4,358 New MKUltra Docs To Be Released After Crowdfunding Campaign
John Greenewald has been FOIA requesting undisclosed, government documents since he was 15 years old, having filed roughly 9,000 requests. So, when he realized a batch of documents he received regarding the CIA’s mind control project MKUltra, was missing thousands of pages, he demanded an answer. Now, after a two-year battle to acquire those documents, the CIA finally acquiesced, though it commanded a fee.
Greenewald was made aware of the documents by a Reddit user who cross-checked his cache with their original index, finding 4,358 missing. Greenewald called the CIA to request them and was unsurprisingly met with resistance.
He was told the documents contained information regarding behavioral modification and were unrelated to MKUltra. But he wasn’t convinced, so he filed another FOIA to attain them.
Typically, Greenewald can submit a fee waiver for a FOIA request, under the grounds that he is a journalist and the publication of the files is for public interest, bettering the public’s understanding of the way government operates.
But this time his waiver was denied, with the CIA requiring a payment of $425.80 for his request. Unfortunately, Greenwald couldn’t come up with the money, instead turning to a GoFundMe crowdsourcing campaign. His goal was met within five days.
The disclosure of documentation surrounding the MKUltra program is of high public interest lately, especially with the release of the Netflix docudrama Wormwood, which investigates the death of former CIA scientist Frank Olsen, who became a victim of the program.
MKUltra was a program focused on studying the potential to control the minds of unwitting subjects, often through the administration of psychoactive substances, such as LSD.
Frank Olson was one of the CIA’s own, who was unknowingly given LSD before his suspicious death, falling from the 13th story window of a New York hotel.
Greenwald’s website was one of the first publications to release the CIA’s MKUltra documents after acquiring them in 2004. Since then, they have become the most commonly searched documents of more than 2,000,000 on the CIA’s website.
It will still take some time before this missing batch of documents makes its way into Olson’s hands and is published on his website, but we look forward to seeing what else the CIA has kept hidden from the public regarding one of its most nefarious and clandestine programs.
Watch this episode of Beyond Belief, in which John Greenewald discusses his career filing FOIA requests to uncover secret government programs:
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What's Happened Since CERN Fired Up the LHC Again?
The Large Hadron Collider was fired up for the third time, as scientists search for “new physics.”
Run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. The purpose of the collider is to allow scientists to test theories and predictions of particle physics and find new physics.
Completed in 2008, the Large Hadron Collider has had two “operational runs,” from 2009 to 2013, and 2015 to 2018. Now this month, after a long hiatus to improve and upgrade data collection and detectors, the Large Hadron Collider is at it again.
As the journal Nature reports, the first two operational runs tested and explored “known physics.” The discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, or “god particle,” in 2012 was part of that work and reaffirmed current models of how the universe works. This time they are looking for new physics and unknowns such as dark matter.
