Gold9472
01-08-2007, 09:46 AM
Canadian victim of CIA brainwashing seeks class-action against government
http://www.brooksbulletin.com/news/national_news.asp?itemid=59666
DENE MOORE
Sunday, January 07, 2007
MONTREAL (CP) - Janine Huard says she was a young mother of four with mild post-partum depression when she checked herself in for psychiatric treatment at a Montreal hospital more than five decades ago.
Huard says what happened after that still haunts her today and she will be in a federal courtroom this week seeking to launch a class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government for Cold War-era brainwashing experiments carried out on her and hundreds of other patients.
"I was a guinea pig," Huard told The Canadian Press.
On and off over more than a decade at McGill University's renowned Allan Memorial Institute, Huard says she received massive electroshocks and was fed more than 40 experimental pills a day.
Huard, who will be 79 at the end of the month, says she was drugged and subjected to so-called "depatterning," during which repetitive recordings were played in her ear for weeks on end, one of them telling her she was of no use to her family.
"I came out of there so sick that my mother had to live with me for 10 years," Huard says. "I couldn't take care of my children any more."
Huard says she lost memories and suffered from migraines.
The ordeal came at the hands of Dr. Ewen Cameron, an Edinburgh-educated, New York-based doctor who pioneered "psychic driving," by which he believed he could erase the memories of patients and rebuild their psyches without psychiatric defect.
The idea intrigued the CIA, which recruited Cameron to experiment with mind control techniques beginning in 1950. The McGill experiments were jointly funded by the CIA and the Canadian government.
As director of the institute until 1964, Cameron conducted a range of experiments, often without the knowledge or permission of patients.
Cameron gave patients LSD and subjected them to massive and multiple electroshock treatments. Some underwent sleep deprivation or total sensory deprivation.
Others were kept in drug-induced comas for months on end while speakers under their pillows broadcasts messages for up to 16 hours a day.
The experiments were part of a larger CIA program called MK-ULTRA, which also saw LSD administered to U.S. prison inmates and patrons of brothels without their knowledge, according to testimony before a 1977 U.S. Senate committee.
The CIA eventually settled a class-action lawsuit by test subjects, including Huard, and the Canadian government ordered a judicial report into Cameron's experiments.
The allegations have not been proven in court.
A federal court hearing is scheduled to begin Wednesday to decide whether to approve a class-action lawsuit.
In 1994, 77 of the mostly unwitting Canadian patients were awarded $100,000 each from the federal government but only those who suffered "total depatterning," meaning they were rendered to childlike state.
More than 250 others were denied compensation because their treatment was less intense and had fewer long-term effects.
In 2004, a federal appeal court overruled that decision and awarded a former patient the $100,000.
"There are many, many former patients of Dr. Cameron who applied for the $100,000 whose applications were denied on the same basis . . . because they misapplied the decree," says Alan Stein, Huard's lawyer.
The federal appeal court decision means hundreds of other former patients should also have received compensation, he says.
"Even though she (Huard) might not have had the number of electroshock treatments as other applicants, she was subject to psychic driving, she was given experimental drugs and she had electroshock treatments," Stein says.
Lawyers for the federal government have argued that too much time has passed for patients to appeal a federal panel decision.
Huard says the treatments affected her four children and her marriage.
"Justice has to be done," says the grandmother of four and great-grandmother of four.
"It's impossible that they ruined our lives like that. They shouldn't sweep it under the carpet."
http://www.brooksbulletin.com/news/national_news.asp?itemid=59666
DENE MOORE
Sunday, January 07, 2007
MONTREAL (CP) - Janine Huard says she was a young mother of four with mild post-partum depression when she checked herself in for psychiatric treatment at a Montreal hospital more than five decades ago.
Huard says what happened after that still haunts her today and she will be in a federal courtroom this week seeking to launch a class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government for Cold War-era brainwashing experiments carried out on her and hundreds of other patients.
"I was a guinea pig," Huard told The Canadian Press.
On and off over more than a decade at McGill University's renowned Allan Memorial Institute, Huard says she received massive electroshocks and was fed more than 40 experimental pills a day.
Huard, who will be 79 at the end of the month, says she was drugged and subjected to so-called "depatterning," during which repetitive recordings were played in her ear for weeks on end, one of them telling her she was of no use to her family.
"I came out of there so sick that my mother had to live with me for 10 years," Huard says. "I couldn't take care of my children any more."
Huard says she lost memories and suffered from migraines.
The ordeal came at the hands of Dr. Ewen Cameron, an Edinburgh-educated, New York-based doctor who pioneered "psychic driving," by which he believed he could erase the memories of patients and rebuild their psyches without psychiatric defect.
The idea intrigued the CIA, which recruited Cameron to experiment with mind control techniques beginning in 1950. The McGill experiments were jointly funded by the CIA and the Canadian government.
As director of the institute until 1964, Cameron conducted a range of experiments, often without the knowledge or permission of patients.
Cameron gave patients LSD and subjected them to massive and multiple electroshock treatments. Some underwent sleep deprivation or total sensory deprivation.
Others were kept in drug-induced comas for months on end while speakers under their pillows broadcasts messages for up to 16 hours a day.
The experiments were part of a larger CIA program called MK-ULTRA, which also saw LSD administered to U.S. prison inmates and patrons of brothels without their knowledge, according to testimony before a 1977 U.S. Senate committee.
The CIA eventually settled a class-action lawsuit by test subjects, including Huard, and the Canadian government ordered a judicial report into Cameron's experiments.
The allegations have not been proven in court.
A federal court hearing is scheduled to begin Wednesday to decide whether to approve a class-action lawsuit.
In 1994, 77 of the mostly unwitting Canadian patients were awarded $100,000 each from the federal government but only those who suffered "total depatterning," meaning they were rendered to childlike state.
More than 250 others were denied compensation because their treatment was less intense and had fewer long-term effects.
In 2004, a federal appeal court overruled that decision and awarded a former patient the $100,000.
"There are many, many former patients of Dr. Cameron who applied for the $100,000 whose applications were denied on the same basis . . . because they misapplied the decree," says Alan Stein, Huard's lawyer.
The federal appeal court decision means hundreds of other former patients should also have received compensation, he says.
"Even though she (Huard) might not have had the number of electroshock treatments as other applicants, she was subject to psychic driving, she was given experimental drugs and she had electroshock treatments," Stein says.
Lawyers for the federal government have argued that too much time has passed for patients to appeal a federal panel decision.
Huard says the treatments affected her four children and her marriage.
"Justice has to be done," says the grandmother of four and great-grandmother of four.
"It's impossible that they ruined our lives like that. They shouldn't sweep it under the carpet."