A former CIA officer on Tuesday said that he does not believe that the agency's research on individuals through Project MKUltra ever stopped. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets received testimony during a hearing earlier in the day focused on MKUltra. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) has led the push to reveal more about the program, which started under former CIA Director Allen Dulles's orders in 1953. Asked how the human experimentation program was kept quiet for so long, [Tracy Walder, former CIA staff operations officer], pointed to the destruction of much of MKUltra's documentation as the reason. Responding to Watergate, former CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all records related to MKUltra, according to a research paper. "You are absolutely not supposed to do that," she continued. "But I think some of this started coming to light because individuals want justice for what happened to them." Luna resumed the congressional hearings on the experimentation program after a ... new report stating that the CIA added a new document to its reading room about the agency studying mind control. "Administering drugs to people without their knowledge or consent, subjecting humans to psychological torture, and using prisoners and hospital patients as nonconsenting research subjects," Luna said as she opened the hearing. "These are crimes against humanity."
Latest
Latest News
Each news summary is created according to strict standards. Here's how we do it.
Each summary is created using a consistent editorial procedure. The target length is approximately 16 lines of 11-point Arial text in a 650-pixel-wide column. Up to 25% of a summary may be set in bold to emphasize the most important ideas. Summaries are composed of verbatim excerpts presented in the same sequence as they appear in the original news source, with very minor editorial additions. Where material has been omitted between excerpts, the omission is indicated with ellipses (...). Any words added by an editor for clarity or context appear in [brackets]. Our original news editor was Fred Burks. Tod Fletcher edited most summaries from 2007 through 2014, and Mark Bailey has served as news editor since 2014.