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The revelation that the CIA peppered food with LSD as part of a mind control experiment on the people of Pont-Saint-Esprit, France fifty years ago, resulting in mass hysteria from hallucinations and five deaths received mention this morning from the Telegraph, along with a number of other news sources in various countries. As of the time of this writing (3/12/10), as far as I've seen,there has been no mention in the American mainstream press.
By the time the story makes it onto the back page of a United States newspaper, or in the small print sidebar of a major news network's web-page, (if history is any guide),the writing will most likely speak blandly of the event...the CIA's manipulation and murder of an unknowing populace casually whispered into the din of bolder headlines screaming news of the health-care debate, celebrity gossip, or the latest "teacher sleeps with student" scandal.
According to the Telegraph's description of the event:
One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: "I am a plane", before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.
Time magazine wrote at the time: "Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead."
During a time when activists are struggling to shed light on the questions surrounding 9/11 in the decade that it happened in, they are confronted with questions like, "how could you believe your government would do this?".The story of Pont-Saint-Esprit serves as one more historical example of governmental entities maliciously conspiring against innocent people to achieve their own ends.
The only problem with stories like the one of Pont-Saint-Esprit is that they come out much too late. The generations most directly affected by such events are older and the youthful energy that often drives the momentum of successful movements to expose the truth diminishes, relegating the disclosure of such facts to the stature of "deathbed revelations" for the perpetrators who will never answer for what they did.
Another historical example of this:
In 2005, Robert J. Hanyok of the New York Times reported that the NSA deliberately distorted intelligence reports to policy-makers regarding the Gulfof Tonkin incident that took place in 1964.
Jesse Ventura recently commented on this during a guest appearance on The View when questioned about his lack of faith in the government:
""why do i have such little faith? Because I was lied to. A while back when I was teaching at Harvard in 2004 Robert McNamara came through, and he stated unequivocally that the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened. Well fifty-eight thousand of my generation was killed in Vietnam. That was the incident that got us into the Vietnam War. Fifty-eight thousand of my generation were killed and probably a million Vietnamese killed over an event that never happened""
The wall of manufactured media outrage at those who question government complicity in major events diminishes with time, but not fast enough to serve any real purpose but for exposing the truth when it's nothing but a historical curiosity. In order for the truth to have any impact, it has to come out in the time that its ramifications are still being felt. Otherwise, justice is lost in the wind...diluted with the screams of the ghosts who once demanded it.
