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Such a good question and how long do you have?? I do fear for journalism and there has never been a more important time for it. I spent 20+ years at the Toronto Star and am now independent (still writing, but doing documentaries and podcasts too). So it’s a bit of a different role as I’m not on the daily cycle and I get to choose what stories I cover (so am not beholden to the temptations some media outlets have to cater to ‘click bait.”) To your question of how we must be rigorous in our vetting of stories.. It’s always been crucial of course, and ever more so now. Sorry .. not a great answer for you but tough format to really dig in!

I’ve heard of the book but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I can’t say whether Charles Manson was involved in any specific MKULTRA experiments. But at one point in time, the vast majority of all the LSD in the United States had been bought and provided for study by the CIA. So in a perverse way, the CIA actually helped bring LSD to the U.S. .. and then came the whole “War on Drugs” era.

Oof. A big one to start. MK-Ultra was the CIA’s attempt to learn how to brainwash people. It started during the Cold War and a time of paranoia that the communists knew the secrets to mind control. What we learned doing this podcast, is that in some ways those experiments never stopped -- that desire to make people do something they don’t want to. During the 1980’s the CIA was involved in interrogations throughout Latin America and then fast forward to after 9/11 and there were the “enhanced interrogation techniques” at CIA Black Sites. Basically, torture interrogations that according to the exhaustive Senate Intelligence Committee Report, didn’t provide any “actionable intelligence.”

The baddies.. Hmm. We definitely as Canadians seem to have that attitude as we look south. But in terms of MK-Ultra and what happened in Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute (how psychiatric patients were used as experimental human guinea pigs), Canada was even more involved in funding Dr. Ewan Cameron’s work (which was also funded by the CIA). One of the themes in our series is that in times of fear .. when medical and medicine collide, these types of abuses take place. Nothing of course is ever black and white .. but I guess the baddies are those who are part of this bureaucracy. The good guys are those who speak out about it, often at great personal cost.

I'm tempted to point to some advertising or social media as the most successful and insidious form of brainwashing to date! But in terms of what MK-Ultra was studying, brainwashing never existed, and never worked. It was always just a form of torture — from Korean war PoWS right up to the so-called War on Terror. When people are tortured, they tell you what they think you want to hear to make the torture stop. It never leads to good intelligence. This Senate Report is amazing: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CRPT-113srpt288.pdf.

If that’s too dense, there’s actually a great movie about this called “The Report,” starring Adam Driver. He plays the guy who wrote the Senate report .. Dan Jones. And you can hear Dan talk about the movie here: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/don-cherry-divides-hockey-the-impeach-o-meter-hong-kong-cartoonist-zunzi-disney-plus-smokey-bear-and-more-1.5359850/meet-the-man-behind-the-investigation-into-the-cia-s-use-of-torture-after-9-11-1.5359854.