Add to my list
Free-lance writer Thomas (author and coauthor of 27 titles on sensational subjects from Jesus to white slavery) gives a recklessly melodramatic rendering of an important subject: the horrific, CIA-sponsored mind-control conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron of McGill University. In March 1987, William Buckley, CIA station chief in Beirut, was snatched by a ShiRe hostage team and delivered into the deadly hands of Dr. al-Abub. When CIA director Casey received a videotape of Buckley, drugged and obviously tortured, he spurred an international network of experts on terrorism to come up with a detailed profile of a doctor who could justify dispensing pain and death. He could have looked in his own fries. Decades before, under the fanciful name "Artichoke" (Allen Dulles' favorite vegetable), the CIA unleashed a campaign to learn the brainwashing techniques used on American soldiers during the Korean War. In Cameron, however, the CIA had found a perfect Dr. Frankenstein. Artichoke was renamed project MK-Ultra, and icy, Scottish-accented Cameron was drowning in money to break and "depattern" minds. He used electroshock on helpless victims again and again; then he plunged his patients into weeks or even months of insulin-induced sleep--and while they slept, they listened to endless tape-loops of their most painful confessions. When Cameron's patients were awake, he injected them with LSD and ordered them to write or record the "confessions" that would torture them while they slept. Finally, in the 60's, the CIA pulled the plug on Cameron. A vastly important subject mangled by muddy, irresponsible exposition as Thomas melodramatically animates subjects he could not have interviewed--including Dulles and Cameron. The public deserves better sources; still, the hot subject matter may attract quite a few readers.
