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It was damning. They were experimenting on American citizens. I hate conspiracy theories that run a muck. But you know,
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a former CI director is the one who came up with the term conspiracy theory to discredit people by making them sound
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like crazy people when in fact there was such a thing called MK Ultra, Operation
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Grasshopper or MK Chickwit. You the CIA did crazy crazy stuff from roughly 1952 to 1975. The Chinese told us in like
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1951 that the Russians were using LSD to try to engineer it to be used as a mind
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control drug. That was disinformation. The truth was the Russians had no LSD program. The Chinese did. So they tried
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to throw us off the off the scent by blaming the Russians. We panicked. And by 1952, we started
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this program called MK Ultra, which began by using LSD experimentally. They started by dosing their own employees
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without telling them. Several committed suicide. One jumped out of a hotel window.
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>> Dosing them with what? >> LSD. >> With the hope that >> see if we can control them. See if we
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can plant memories that didn't actually happen. Then they decided, no, it's not
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a good idea to dose our own people. Let's just dose strangers out in public.
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So they went to San Francisco, rented a safe house. They hired prostitutes to go
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out on the street, pick up John's, people who hire prostitutes, bring them back to the safe house, dose the John's
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with uh LSD, and just see what happens. But I mean, these are like serious crimes you're committing against people.
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The CIA paid sex workers to lure men to safe houses where agents drugged them and then watched them through oneway
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mirrors and recorded their behavior. >> Exactly. >> They tried to erase their personality.
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>> Nice, huh? >> The goal was often to break and rebuild the human mind. In 1973, the CIA
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director ordered mass destruction of the MK Ultra Files. >> That day, he testified before the Church
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Committee. The church committee specifically told him, "Do not destroy any documents." He went back that
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afternoon to the CIA and said, "Destroy everything." >> Why? >> Because it it was damning. They were
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experimenting on American citizens. They were they were experimenting by spreading diseases in American cities.
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He was fined like $150 and um about 15% of the documents were overlooked and survived. We'll never
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know exactly what happened under MK Ultra.