Ken Follett Quotes

Central Intelligence Agency. The MKULTRA scandal involved testing LSD on unwitting American subjects. Under the influence of the powerful drug people did all kinds of unwholesome and illegal things with the CIA agents observing and in some cases participating. Several American citizens suffered permanent damage.

Neilson had flown in the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. It was the first bombing of Tokyo in WWII. He was shot down and captured. He was tortured including the torture of ‘waterboarding.’ The Japanese who administered the torture and who allowed it were tried before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East—the Tokyo War Crime Trials. They were convicted and punished. In the first decade of the 21st century the George W, Bush Administration argued that waterboarding was not necessarily torture despite the fact that Americans had tried and punished foreigners who engaged in the practice and even Americans who did. It was completely outlawed by military regulations but some Americans felt that it should be allowed by the CIA in dealing with terrorists.

What is amazing about this quotation is that it shows the naivety of one of the most sophisticated politicians in the country. He and many politicians were really surprised that commercial consumer marketing techniques would work so well. He and many others thought that the issue of marketing political candidates was something that should be debated. Meanwhile, all the pragmatic politicians of both political parties jumped on the commercial marketing bandwagon, but the Republicans tended to master and execute the techniques more skillfully.

His views are repudiated by current officials of Scientology, one of the major cults of the world. They claim that his views stem from a feud with his father, the Scientology founder.

See {627831} for her distinction between cults and religions.

This is a noteworthy quotation as it shows the nasty side of American intelligence activity in the aftermath of WWII. Mykola Lebed, 1909-1998 was a Ukrainian Nationalist war criminal working with the Nazis who was responsible for the murder and ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, He was convicted, and imprisoned for the murder, in 1936, of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki but was released when the Nazis occupied Poland. However, he was anti-Russian and our CIA enlisd his “services” to spy on the Soviets in the Ukraine. Then in 1949 he emigrated to the United States. As a war criminal, the law required that he be sent back to Europe, but this letter from the CIA Director “persuaded” the immigration authorities to not only allow him into the country, but the CIA paid him and he lived until in New York City until his death. There was no legal basis for his entry into the United States but the arrangements were made in secret. Polish patriots who had greatly assisted the Allies in fighting the Germans in WWII with great losses, did not even know that the war criminal that had tortured and murdered so many Poles was not only alive and well and living in New York, but was being paid by the United States government. The issue of what criteria are used for American intelligence agencies to use agents and what “rewards” can be given has been in controversy ever since. In one case in the late 20th century, the CIA actually employed an agent in South America who murdered and raped American nuns doing humanitarian work. The argument on the other side is that for espionage one wants terrible people with no moral compunctions as they make good agents. The question has always been at what moral cost and does a sociopath really make a good agent. See {633239}.

At that time in American History, the George W. Bush Justice Department had a small team of lawyers who wrote a legal brief that defined torture in such a way that many of the most common forms of torture were no longer legal torture, even though they had been torture in American law and were again torture after this embarrassing episode of American history. The renamed techniques were called “enhanced interrogation” and a few terrorist suspects were subjected to it before the rules and laws were changed and the “legal opinions” nullified. The FBI and military intelligence did not use the so called enhanced interrogation techniques as they felt that torture produced unreliable intelligence as the victim will say anything the questioner wants to hear to end the torture. They also thought the Justice department memo was sloppy and defective legal work. Senator McCain was a particular expert on torture in that he had, during the Vietnam War, been captured and imprisoned for 7 years during which he had been tortured on several occasions.