
The Black Vault: A FOIA obsessive’s UFO-filled empire - samclemens
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/black-vault-foia-john-greenewald.php
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Fnoord
> The Black Vault’s biggest score to date may be its material related to
> MKUltra, a top-secret CIA project that involved dozens of mind-control
> experiments on US citizens and others. [..]

Why would this be the biggest score (title doesn't reflect it)? Was this the
first documentation regarding MKULTRA/ARTICHOKE/BLUEBIRD?

For those interesting in CIA's attempts to explore New Age (e.g. apply "remote
viewing") I can recommend the documentary The Men Who Stare At Goats [1].
There's also a Hollywood adaptation of it.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats)

~~~
keanebean86
I assume the CIA leaks mkultra and related stuff to keep the crazies busy and
troll other countries.

There's also patents for seemingly impossible technology filed by the Navy.

[https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a30645682...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a30645682/navy-
ufo-patents-compact-fusion-reactor-inventor/)

~~~
HillRat
Except MKULTRA was part of CIA’s “family jewels” —- indeed, it was so infamous
that a cover letter to the DCI suggested they not familiarize themselves with
the program in order to maintain plausible deniability. And MKULTRA was only
part of a set of equally concerning operations, such as its progenitors,
BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, or Project OFTEN, which collaborated with
pharmaceutical firms to uncover drugs too risky for release that might have
covert applications (and which were then tested on unwitting military
personnel).

While CIA certainly uses disinformation for a variety of reasons, this doesn’t
obviate the fact that the agency has been — largely if not quite entirely in
the past — a very, very amoral actor.

~~~
csilverman
I have to wonder about the extent to which the CIA really believed this was
possible, or if it was more along the lines of "well sure, it sounds batshit,
but the Soviets are doing it and if there really is something to it, we don't
want to be behind in the game."

When one has infinite funding and no ethical oversight, the pit really is
bottomless.

~~~
sterlind
Mkultra seems pretty plausible to me, at least with the science they had at
the time. LSD was making huge waves in the psychiatric community, and many
humint objectives like interrogation and brainwashing are inherently applied
psychology. LSD was a breakthrough tool that laid the psyche bare, if only
they could discover how to harness it.

Combine that with amoral thinking about the cold war and "greater good" and
it's understandable, yet reprehensible, that they dosed prisoners and johns in
brothels.

~~~
csilverman
It's funny you mention that, because the first thing that crosses my mind,
whenever I run across stuff like this, is that the people who perpetrated
these things were probably nice polite folks who had friends, got along with
their neighbors, were kind to their families, and held the door open for
people when they went to the supermarket.

And then they went to work every morning and played their part in monstrous
endeavors that—on coming to light—make the rest of us question our faith in
humanity.

I don't doubt that some people who wind up doing these things are legitimately
sociopathic. But I also have a disturbing suspicion that many of them were
probably normal, and bought into the idea that drugging and blackmailing some
random person played a role in defending America. What matters more—some
lowlife from the streets, or national security? Sacrifices have to be made,
etc.

Pretty much every atrocity I know of—while spearheaded by evil people—relied
heavily on the ability of normal, decent people to rationalize what they were
doing.

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motohagiography
I'd say this looks like a hit:

"I asked Greenewald if he considers himself a journalist. After all, when he
files foia requests, he does so under the news media category in order to get
fee waivers."

[...]

"But Greenewald doesn’t identify that way. “Even though I write articles and
interview people and get quotes, I’ve just never considered or labeled myself
a journalist, simply because I didn’t do the formal schooling,” he said. "

Cue a spiteful bill from those agencies for back waived fees and other means
to take the site down or punish him with process. I hope the gofundme for his
defense gets posted here too. :)

I'm sure it's nothing.

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sterlind
> _Back then, the turnaround time for a request was far quicker than it is
> now. “It’s really night and day,” he told me recently. It averaged, by
> Greenewald’s estimate, a couple of months before he heard an answer; today
> the wait is often measured in years._

This is sad, and something we should be pushing back on hard. FOIA needs an
SLA agencies can be held accountable to.

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lgats
if you are having trouble scrolling:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Acjr.o...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Acjr.org%2Fspecial_report%2Fblack-
vault-foia-john-
greenewald.php&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS876US876&oq=cache%3Acjr.org%2Fspecial_report%2Fblack-
vault-foia-john-
greenewald.php&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.2655j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

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IncRnd
You need to allow facebook.net in order for the page to scroll..... It is a
UFO page...

