Transcription
At Stanford University, near San Francisco, Dr. Harvey Weinstein is an associate professor of psychiatry, and he also counsels students.
Tell me some more about Dr. Weinstein. He is a Montrealer who attended medical school at McGill University, but he refused to do his postgraduate work in psychiatry at McGill's Allen Memorial Institute because there, his father had been used as a human guinea pig. He says he became a psychiatrist to unravel the horror of what happened to his dad.
"Louis Weinstein, my father, was a 49-year-old Montreal businessman who was successful and dynamic, and whose life was destroyed by a series of treatments. He was someone who became anxious for a relatively short period of time, who went to get some help, and whose life was totally shattered by the experience."
His father was one of the more than 50 patients treated here at the Allen Memorial Institute under a secret program designed to develop brainwashing techniques. The Allan has an international reputation as a renowned psychiatric institution, but in the late 50s, the patients knew nothing of a cascade of mind-control experiments underway, including sensory deprivation and worse.
"He went in one winter evening and was put to sleep for approximately two months. He was given shock treatments of various kinds, gradually building intensity to an intensity and a frequency that was not certainly the routine or standard at the time."
Electroshock is a standard but controversial treatment for extreme depression. However, at the Allan, the shocks were administered not two or three times a week, but three or four times a day for weeks on end. Patients were reduced to vegetables. It was called deep patterning, and on top of that, the patients were given dangerous experimental drugs.
"He was given a whole slew of drugs, including amphetamines, likely PCP, insulin comas, barbiturates of all kinds, LSD. He was then forced to listen to recorded messages. It was called psychic driving. Once the patients were drugged and shocked to breakdown their minds, they were bombarded with taped messages for up to 16 hours a day."
This is how one patient remembers it: "[Music] At the end of the time, my father was someone who was unrecognizable to me or anyone else in the family or his friends. He was someone who could not function in this world, whose perspective didn't extend beyond the next five minutes, who had no recollection of the past and almost no recognition of the present."
The CIA was behind it. Documents pried loose in 1979 showed that through a front organization, the Central Intelligence Agency funded what was called the MKULTRA project in Montreal. It was run by Dr. Ewen Cameron. Cameron had a worldwide reputation as chairman of McGill's Department of Psychiatry and president of both the American and World Psychiatric Associations. Attracted by Cameron's reputation, Dr. Mary Morel went to study psychiatry under him. Instead, Cameron persuaded her to become a patient at the Allan. He drugged her, shocked her massively, erased 10 years of her memory, and even today, she has difficulty remembering some names and faces.
"He decided to ignore all principles, all medical ethics and medical principles. He used when he began. Colleagues, me, how low can he get? It wasn't as though Cameron didn't know what he was doing. Dr. Cameron was present at the Nuremberg trials. So I find that for someone who in 1945, 1946 was involved in evaluating and considering what the Nazis had done to helpless people in concentration camps, was five or six years later invading people's brains. That was more than enough."
For a huge lawsuit launched five years ago by Louis Weinstein and eight other of Cameron's Canadian patients at the Allan, they sued the CIA for ruining their lives and were willing to settle for as little as two hundred and fifty thousand dollars each. But the case has gone nowhere. In fact, the CIA has tried to dismiss them with twenty-five thousand dollars each as a mere nuisance settlement.
"We got a lot of stuff. The case is being carried by Joseph Raw, a prominent American civil liberties lawyer. So far, Raw has received no fees, and in fact, his firm has spent ten thousand dollars out of pocket. What he needs most is cooperation and documents from the Government of Canada."
"When the Fifth Estate case presentation came out in January of '84, we got call after call from the government. 'What can we do to help you?' Alerted them, they never made the slightest doubt that we were right. They were saying, 'What can we do to help? What can we do to speed it up?' We told them then, 'Why didn't something happen?' That is the same question you asked me before about motivation. All I can tell you is nothing did happen."
External Affairs Minister Joe Clark raised the issue with US Secretary of State George Shultz last May. Shultz promised to review the issue and passed it on to the State Department's legal adviser. The Canadians had high hopes for a settlement, but after Clark went home, Raw got stonewalled again, and he blames the Canadian government for not following through.
"What makes you think that it makes a pinch of anything you choose whether the Canadian government stands up or hollers or not. If the Americans don't want to settle, because the Americans don't want to settle because they're getting such a free ride, they would have to settle. If the Canadian government says, for example, 'I could settle this thing if I could be, and it could have Joe Clark's position for it, and for a day, I'll settle it. Why don't you do here? I call up George Shultz. I'd say, 'George, I hate to do this, but the pressure on me is terrible. I'm going to go to the World Court at The Hague in 30 days if this case isn't settled.' I'll tell you, this case will be settled. The United States is so red-faced about the way they've treated the Hague that they're not going to be able to let another, let now. I go, the communist government went, they raised hell. Mouth and how I went, they'd settle. They'd settle in a minute."
"What about documents from Canada? I understand there was an apology offered by CIA agents to Canadian intelligence officers."
"That's absolutely right, but they wanted a critical piece of evidence. Well, it's your, it's an admission of guilt. There's no question about the outcome. Ultimately, the question is one of time. We have a 79-year-old plaintiff. He's very ill. Is he going to live to see it? Or some of the other plaintiffs going to live to see it? I'm going to live to see it. It's a good question, and it depends. The answer depends not on us, because the court case will take another five or ten years. It depends on whether the Canadian government, I don't even know which one's in power, because one of them has been as little helpful as the other, Canadian government really gets to work on this and tells the US government they mean it, either by saying they'll go to the Hague or something similar to that."
External Affairs Minister Clark writes to us that he's still deeply concerned and intends to raise the issue once again with Schultz when they meet in Calgary next week. But for the victims and their families, time is running out. Harvey Weinstein's father is 79 now and failing.
"I think it's important that people understand what was happening to these Canadians and to my father in particular, because you hear words like 'deep patterning' and 'psychic driving,' and those are the words that Dr. Cameron used in his papers, and they sound very clinical, but don't give one a sense of the horror of this process."
Robert Logie of Vancouver, another victim, was deep patterned. He was injected with LSD, put to sleep for 23 days, hit with massive electric shocks, and brainwashed with recorded messages.
"I've never been able to sleep without medication since. The sleepiness I went through years and years and years of severe depressions. I dream about it. I all my waking hours to think about it. It's eating me up."
Janine, who art of Montreal, went through the same chamber of horrors. She had comfort treatment for common depression after childbirth, and that treatment destroyed all of her plans.
"Not being with my family, not being able to follow a career, not being able to study anymore, which I wanted to do very much. I would say that cost me my life."
Some of the most brutal drug and electroshock treatment was administered to Val Orlickau of Winnipeg, the wife of New Democratic MP David Orlickau. Mrs. Orlickau had come to Cameron for treatment of depression after childbirth, and the treatment almost destroyed her life as well.
"When I first went home to Winnipeg, I attempted to take my own life because I couldn't enjoy the way I felt, and I have a chronic need. I'm very dependent on other people, and I have a chronic depression which at times gets worse."
"You can be damn sure that if this had happened in Canada, the wife of an American senator or congressman, the American public would be riled as unbelievable, and there would be pressure on Canada that would be very substantial. Where's my country? Where's my country in this? I don't know, and it hurts, and it makes me angry."