallmarks of a co-ordinated intelligence operation – especially given their release just before the Copenhagen climate conference in December…

Full article

On September 18th, 2009, seven former CIA directors wrote a letter to President Obama, asking him to use any available means to shut down the Holder Justice Dept’s investigation into criminal activity by the CIA and other U.S. Intelligence groups.

This request first and foremost reveals what the intelligence community has long taken for granted–that a President is not supposed to exercise that sort of power over them; that intelligence agencies, whose stock-in-trade is deception, should still be trusted to investigate and police themselves; and that ‘national security’ is, and should be, a blanket that conceals a multitude of crimes.

In the letter, the seven invoke 9/11 first thing, implying that anything they did was for the country’s own best interests. They further argue that the alleged crimes were already looked into and cleared, and that by investigating crimes committed by intelligence, we expose its secret workings and weaken it–thus threatening our own safety and scaring other governments who work intelligence with us.

Left unstated, of course, are these facts: 

• all but two of the 7 Dwarves would themselves be subject to prosecution for crimes against humanity were AG Holder to continue;
• the re-litigation was intitiated because the initial investigations referred to in the letter were hopelessly compromised;
• intelligence agencies can be, and routinely are, the subject of oversight that doesn’t expose themselves to danger
• foreign intelligence agences are concerned about America’s ability to maintain secrets not because of the threat of criminal investigation of the CIA, but because of the Bush administration’s habit of exposing secrets for political gain–such as when Dick Cheney outed Valerie Plame, shutting down a decade’s worth of cover in tracking loose nukes (and costing the lives of an unknown number of deep cover assets), or when Bush announced, right before the election, the status of a UK investigation that would have potentially closed down the London bombings plot had it remained secret 

The seven signatories are Michael Hayden and Porter Goss, who served under George W. Bush (Goss has a decades-long intelligence relationship with Bush, Sr, helping subvert democracy in Latin America); George Tenet, who served Clinton and Bush (and who has perjured himself more times than we can count); John Deutch & R. James Woolsey, who served Clinton (Woolsey also has a longstanding intelligence relationship with Bush, Sr);  William Webster, who served under Bush Sr, and Reagan); and James R. Schlesinger, Nixon’s CIA Director.

So here’s the coincidence part: The letter to Obama is sent to the mainstream press on the 18th, along with GOP talking points to the rightwing blogosphere that Obama is outrageously ignoring seven former CIA leaders and putting America in harm’s way, blah blah blah. Barely 36 hours later, the first-in-a-long-time terror alert is sounded and the FBI moves in to disrupt an alleged domestic alQaeda plot  in NYC. The FBI later admits it moved too early in making the arrests, but that their action wasn’t at all timed to coincide with to the letter to Obama.

 Okay, then, that settles it.

A chilling side note, imo, is Senator Joseph Liebermann’s argument, included in the CIA letter, that to do their dangerous and critical jobs without worrying that years from now a future Attorney General will authorize a criminal investigation of them for behavior that a previous Attorney General concluded was authorized and legal.

His assumption that the US Attorney General is empowered to, at will, change the laws and treaties of the US flies in the face of America’s commitment to the rule of law, and also looks like a cheap attempt by a Democrat to provide cover for GOP crimes.

Here’s the Letter:

Letter from seven former CIA Heads

September 18, 2009

To The President

The White House

Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. President:

We have served as Directors of Central Intelligence or Directors of the CIA for Presidents reaching back over 35 years. We respectfully urge you to exercise your authority to reverse Attorney General Holder’s August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations that took place following the attacks of September 11.

Our reasons for making this recommendation are as follows.

The post-September 11 interrogations for which the Attorney General is opening an inquiry were investigated four years ago by career prosecutors. The CIA, at its own initiative, forwarded fewer than 20 instances where Agency officers appeared to have acted beyond their existing legal authorities. Career prosecutors under the supervision of the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia determined that one prosecution (of a CIA contractor) was warranted. A conviction was later obtained. They determined that prosecutions were not warranted in the other cases. In a number of these cases the CIA subsequently took administrative disciplinary steps against the individuals involved. Attorney General Holder’s decision to re-open the criminal investigation creates an atmosphere of continuous jeopardy for those whose cases the Department of Justice had previously declined to prosecute. Moreover, there is no reason to expect that the re-opened criminal investigation will remain narrowly focused.

If criminal investigations closed by career prosecutors during one administration can so easily be reopened at the direction of political appointees in the next, declinations of prosecution will be rendered meaningless. Those men and women who undertake difficult intelligence assignments in the aftermath of an attack such as September 11 must believe there is permanence in the legal rules that govern their actions. They must be free, as the Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Senator Lieberman, has put it: “to do their dangerous and critical jobs without worrying that years from now a future Attorney General will authorize a criminal investigation of them for behavior that a previous Attorney General concluded was authorized and legal.”  Similar deference needs to be shown to fact-based decisions made by career prosecutors years ago.

Not only will some members of the intelligence community be subjected to costly financial and other burdens from what amounts to endless criminal investigations, but this approach will seriously damage the willingness of many other intelligence officers to take risks to protect the country. In our judgment such risk-taking is vital to success in the long and difficult fight against the terrorists who continue to threaten us.

Success in intelligence often depends on surprise and deception and on creating uncertainty in the mind of an enemy. As President you have the authority to make decisions restricting substantive interrogation or any other intelligence collection method, based on legal analyses and policy recommendations. But, the administration must be mindful that public disclosure about past intelligence operations can only help Al Qaeda elude US intelligence and plan future operations. Disclosures about CIA collection operations have and will continue to make it harder for intelligence officers to maintain the momentum of operations that have saved lives and helped protect America from further attacks.

Finally, another certain result of these reopened investigations is the serious damage done to our intelligence community’s ability to obtain the cooperation of foreign intelligence agencies.

Foreign services are already greatly concerned about the United States’ inability to maintain any secrets. They rightly fear that, through these additional investigations and the court proceedings that could follow, terrorists may learn how other countries came to our assistance in a time of peril. The United States promised these foreign countries that their cooperation would never be disclosed. As a result of the zeal on the part of some to uncover every action taken in the post-9/11 period, many countries may decide that they can no longer safely share intelligence or cooperate with us on future counter-terrorist operations. They simply cannot rely on our promises of secrecy.

We support your stated commitment, Mr. President, to look to the future regarding these important issues. In our judgment the only way that is possible is if the criminal investigation of these interrogations that Attorney General Holder has re-opened is now re-closed.

Sincerely,

Michael Hayden

Porter Goss

George Tenet

John Deutch

R. James Woolsey

William Webster

James R. Schlesinger

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters  posts a interesting piece on the similarities in social and political climate between the early JFK and Obama presidencies:

The Last Time Right-Wing Hatred Ran Wild Like This a President Was Killed

Excerpts:

Dallas had become the Mecca for medicine-show evangelists … the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry Societies, and the headquarters of [ultra-conservative oil billionaire] H. L. Hunt…

In that third year of the Kennedy presidency…a kind of fever lay over Dallas country. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed, “Impeach Earl Warren!” Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas… Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; John F. Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; corporate junior executives were required to attend radical seminars.

A retired major general ran the American flag upside down, deriding it as “the Democrat flag.” A ‘Wanted for Treason’ poster with J.F.K.’s face on it was circulated, announcing “This Man is Wanted” for—among other things—“turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist controlled United Nations” and appointing “anti-Christians … aliens and known Communists” to federal offices.

And a full-page advertisement had appeared the day of the assassination in The Dallas Morning News accusing Kennedy of making a secret deal with the Communist Party; when it was shown to the president, he was appalled. He turned to Jacqueline, who was visibly upset, and said, “Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today.”

“…In a wealthy Dallas suburb, when told that President Kennedy had been murdered in their city, fourth-grade students burst into applause.”

Today, conservatives are expressing outrage that Rep. Nancy Pelosi had the nerve to raise concerns about the onrush of violent political rhetoric. The rightwing noise machine claims it has no idea what Pelosi’s talking about. But the truth is, America’s most famous bouts of political violence (i.e. JFK, RFK, MLK, Oklahoma City, etc.) have always been accompanied by waves of radical, rightwing rhetoric. Given that history, the GOP’s insistence that the hate now filling the streets couldn’t possibly inspire violence seems woefully naive.

Read more…

I’m wondering.

The Destruction of the Black Middle Class

Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammed

“To judge from most of the commentary on the Professor Gates-Crowley affair, you would think that a ‘black elite’ has gotten dangerously out of hand. First Gates (Cambridge, Yale, Harvard) showed insufficient deference to Crowley, then Obama (Occidental, Harvard) piled on to accuse the police of having acted “stupidly.” Was this “the end of white America” which the Atlantic had warned of in its January/February cover story?

“Left out of the ensuing tangle of commentary on race and class has been the increasing impoverishment—or, we should say, re-impoverishment–of African Americans as a group… According to a study by Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy, 33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling out of the middle class at the start of the recession… millions of the black equivalents of Officer Crowley – from factory workers to bank tellers and white collar managers – are sliding down toward destitution.

“Black unemployment is now at 14.7 percent, compared to 8.7 for whites. In New York City, black unemployment has been rising four times as fast as that of whites… No one can entirely explain the extraordinary rate of job loss among African Americans, though factors may include the relative concentration of blacks in the hard-hit retail and manufacturing sectors, as well as the lesser seniority of blacks in better-paying, white collar, positions.

“But one thing is certain: The longstanding racial “wealth gap”  makes African Americans particularly vulnerable to poverty when job loss strikes. In 1998, the net worth of white households on average was $100,700 higher than that of African-Americans. By 2007, this gap had increased to $142,600… To put it another way: in 2004, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the African American family had only one 12 cents. In 2007, it had exactly a dime.

“All this comes on top of the highly racially skewed subprime mortgage calamity. After decades of being denied mortgages on racial grounds, African Americans made a tempting market for bubble-crazed lenders like Countrywide, with the result that high income blacks were almost twice as likely as low income whites to receive high interest subprime loans…”

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