(Ken Silva, Headline USA) As conspiracy theories about the July 13 Trump assassination attempt continue to percolate, the CIA has taken the rare step of publicly responding to one of them—denying that the shooter, Thomas Crooks, was a victim of its mind control program.
“These claims are utterly false, absurd, and damaging,” a CIA spokesperson told Gizmodo on Thursday, referencing the agency’s infamous mind-control program “MKUltra.”
“The CIA had no relationship whatsoever with Thomas Crooks. Regarding MKULTRA, the CIA’s program was shut down more than 40 years ago, and declassified information about the program is publicly available on CIA.gov.”
Gizmodo and other outlets noted that the CIA usually doesn’t respond to public conspiracy theories. With the Trump shooting, conspiracy theorists are comparing it to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The JFK assassination had at least one direct link to MKUltra: A scientist involved in the CIA mind-control program, Dr. Jolyon West, “examined” Jack Ruby—the man who killed alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald—after Ruby alleged that the JFK shooting was a wider conspiracy.
Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West was a CIA and military-affiliated scientist who conducted research on brainwashing techniques, especially involving the use of LSD. He “examined” Jack Ruby in prison after Ruby started saying JFK had been killed by a conspiracy … pic.twitter.com/7KosH4OuPB
— Nougat Hand Bank (@WireRacing) July 6, 2021
And while the CIA claims to have ended MKUltra, the agency used similar torture tactics against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
“The history reveals that CIA doctors were hunting for a ‘truth serum’ to use on prisoners as part of a previously secret effort called Project Medication,” the ACLU revealed in 2018 after obtaining records about the torture at Gitmo.
“The CIA studied records of old Soviet drug experiments as well as the CIA’s notorious and discredited MK-Ultra program, which involved human experimentation with LSD and other drugs on unwitting subjects. The CIA doctors involved in Project Medication wanted to use Versed, a psychoactive drug similar to some of those used in MK-Ultra, on prisoners.”
Meanwhile, victims of MKUltra experiments in Canada recently lost a lawsuit over the matter. That litigation stemmed from CIA-sponsored experiments that took place at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute under psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron.
Court records from the lawsuit describe Dr. Cameron’s “Montreal Experiments” as consisting of extreme mind-control brainwashing experimentation on “unwitting” patients by methods of such as drug-induced comas, intensive electroconvulsive therapy, “psychic driving,” sensory deprivation, and the administration of a cocktail of drugs to suppress nerve functionality and activation.
Lawyers for the U.S. government have argued that the CIA should be immune for its actions. An appeals court sided with those lawyers last year, and Canada’s supreme court reportedly declined to hear the case earlier this year.
There doesn’t appear to be any evidence that Crooks was experimented on in a medical setting. Questions remain about who he may have been in contact with online.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
