Korean prisoners of war in the 1950s were subjected to early MK-ULTRA experiments while in American custody, according to recently declassified CIA documents which confirm these experiments for the first time. The only reporting that previously referenced Koreans being used as guinea pigs for these experiments was journalist John Marks’s landmark 1979 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.” Using CIA documents, Marks traced the now-infamous MK-ULTRA project to its start, when it was known as Project Bluebird. In the book, Marks describes how, in October 1950, 25 unnamed North Korean POWs were chosen as the first test subjects to receive “advanced” interrogation techniques, with the overt goal of “controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.”

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The first reference to “Project Bluebird” in the NSA’s collection is an office memorandum from April 5, 1950. Addressed to CIA Director Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the document lays out the project’s goals, required training, and budget, all while emphasizing that knowledge of Project Bluebird “should be restricted to the absolute minimum number of persons.” The memo includes detailed plans for interrogation teams trained to utilize the polygraph, various drugs, and hypnotism “for personality control purposes.” These teams were to be made up of three people: a doctor (ideally a psychiatrist), a hypnotist, and a polygraph technician. The memo clarifies that while the doctor and technician would need to undergo approximately five months of training, the Inspection and Security Staff’s own department hypnotist could be made available immediately. In a later memo from February 2, 1951, there are inquiries into acquiring six “hypospray” devices: experimental instruments designed to covertly inject sedatives through the skin via “jet injection.” There’s a request to investigate modification of a “tear gas pencil” and other “devices of unestablished action,” such as the “German ‘Scheintot’ [sic] (appearance of death) pistol.”

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[W]hile the actual offshore locations are redacted, a write-up of a CIA meeting held one year later specifically notes a “project in Japan and Korea in which the Army had used a polygraph operator along with a team of psychiatrists and psychologists on Korean POWs.” Although the initial proposal for Project Bluebird mostly emphasized the potential for “personality control,” it’s clear that CIA officials were also interested in broader, more ambitious outcomes. One document summarizing a “special meeting” between U.S., British, and Canadian intelligence services notes the CIA’s desire to research “the psychological factors causing the human mind to accept certain political beliefs” and “determining means for combatting communism,” “‘selling’ democracy,” and preventing the “penetration of communism into trade unions.” Another meeting held on May 9, 1950, called for “the Surgeon General of the Army to place on the search list of the Nuremberg Trials papers request for information on drugs, narcoanalysis, and special interrogation techniques.”

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Notably absent from these declassified documents is any proof that similar experiments were undertaken by enemies of the U.S. The central animating myth behind MK-ULTRA and Project Bluebird is the narrative of the American soldier who returned home after months of imprisonment by enemy forces, only to be revealed as a hypnotized double agent. Throughout the Korean War, American moviegoers were screened films starring and narrated by future president Ronald Reagan. These films showed American troops being psychologically tortured by Chinese and North Korean soldiers until dangerous, anti-democratic ideals were implanted in their minds without their knowledge.

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Everything has to come after guaranteed housing. Everything has to come after guaranteed food and water. Everything has to come after guaranteed healthcare. Everything has to come after guaranteed electricity and internet in this day and age.

If you can be unhoused, you can have everything taken from you. If you can be underfed, you can have everything taken away from you. These are not liberties or privileges. These need to be the absolute floor for human rights.

Only when- and if- they regain the humanity they lost the moment they started to accept the fallacy that their "race" makes them better than the rest of us can feminism as a truly global project aimed at bettering the lives of all women emerge, be those women white or of color, trans or cis, nonbinary persons, poor or middle class, disabled, neurodivergent.

It all leads back to the same place, and that place is the rift that European colonialism deliberately created between women, making white women complicit in the racism they have since been all too eager to blame solely in white men. Because, as Stephanie Jones-Rogers remind us, white women were not passive bystanders to the racism crimes of white men: "They were co-conspirators.""

We weren’t allowed to give anyone as much as a handshake. Even if we had family visiting us, if a doctor or nurse came in during that time, and found as much as me (a teenager) hugging my sister, it got treated like I was holding her at gunpoint as a hostage in a bank robbery. My visitation was revoked, I was placed in solitary for a few days I can’t really remember well, and still got set with 24/7 constant monitoring even in the bathroom for a while afterwards.

This nurse was kind enough to just awkwardly and visibly turn away during this time. She always chose this because everyone was Infinitely more comfortable with her showing us she wasn’t watching than the people who would watch us like a hawk and would report if we tried to cover our chests or crotch.

She’d also recognize when someone with an eating disorder just actually couldn’t eat what was expected of us to eat. And she would have snacks and other things for us to eat instead, and wouldn’t punish us if we couldn’t finish our plate.

She got fired. She was accused of being a child predator because the small kids and the teenagers liked the one person who treated them like a human being. There was a criminal investigation that literally led to nowhere because SHE didn’t commit any crime. She was still barred from entering the profession ever again and had to fight to keep it off her permanent records.

The exact thing that got her pushed over the edge? A kid asked for her specifically after they had a bad panic attack

Why? Because she had screaming nightmares and that meant she was “too dangerous” to ever be unmonitored, but they didn’t have the staff to watch her specifically, so she always had to be where the one staff watching all of us (about 20 kids) could see her. She was considered too much of a flight risk to go to the cafeteria or to any of the activities (one hour in a prison-like outside area and one hour in an art class). Some of us tried to talk to her just to introduce ourselves and the staff threatened to take away our privileges.

The privileges in question? Doing our laundry, visitation, not being in solitary, attending the one movie night per week, showering alone and “only” being checked on every 5 min, going outside, and being allowed to draw (the only thing to do outside of the two hours of activities).

I went to three different mental hospitals. In all of the ones I went to, these things were privileges. There was only one that allowed us to drink any water outside of meals or taking meds; they had a mandatory PE and we were given one cup of water after exercising and you only had a minute or two to drink it before they took it away. That was it.

In my second mental hospital, I got along too well with my roommate so they made us switch rooms to be roommates with people we didn’t get along with. We were specifically told the reason was because we were too friendly. There was another patient who had been dating someone since before she went to the mental hospital, and the person she was dating got admitted to a different ward while she was there. The nurses, therapists, and psychologists told her she would not be discharged unless she broke up with him.

Skirt go spin! <3