The CIA has "come clean": the publication of the notorious "Family Jewels" is a listing of material that should be seen as highly embarrassing, often illegal operations the agency carried out since its inception in 1947. Fortunately, most of what the report contains, is already known; perhaps unfortunately, no doubt what went into this publication are only the already known crimes and gaffes, with more still buried inside the agency vaults.

Amongst the highlight is a reference to the CIA Science and Technology Directorate Chief Carl Duckett who "thinks the Director would be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program" - the program being Sidney Gottlieb's drug experiments, also known as MK-ULTRA. Elsewhere, this material is listed as "potentially embarrassing Agency activities" and described as "Experiments in influencing human behaviour through the administration of mind- or personality-altering drugs to unwitting subjects."

We already know of how these experiments were performed in Canada, where several hundreds of people are trying to sue whomever they can for the unknown, experimental and unethical treatment performed on them. We know that apparently one agent died when he was unknowingly used by colleagues in an experiment. But what the publication does not focus on, is that amongst the innocent victims, there were children as young as four.
"The CIA bought my services from my grandfather in 1952 starting at the tender age of four," wrote Carol Rutz of her experiences. "Over the next 12 years, I was tested, trained, and used in various ways. Electroshock, drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and other types of trauma were used to make me complain and split my personality (to create multiple personalities for specific tasks). Each alter or personality was created to respond to a post-hypnotic trigger, then perform an act and (I would) not remember it later."
This Manchurian Candidate program was just one of the operational uses of the mind-control scenario by the CIA. The US began these experiments after World War II when it made a grab for hundreds of Nazi scientists and doctors who had been researching mind control in concentration camps, fearing they would fall into Soviet hands. Though Werner von Braun and the rocket brain drain is probably the best known example of Nazi scientists turned Uncle Samites, he was just the tip of the iceberg. Those responsible and in charge of the Nazi death camps, the men experimenting on innocent men, women and children, were soon given extraordinary powers and money to continue their research in the deepest secret, in America.
"We have no answer to the moral issue," former director Richard Helms infamously said when asked about the nature of the projects. The release of the documents reveals how the CIA funded these real-life Dr Strangeloves and engaged pharmaceutical companies to help its experiments. The agency appealed to big pharmaceutical companies to pass on any drugs that could not be marketed because of "unfavourable side effects" to be tested on mice and monkeys. Any drugs that passed muster would then be used, according to an internal memo, on volunteer US soldiers.

The Family Jewels files do not provide further detail into the numerous mind-control programs, such as MKULTRA, covertly propped up by the agency. Perhaps the absence of such information, should pose questions itself. For example, in 1953, MKULTRA was given 6 per cent of the total CIA budget without any oversight. Six percent is a large portion of any budget, yet the extent of the experiments have always been systematically downplayed; could it be that the quick mention in the latest publication is purely in the hope that people will read over it?
The nature of the experiments, gathered from government documents and testimony in numerous lawsuits brought against the CIA, is shocking, from testing LSD on children to implanting electrodes in victims' brains to deliberately poisoning people with uranium.
The programs, though carefully hidden, continued into the 1970s - when Helms ordered much of the documentation to be destroyed. It means that the true scope of the project will never be known - which some claim is beyond belief.
Some believe the CIA completed its goal, initially outlined in the early 1950s, of altering a personality and having someone "perform an action contrary to an individual's basic moral principles". The attorney for Sirhan Sirhan, Lawrence Teeter, has said his client was programmed to assassinate Robert Kennedy in 1968. Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, volunteered to take part in CIA mind-control experiments when he was a student at Harvard University in the late 50s. It is but the tip of an iceberg that seems immune from global warming.