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May. 28th, 2004 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsycheEnough evidence for trial of CIA drugging
A San Jose man who claimed the CIA secretly had given him LSD in 1957 as part of a mind-control experiment -- causing him to try to hold up a San Francisco bar in a fit of paranoia -- offered enough evidence of possible drugging to go to trial on his $12 million damages suit, a federal judge ruled Monday.
The decision by Chief U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel cited what appeared to be an admission by a former operative in the CIA program, in a sworn deposition in February 2003, that he had slipped LSD into one of Wayne Ritchie's drinks.
"I drugged guys involved in about 10, 12 (instances)," former federal narcotics agent Ira Feldman, who worked for the CIA's Project MKULTRA, told Ritchie's lawyer. "I didn't do any follow-up. ...You just back away and let them worry like this nitwit, Ritchie."
[...] The CIA program, a response to reports of brainwashing of American prisoners during the Korean War, was an attempt to find chemicals or techniques that could control human consciousness.
According to testimony at congressional hearings in the 1970s and other records, the CIA and federal narcotics agents started giving mind-altering drugs to unsuspecting government employees, private citizens and prison volunteers in the early 1950s and continued to do so for at least a decade.
A San Jose man who claimed the CIA secretly had given him LSD in 1957 as part of a mind-control experiment -- causing him to try to hold up a San Francisco bar in a fit of paranoia -- offered enough evidence of possible drugging to go to trial on his $12 million damages suit, a federal judge ruled Monday.
The decision by Chief U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel cited what appeared to be an admission by a former operative in the CIA program, in a sworn deposition in February 2003, that he had slipped LSD into one of Wayne Ritchie's drinks.
"I drugged guys involved in about 10, 12 (instances)," former federal narcotics agent Ira Feldman, who worked for the CIA's Project MKULTRA, told Ritchie's lawyer. "I didn't do any follow-up. ...You just back away and let them worry like this nitwit, Ritchie."
[...] The CIA program, a response to reports of brainwashing of American prisoners during the Korean War, was an attempt to find chemicals or techniques that could control human consciousness.
According to testimony at congressional hearings in the 1970s and other records, the CIA and federal narcotics agents started giving mind-altering drugs to unsuspecting government employees, private citizens and prison volunteers in the early 1950s and continued to do so for at least a decade.