Suing the CIA Over MKUltra

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:44 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1057. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and That over there is real-life attorney Matt Cameron. How are you doing, Matt?

0:00:53 Matt: Spent the weekend getting tortured by the CIA. Having a good time.

0:00:56 Thomas: Really? Again?

0:00:57 Matt: Yeah .

0:00:57 Thomas: No, I'm joking.

0:00:57 Matt: No, I just don't, a lot of reading. I've done a lot of reading about this subject over the years, but I just went back and rewrote a bunch of stuff and had a great time doing it.

0:01:06 Thomas: Yeah! Yeah, this is kind of a little bit out of left field in some ways, but I am so excited to talk about this. And that is always what makes the best content of any kind. Even though this is not, you know, news or Trump related, I think it's nice to have a little departure now and then.

0:01:21 Matt: Needed the break, frankly. So I think it's good to, we've heard a lot about the Supreme Court, a lot about Donald Trump. There is actually a tie -in to recent events in this. For the most part, this is stuff I've been buttonholing people at parties for years and trying to tell them what their government's been doing. And anytime that you say the word CIA mind control, there's a look that people get on their faces.

0:01:37 Thomas: Yeah, so anyway.

0:01:39 Matt: I'm very familiar with this look.

0:01:40 Thomas: I want to believe. And... I'm a little worried, the Marianne Williamson thing, that like, have you gone down some weird rabbit hole, or are you just talking about things that actually happen that are so crazy it is hard to believe they happen? We'll see...

0:01:42 Matt: Yeah, exactly.

0:01:54 Matt: This is going to be the best sourced episode we've ever done. I'll tell you that. Yeah, guaranteed.

0:01:58 Thomas: Wow. All... right. Well, after this break, which you can avoid at patreon.com/law, we'll get to it.

0:02:06 Matt: Since I mentioned it, I want to talk about my sources very quickly because I'm going to say some things that if you're not familiar with the CIA, CIA's domestic activities in the United States, you might question my sanity. So I just want to mention where I'm getting this information that I'm about to tell you, all of which is completely true and verified by actual journalists. So the book that if you want to just know about this, the best place to start is a recent book from 2019 called Poisoner in Chief. It's about Sidney Gottlieb, who we'll talk about a bit. It's by Stephen Kinzer, who's a very well -respected former New York Times journalist and professor. Great book, very well reviewed at the time. Another book I really enjoyed is Chaos by Tom O'Neill, which talks, it's kind of re -evaluating the Manson murders and completely blowing apart the official helter-skelter narrative that the prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, had very much an interest in getting out there at trial. Lot of great stuff in there.

0:02:17 Thomas: What does that have to do with this? Oh,

0:02:54 Matt: You don't want to know. No. Devil's Chessboard, which is a biography of Allen Dulles and The Rise of the CIA, has some stuff about this. The Corporation has been on this for reasons we'll talk about. They had a great podcast series called Brainwashed, and they also had a very influential documentary, which we'll play a quick clip of, called The Sleep Room on a show called The Fifth Estate, sort of their 60 Minutes. And WBUR here in Boston did a podcast called Madness, a documentary podcast that follows a lot of this. And Errol Morris did a documentary series called Wormwood. I've also been relying on primary sources, including the Church Committee, of course, a wide range of respectable journalistic sources, including the CBC, New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and Jacobin. So

0:02:56 Thomas: Jeez.

0:03:29 Thomas: And the aliens that abducted him last night and told him all this while probing him.

0:03:32 Matt: Yes, that's right. That too.

0:03:34 Thomas: That too. But that's like a minor. So it's a couple of footnotes on that one.

0:03:35 Matt: So, right. Those are the major sources. Also I'm have to mention The Search for the Manchurian Candidate of 1979 by Harvard fellow and visiting scholar at Harvard Law, John Marks, which I've listened to on Audible, but you can actually find the full text of that book on the CIA's website, Which is very funny to me. Since I've just mentioned all these sources, let me tell you just for a few minutes about what I think is the single most interesting thing in 20th century US history. I really think there's nothing more interesting than this. It's not great, but it's interesting. The Central Intelligence Agency accidentally created the American counterculture of the 1960s. Didn't mean to do it, just completely accidentally, but by running a series of tests. Now, funded by the CIA through what they call cutout front organizations.

And so the people receiving them often never knew that they they were CIA-funded. They had kind of bland names. They would write to get grant applications, and the CIA would encourage them to do certain kinds of studies. And the CIA was obsessed with the idea that our enemies during the Cold War were engaging in brainwashing techniques, that they were using drugs and hypnosis and other things, that communism essentially was a form of mass brainwashing.

They were concerned about what had happened to our soldiers in the Korean War, who had come back, many of them with psychological issues from things they suffered while prisoners of war.

And they thought there was some kind of work on this and it became a national security issue for us to learn how to brainwash people and we're obsessed with the idea of truth serums, brainwashing, of trying to find ways to recruit enemy agents without them even remembering we'd done it, um, know that kind of stuff, so.

0:03:50 Thomas: I Wow.

0:04:59 Thomas: We've brainwashed people into capitalism and we don't want someone brainwashing them out of it.

0:05:02 Matt: That's Right. Yeah, very much, very true. Um, one of my favorite facts about this entire thing is that the CIA purchased the world's entire known supply of LSD in 1959. Purchased it from Sandoz Laboratories for $240,000. Nobody really knew how to use it at the time. Albert Hoffman, who invented it, knew he had something on his hands, but nobody really knew what it was for. One of the first things they did was give 300 milligrams, and this is a substance that is usually measured in micrograms, to an elephant just to see what would happen. And he died in five minutes. RIP, Tusco. Yeah. And so then they started giving reasonable doses to people. And I just want to mention, again, just straight up facts. I'm not going to sensationalize this. I'm not going to speculate in conspiracy theories. I'm just going to tell you a number of people you've heard of who participated in these experiments through CIA front organizations. Let's start with Ted Kaczynski, who was subjected to interrogation techniques starting in 1959 at Harvard. He voluntarily participated in a study at Harvard in which he was subjected to humiliation verbally.

Once a week for three years, his brother said he never really talked about this, but from what he knew, that his brother was meeting with people during the study to verbally abuse and humiliate him, that he was forced to write a lot of essays and that he described it as the worst three years of his life. And that, of course, became the Unabomber. And about how that might have played into who he became later.

0:05:33 Thomas: Geez.

0:06:17 Thomas: Mean, if I were seeing a sex worker for a humiliation kink, I guess I would maybe make up a similar story if someone found out. I don't know.

0:06:24 Matt: No, this is, and again, we know these studies existed. Whitey Bulger, the Boston gangster, of course, infamously, extremely violent and dangerous. He volunteered for an experiment while he was doing his first prison term, and it was supposed to be testing cures for schizophrenia. And it ended up that they were just giving him LSD pretty much every day in prison. So if you could imagine taking LSD in a prison environment, not knowing what it is, because nobody knew what an LSD was at the time.

0:06:48 Thomas: Talk about set and setting.

0:06:50 Matt: He had horrible visions. It really messed him up. One of the jurors in his case actually came back later, and a couple of years ago, and said that she wouldn't have voted to convict him on the murder charges. She said she would have on some of the other gangster type stuff, but the murder chargers themselves, she said because she corresponded with him after the trial, she got into a writing relationship with him and he shared that he had chronic insomnia and had horrible nightmares every night since 1957, since he was made to do this. And it fundamentally changed who he was. Again, I don't want to disclaim too much responsibility here, but he was a monster, and you have to wonder how people get that way. Better news, these studies also resulted in Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist. Life completely changed, and he introduced LSD to the Grateful Dead, who were previously a bluegrass band, and became a bluegrass band on LSD.

0:07:34 Matt: That's the simplest best way to explain the Grateful Dead. And honestly, when you look at songs like Ripple and Broke Down Palace, like these are beautiful lyrics that really could only have been written on psychedelics. Kesey was sort of the original hippie, the original acid test guy, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but he also famously was responsible for a lot of the early hippie movement. He was a volunteer participant in 1959 in a Stanford study where he was administered LSD.

And he entered Stanford as a straight -laced jock, started this study, and within six months, he was a full -on hippie and starting the San Francisco countercultural movement. So on and on. And again, indirectly, this ended up with Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and any number of other people were affected by the funding that was put out there that got in these various places. So, just to establish all of that. And then there is Charles Manson. I don't want to get into that too much.

I will say that in Chaos, Tom O 'Neill asks Alan Schefflin, who's – that's somebody I'd love to talk about this another time. Hypnosis and the law is another interest of mine. Alan Schepplin was one of the experts on hypnosis and law. Law. And Tom O 'Neill just asked him straight up if he thought there was any possibility because there's a lot of connections between the Manson family and the CIA -funded experiments.

He asked him if it was possible the Mansons murders were part of an MKUltra experiment gone wrong. And Shetland said, no, it was an MK Ultra experiment gone right. So I will just leave it at that.

0:08:52 Thomas: Okay.

0:08:53 Matt: There's a lot of stories here that are just completely unbelievable. And the wonderful thing about Chaos, which everybody really should read, it's a great book, is the author does not push any one narrative on you. He just puts out everything he's learned from decades of research on this and just sort of says, I don't know what to do with this. You figure it out, basically.

0:09:07 Thomas: I don't know what to do with that, Matt. Oh.

0:09:08 Matt: Exactly. That's how I feel. That is how I felt about a lot of these things. There were so many different stories. Morris documentary I mentioned, Wormwood, is about Frank Olson, who was a CIA employee who was dosed at a party. They just sort of decided it would be fun to dose some people. They did this all the time. They they just put LSD into people's drinks, ended up either being pushed or jumping out of a window in a hotel.

0:09:28 Matt: Very strange story. Yeah. Yeah, that was one of the two known deaths, but there are probably more than that out of this because they were constantly dosing people without their permission, including at one point, there's so many colorful characters in this, but one of them was a former narcotics agent named George White, who was insane. And he set up three CIA safe houses in San Francisco, which were just upscale brothels. And they just gave everybody LSD and just to see what would happen. And who knows what came out of all that. At one point, they dosed a federal holiday party and a deputy US marshal named Wayne Ritchie ended up completely losing his mind for a couple of hours as you do. And again, remember, nobody knew what LSD was at the time. So this guy really thought, he had no idea that anything was capable of making him

0:09:28 Thomas: I've heard of that yeah wow the hell

0:10:08 Matt: Do this because he's seeing demon cars coming down the street. He becomes extremely paranoid and he's a deputy U.S. marshal. So he goes and gets his gun and robs a bar. And just just because he thinks, whatever, he's having these visions. And he could not explain at trial what he had done. And again, he was an upstanding guy. He was a military veteran, no previous record, had great moral character as far as anybody knew, and suddenly just spontaneously goes out and robs a bar. The judge decided that it must have been PTSD from military service, gave him probation. And he doesn't find out that it was an MKUltra experiment until he read it in the New York Times 20 or 30 years later.

0:10:08 Thomas: That's yeah

0:10:41 Matt: And many stories like this of people whose lives were affected. So I'm I'm just blazing through this as quickly as possible, just so people understand just how bad this was. We're going to talk about one particular case in Canada. Obviously, legally, these are all significant violations of the Nuremberg Code, which is not binding necessarily. But the first rule, the Nuremberg Code, was again, of course, established after the Nuremberg trials. There was a doctors' trial of a doctor named Karl Brandt and a bunch of other doctors. Most of them were executed. In 1947, they determined that rule one of the Nuremberg Code was that informed consent must be obtained from experimental subjects. I think that's something we all understand now. And of course, there are human review boards that get into anything like that.

0:10:54 Thomas: Embarrassing That that needed to be written down, never occurred to me, but yeah, okay, sure.

0:11:22 Matt: Yeah, well, when you read about it, I mean, of course we all know what the Nazis were doing with horrible medical experiments, but the Japanese actually put the Nazis to shame on some of this stuff. That's not really been reported. Yeah. No, Unit 731, Kinzer gets into it in the Gottlieb book, Gottliebs, his early career, he was the person who ended up running MKUltra. Early career was actually taking the people, sort of handpicking the ones from Japan and Germany who had done some of the worst stuff, giving them immunity, giving them stipends, and having their research adopted. Because they got incredible data, obviously, by torturing people to death.

They got data you could never get anywhere else, and a lot of it was actually very useful, as horrible as that is. So that's where all this is coming from. Hard to take in. I know I just bombarded everybody with a lot of information about MKUltra right there.

But it's the kind of thing, as you read about it, it starts to become more and more normal, but it is very hard to talk about CIA mind control, even knowing that there was this program from about 1953 to 1966, and possibly around those times as well, but that's what we know, in which the CIA was intentionally conducting experiments in mind control and brainwashing on American citizens and also Canadian citizens without their consent, almost completely without their consent, and

0:11:22 Thomas: Yeah yeah oh geez, I don't know about this I I know it's but a minor wrinkle of the - how wrong this is, but I thought the CIA was supposed to do stuff like - not in the United States, but was it a "give me 24 hours" situation, and then that as long as you say, give me 24, sometimes 48, mostly 24 hours, then you're allowed to do whatever.

0:12:36 Matt: Really, yeah, no, that's right. They're not. That's right. 13 apparently.

0:12:47 Thomas: Well, I assume they had enough staff to cycle through the 24 hours at a time.

0:12:51 Matt: 24 hours, that's right, one at a time. Generally, of course, the CIA, as we're going to talk about, is one of the hardest institutions in the federal government to sue because it can always fall back on national security. And that's the easiest way to protect yourself from immunity for pretty much anything.

0:13:03 Thomas: I had to give that guy LSD for national security reasons. Sounds like a hard sell for me, but okay.

0:13:10 Matt: They got a unanimous Supreme Court to agree, not that it was national security. Now let's talk about that for a second. So one of the main problems with suing, of course, is that you don't have any information. You have witness accounts, you know that these things happened, you have some information that's been released, and the Church Committee was able to get a lot when they were investigating CIA and FBI. That was the sort of general broad -ranging Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of misconduct by the federal government. There was a lot on MKUltra in that. I'll link to those transcripts.

Ralph Nader had to sue to try to get through his organization Public Citizen in 1977. After the church committee had concluded, one thing they weren't able to get were actually the names of the researchers and the institutions they were associated with, which is a pretty important part of suing, obviously. This went all the way to the Supreme Court. I thought this was a really interesting legal question about how you get this information out of the CIA. And of course, under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. 552, there are nine possible exemptions to things the government doesn't have to release.

And you would think in this case that the CIA would rely on what they usually do, which is exemption one, which has anything that touches on national security. But I think it's very telling that in this case, which ended up as CIA v. Sims in 1985, this is a unanimous decision from Justice Burger, with Marshall and Brennan concurring, not dissenting, concurring, they did actually find that the CIA correctly relied not on Exemption 1, but Exemption 3. And again, I'll tell you what this is, but it's just really telling that Exemption 1 was not raised at all because they knew they couldn't really even say, just as you just said, that it's not really national security when you're dosing people non -consensually. They relied on was Exemption 3, which is information that is prohibited from disclosure by another federal law. And

0:13:21 Thomas: Yeah,

0:14:47 Matt: The law that they raised was the National Security Act of 1947. 47.

0:14:52 Matt: Exactly. That's right. Pretty much. Yeah. They love that one. 102(d)(3) of the National Security Act says the director of central intelligence shall be responsible for protecting intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure. So the question for the case became, are these mad scientists intelligence sources and methods? Because they were not classic sort of spies or people they rely on for intelligence. There was a lot of back and forth because the D.C. Circuit had to send it back to the district court because they didn't actually really define, nobody defined what intelligence sources actually means. They came up with a very broad definition. And the Supreme Court eventually agreed that Congress intended the phrase "intelligence sources" to include an extraordinary diversity. That's what they said, of different kinds of people, including potentially mad scientists.

0:14:47 Thomas: The they just use regular scientists? They're like, no, we need, there's a mad scientist is necessary.

0:15:40 Matt: No. Do the stuff you're going to hear about in Canada, you have to have a mad scientist. That's the only way it's going to work.

0:15:46 Thomas: Jeez. Sure why they give out that kind of PhD. It's weird that they do that.

0:15:51 Matt: Studies, yeah. So we thus conclude that MKUltra researchers are intelligence sources within the broad meaning of 102D3 because these persons provided, or were engaged to provide, information the agency needs to fulfill its statutory obligations with respect to foreign intelligence. And their point was that at the the time, everyone believed that it was necessary for us to pursue these paths, right? Because we thought that the other guys were doing it. And so because they thought it was okay at the time these count as intelligence sources, we

0:15:52 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, okay, The theory is that there's some mind control slash, have the statutory responsibility to like collect taxes or build roads or whatever. It's like, well, yeah, that could be useful for that. Like, anybody, I think anybody should use that justification.

0:16:31 Matt: Sure. And now the president can. The president could just dose us all, apparently, as part of his job. I think the Supreme Court has upheld that now.

0:16:37 Thomas: If it's an official dosing and

0:16:40 Matt: That's right. If just to note, Marshall and Brennan, you would have expected a dissent from them usually in this kind of a case, but they actually concurred and just said they agreed, generally speaking, that these qualified as intelligence sources, but that we shouldn't adopt the CIA's definition of intelligence sources. And they should have just defined it as any relationship which the parties understood to be confidential, because that's not necessarily the case with these institutions.

But I will say that this confidentiality that they did have with many of these institutions and researchers allowed the researchers to go way beyond what they would have done ethically otherwise. And we'll never know. There were some very famous people who we know we're involved in this, but also a number we don't know for sure.

And people whose reputations would have been completely destroyed if it was known that they were participating in some of these things, because they were testing these things on, as we said, on prisoners, but also on people who are living on the street, on sex workers, on some volunteering military members. But for the most part, they were people who were fairly disadvantaged. So there's just a lot of stories we'll probably never know of what actually happened.

So the Church Committee was really helpful in getting out a lot of this information, but the CIA actually very wisely destroyed most of the MKUltra documentation. So there's just a lot we don't know. They were only able to get about 8,000 pages, and we still don't know that list of names that they're trying to get. So that's the first question, obviously, is how you even find the information that you need.

And that's a lot the purpose of this kind of litigation is going to just be to create a historical record and something that the government doesn't want want a record of. The plaintiffs in these cases were looking for cash damages as well, but in many cases, they really just wanted apologies and they wanted some reckoning and historical record.

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0:19:50 Matt: Focus today, though, on the legal actions that have gotten the least attention, which are out of Canada. And me when And I should say, my interest in MKUltra started when I got COVID a couple of years ago, and I had to skip Thanksgiving.

0:20:03 Thomas: You blame the CIA. Nice.

0:20:04 Matt: That's right, they gave me COVID. I had to skip Thanksgiving, so I just played video games and listened to books about MKUltra for about three days straight, my own kind of brainwashing. So yeah, pretty great. Three of the better days of my life. Read a lot since then. It's just one of those things I keep coming back to. So that's just kind of where this comes from. But the Canadian stuff was new to me, and it has only come up more recently in the news. It was mentioned in passing in some of these books and sources, but they were more focused on the American activities.

But it's astonishing to me first of all that the United States – well, I guess nothing should surprise me about the CIA – but that they were giving about $500,000 over the course of five or six years to a truly mad scientist. And unfortunately, I think, as history's worst Cameron. He is by far the worst Cameron I've ever heard of. Donald Ewen Cameron, very well respected psychiatrist at the time, someone who's considered a real leader in the field.

He was running the Allan Memorial Institute in Quebec, in Montreal. So the CIA got interested in his work. And through a front organization called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, they had all kinds of organizations like this with bland names. They invited him after reading a paper that he had published called Psychic Driving. So let me tell you about Psychic Driving, which is horrific, really horrific. We're going to listen to a couple of people talk about it very quickly here.

But the idea, and he invented this, and the only reason that it was ever carried out was because the CIA paid for it. But it's the idea that you can take people with mental illness, and I should say, and probably should have said up front, there's some pretty disturbing stuff here about abuse and torture of people with mental wellness, just so you could be aware.

You take people and you put them basically in a drug -induced coma, and you just leave them in that coma for a month or longer. And you just play tapes over and over and and over again until they either have been reprogrammed, he called it repatterning, and this is obviously the kind of thing the CIA was looking to try to do, his idea was that it could actually cure mental illness by replacing the bad patterns with good patterns.

But he didn't just do good patterns, so let's listen. We've got a couple of people here. I think it's much more effective to hear them talk about it. This is from that documentary on the CBC I mentioned called The Sleep Room, and voice we're going to hear is from Linda McDonald, who went thinking she was going to be going in overnight and ended up five months later.

0:20:12 Thomas: Why'd

0:22:20 Clip: I was, had to be toilet trained. I was a vegetable. I had no identity, I had never existed in the world before. Like a baby. Just like a baby that has to be toilet trained.

0:22:39 Clip: And this is, this is one of the twins in 1962 before I went to town, and this is the same one I think. I just look at the pictures and I know who that is, who they are, but I don't remember them as my children at all. I mean, I know that they came from my body, but there's no, that's all. I don't know, and that's because I was told that. So these are my children.

0:23:10 Matt: That's Linda McDonald. Horrific, obviously. I didn't even know that was possible, and I guess nobody knew until we started doing it.

0:23:17 Thomas: From, like, she was put on these drugs so much without her consent, obviously, that she, like, lost all her memories and stuff.

0:23:25 Matt: Not only that, but Cameron was also, along with LSD and mescaline, administering electroshock therapy at 20 to 40 times the standard dose, two Two to three times a day. So shocking people's memories out of existence as part of his de-patterning. I want to play another clip here of something that I think is arguably even much worse from someone named Robert Logie, and

0:23:33 Thomas: Oh Jesus.

0:23:45 Clip: Also know the words, which were, you killed your mother, you're killing your mother. Yep. It was alive and well. It was a lot of love. Over and over again, this goes on. Well, like I said, it takes about two seconds to send out a message. And this was going on for 23 years. And at home, at home. My mother was there, and why was she there, didn't make any sense.

0:24:19 Matt: The horror movie scenario of being in a barbiturate coma, just being unable to move and just hearing a speaker under your pillow saying you killed your mother over and over again on a loop for 23 days. I just can't even, I, I don't know how that guy, Robert Logie, has serious mental issues still, insomnia and depression, and has had all kinds of problems, and he looks really tortured. Like, you see his face when he's talking about this, just looks really haunted.

Um, I I wanted to mention this one in particular because part of the way that Cameron was selling this was that these would be positive messages, that he would reprogram people with nice, happy things, talking about how they're good people and how they make friends easily and whatever. There's no other explanation. He has to have been a complete sadist, because why else would you do that? Why would you put that in a loop? You killed your mother. Another subject, and not in this documentary, but I'd read about elsewhere, where I wrote down the loop was, you do not trust women.

You are small and inferior. You are unable to compete with other men over and over again. There are other people who are told that basically they're horrible people, that they're fundamentally unlovable, that your parents don't love you, that kind of stuff, right? Just like horrible messages that you're being subjected to while you're in a trance state for days at a time. He did, to be fair, he did play some positive messages, but none of it helped. None of it did anything. Psychic driving was generally found to to be completely worthless and damaging.

0:25:02 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:25:35 Matt: There's nothing good about it.

0:25:36 Thomas: I don't know why. I mean. Guess there's some weird theory behind it. But like telling someone something a million times. It's not true. I mean call me crazy. I don't know why that would do anything.

0:25:43 Matt: Yeah. Well, yeah. Especially if you're trying to reprogram their entire personality and like your personality becomes, you killed your mother. I mean, it's just, I don't know.

0:25:48 Thomas: Yeah. Personalities are pretty complex like I don't think you can just reprogram one that's hard

0:25:53 Matt: Yeah, there's a lot you can do with hypnosis. And I really believe in hypnosis as a practitioner and somebody who's just done a lot of reading about it, but I don't think you can actually completely transform someone. That is not possible. You can get them to stop smoking or run a marathon or whatever, but yeah.

0:26:07 Thomas: I DON'T THINK ANYBODY COULD GET ME TO RUN A MARATHON IF I'M BEING HONEST WITH YOU, DO YOUR WORST, GIVE IT A TRY, I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING, I DIDN'T KNOW HYPNOSIS WAS ANYTHING OTHER THAN BULLSHIT, OH

0:26:16 Matt: Have to want to, so there's that.

0:26:18 Thomas: THAT'S OH I HAVE THAT POWER TOO I CAN GET PEOPLE TO DO SOMETHING THEY ALREADY WANT TO DO YEAH

0:26:20 Matt: Yeah. Well, you know, but like if you want to quit smoking and you know how it is, like you're compelled to smoke, right? But you can actually it's incredibly effective because it goes under the hood and gets into the subconscious and it tells you you're just not a smoker and smoking is disgusting. So I guess hypnosis was part of the deal, but not in Cameron's research, but in MKUltra as well. That's a whole other story, and I'd love to do an episode on the law of hypnosis because it's some incredible stuff there. But on paper, what Cameron was doing, along with trying to work with these other mental issues, was to just find a cure for schizophrenia. And that was actually the cover for the Whitey Bulger.

0:26:26 Thomas: YEAH GIVES YOU THAT EXTRA BOOST OR SOMETHING YOU'RE NOT SCHIZOPHRENIC you're not schizophrenic you're nuts stupid why would that do anything

0:26:54 Matt: Exactly right. See how that works out? Yeah. No, it's just like just to – it's such a weird, simplistic, like five-year-old's view of how brains work.

0:26:58 Thomas: Yeah All our brains have a constant internal monologue of the things that are true at all times, you're in a chair, there's a house, it's a bit, and like if you do a different monologue then that changes your whole reality it's

0:27:13 Matt: Right. Yeah, it's the secret, but on a loop. It's actually stupider than the secret. You're right. We found something stupider than the secret. Yeah. But I mean, Whitey Bulger said he actually thought he was doing something good for science when he volunteered for this. He was taking time off his prison sentence, but he actually felt like he was going to do something that was a noble thing to do by volunteering for these experimental drugs, not knowing it was going to be LSD, because he was told that this is something that would be a cure for schizophrenia, and he was gonna be a part of the control group. Cameron was an extremely extremely ambitious man. He was a very powerful figure. People referred to him as godlike that he ran the institution that way. And he just really wanted to win a Nobel Prize. And this is the kind of things he was doing.

0:27:21 Thomas: Stupider than the secret sure do They give a Nobel Prize in sadism? I didn't know they had that one. Yeah. I

0:27:55 Matt: If they did, yeah, He would have won it a couple of times. Just to mention a couple other things he was doing, he was really into sensory deprivation. So he would put people in for 35 days at a time into a box with, and just kind of keep them on a drip, basically. Don't know if you've ever done this, but I've done a float tank before for an hour and you should. It's a great experience, but I would not do it for 35 days. And lose

0:28:12 Thomas: Haven't but I want to yeah yeah I have there's I don't know if there's anything I would do for 35 days like at all yeah

0:28:21 Matt: My mind. Anybody would lose their minds. And he really thought that as part of this too, you heard Linda McDonald saying that she was rendered incontinent. Basically she had to be toilet trained again as an adult. That was one of his obsessions, was the idea that you had to remove people's ability even to use basic bodily functions and to really completely wipe them and get them down to an infant state and rebuild them.

And of course, what it ended up doing instead was giving them far worse mental problems and turning some of them into violent abusers. So the families were badly affected by all of this too. And that's where the lawsuits come from, obviously, because many of these people aren't with us at this point. So in the '80s, one of my legal heroes, Joseph Rauh, a civil rights attorney. One of the people who helped get the Civil Rights Act passed, as well as the Voting Rights Act.

He defended people before the House Un-American Activities Committee, did a bunch of other great progressive stuff, took on this case, and it was a really difficult case just to start with because you're talking about Canadian, just average people, trying to sue the CIA and to prove that

0:28:22 Thomas: Geez

0:29:19 Matt: The CIA knew that they were negligent in doing this. And nobody in Canada wanted to take the suit on. So we got Joseph Rauh and Jim Turner, at the time. And Turner himself had been a research assistant on the Church Committee, was very familiar with these things. And Rauh was a fighter. He was somebody that was willing to take on a fight like this, and he did, for years and years.

And he, just again, just a great example, and I want to try to highlight these more, of attorneys just doing incredible work in the trenches, trying to get real work done for real people. And you have to go into court and prove, which should be pretty easy to do, that the CIA knew that they were paying for dangerous experiments, that these things were life -threatening, that this was reckless, that Cameron was already engaged in research that no reasonable psychiatrist would do, those are all open questions.

There's a published district court case in D.C. in '88 about this, I took a look at. They did allow the case to go forward with some limitations. One of the issues in here was the statute of limitations, because ironically enough, of course, many of the people had no memory of this, and they had no, because of what was done to them.

So there was an argument to be made that they sued too late once the stuff came out and they realized they had been part of these experiments. The court graciously found essentially that, even though you can't really account for what they called insanity in tolling particular statutes of limitations, that they could take it into account for when, when they found out and the fact that it was the defendants that did this to them.

So they went back and looked at the application that Cameron had put in, and he was pretty clear. And again, he was invited to do this by a CIA front organization after they read his paper about psychic driving, about the thing with the tapes. And he, in his application, said that he was going to be doing electroconvulsive shock, sensory isolation, drug -induced continuous sleep, the psychic driving that we talked about, agents, LSD. He was very clear about what he was going to do.

And the CIA not only signed off on it, but Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra, was deposed for three days during this. And I heard an interview of Joseph, excuse me, of Jim Turner, talking about this, about what it was like to depose him. And he said that you could just tell when you sat across from Gottlieb that he was an assassin. He actually trained him initially.

His initial first job for the CIA was to assassinate Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, the Congolese leader, one of the people that we were worried about going over to communism. He was completely unrepentant. So Sidney Gottlieb had nothing to say about anything that he had done, and he thought it was all justified. And they made it very clear, and they admitted in deposition, that they did not inquire about these methods. They didn't inquire over the well -being of the patients, about any ethical issues. Issues.

0:29:19 Thomas: So I wanted to say uh at some point I know it's hard because there's so much information here but the fact that we're in court here and we're doing all this stuff this isn't because Cause all the, so much of this stuff sounds like the stuff your stoner older brother's friend told you when he, whatever, but it's not like all of this is just, yeah, I bet you they did this. And I, you know, after taking a big, uh, you know, big puff of something, it's like their depositions are there. This isn't like, a lot of this has been admitted, right?

0:32:07 Matt: Yeah. Oh, yeah, totally, and they were very open about it. And also, we know from the actual CIA primary sources, the ones that actually survived the distraction, as well as the findings from the church committee, and as well As some very, very good journalism. So again, it's just I know, and I really want to tell you, everything I've said so far is, is, I can't stress enough, is sourced.

0:32:29 Thomas: It's frigging nuts. Yeah.

0:32:35 Matt: And, you changed. I mean, I've never trusted the federal government, obviously, but it really changed a lot of how I think about a lot things when I started to learn more and more about this particular thing. Of course, we'd like to think the CIA is not doing anything like this anymore, but, you know, who knows? Probably not. So there, Gottlieb actually said in his deposition that he felt it wasn't necessary to go into a lot of detail about how they were handling the subjects. So that was about as much as he had to say. And he said he had no problem with any of it, and they didn't care about consent. So, did show, obviously.

0:33:00 Thomas: Are these people? It sounds like there have been a number of different kinds of people that you're talking about, whether it's, you know, a prisoner reducing their sentence or is it, was it like mental patients? Was who are these people?

0:33:09 Matt: The suit I'm talking about right now was from 1988, and that was on behalf of nine plaintiffs from Canada, from this Allen Institute that was run by Ewan Cameron. And I wanted to focus on the Canadian one because it's been in the news recently and because it has barely been reported. And it's actually, of all of the MKUltra stuff that I've heard about, and I feel like I've read about most of it, this is actually concentrated to be the worst. I think it's the worst stuff that they paid for, so I think it's worth the focus.

0:33:31 Thomas: Jeez. So these were people who were like, committed, quote, to

0:33:36 Matt: Yes, so these are people, by the way, not schizophrenics necessarily, there were some, but many of these people had pretty minor stuff going on, like postpartum depression, anxiety, things like routine mental conditions. Somebody actually had just kind of like a facial twitch, like a nerve damage thing that they were trying to fix. And he ended up going through psychic driving. None of them ever consented to any of this or knew what was going to be happening. They just knew they're going to be going through some treatment to work with their problems. Linda McDonald, I believe was pregnant at the time as well. And her son is actually trying to get some damages saying that he thinks he suffered from this as a fetus. Obviously, electroshocking a fetal isn't a great idea.

0:33:55 Thomas: My God. Wow.

0:34:08 Thomas: It's like Stranger Things, but real.

0:34:12 Matt: Don't get me started on the actual thing because they were doing that too. That was actually being done, the stuff they were portraying with the

0:34:19 Thomas: Oh. Oh, the trying to like make people telekinesis and crap remote viewing.

0:34:21 Matt: Remote viewing. They were actually experimenting on children for some of of that stuff. It's not totally fictional. Yeah.

0:34:24 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Wow. Super cool. Super chill.

0:34:30 Matt: No, that's a whole other thing. And the Russians were doing it much worse, obviously, but we were both...

0:34:35 Thomas: That's fine then.

0:34:35 Matt: Yeah, that is fine. We just had to keep up. It was a space race of torturing children. His research in '57, and he was funded by the CIA from about '57 to '61. He had plenty of time, and he received about $500,000 in today's money to do this. And he told the organization, which I don't think he actually knew it was the CIA, but he wrote back at the end when the funding was done and said he couldn't and have done this work without them.

So, you know, can't really miss that. In this 1988 lawsuit, after going to all of this work to depose Sidney Gottlieb, all these other people, to just doing hero's work in the D.C. district court, trying to get this suit going, the Canadian government commissioned a report. And there's a lot of controversy about this report, the Cooper Commission. And Jim Turner, the other lawyer here, thought that this had to have been influenced or paid for even by the CIA, this report, because it completely exonerated.

I just want to read a quick finding from that report because it's pretty astonishing. They did their own kind of investigation of what Cameron was doing. Here's in the executive summary up front.

The practical side, and judging by the standards of today, most psychiatrists would conclude that depatterning was a failure, not only in terms of efficacy as a medical treatment, but also in that it represented a level of assault on the brain that was not justifiable, even by the standards of the time, and even in light of the rather rudimentary level of scientific and medical knowledge of those days compared to today. These conclusions are, however, evident only with the benefit of hindsight.

0:35:55 Matt: Right? Couldn't have possibly known. Even though at the time we think that it probably wasn't justifiable, but they claim they have experts that said that nobody was prepared to state that it was conducted in disregard of the limits of acceptable medical practices, etc., etc. This was an astonishing report. Nobody expected that result because of the extremity of what Cameron was doing. Jim Turner thought it was deliberate sabotage because what they were trying to do was obviously get the CIA out of this lawsuit. They were trying throw it on the Canadians because the Canadian government was putting some funding in for Cameron's research. Jim Turner was actually told by one of the CIA lawyers that they were going to try to hang this whole thing on Canada.

0:35:54 Thomas: Yeah. Couldn't have known. Impossible to know.

0:36:29 Matt: They eventually reached a settlement, and that was the best that they could do. They're looking for a million, million each. They ended up paying the families a total of $750,000. The Canadian government threw in $20,000, I think. I don't know if that was Canadian or US. And so that's all they ended up getting, which honestly, for a suit against the CIA, that's probably about as much as you're going to end up getting.

0:36:45 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:36:46 Matt: That's not easy to do.

0:36:47 Thomas: That means they won or settled.

0:36:50 Matt: Well, they settled in a way that this is the other thing that's really disappointing about all of this is there's never been an admission of liability or An apology from anybody involved in any of this. And that's that's really what the families want is just somebody to say this happened and we're sorry. And that was part of the settlement is that nobody's taking responsibility. Just get the money. And at that point, the families just really wanted the money, so understandably. But the more recent news is from the class action that was filed in 2019. So there are two different suits right now pending in Canada.

And this is why I think our Canadian listeners might know more about all of this than American listeners because it looks like it's been covered pretty well up there. The New York Times has done some very short stories on it. I couldn't find very much else out there. There's both a class action and a direct action. I want to talk about the legal issues involved in this.

So the direct action is pretty straightforward because it doesn't require the court to sign off on a class the way that the class action does. And it's been going forward. I don't think it's got a resolution yet, but the attorney, Alan Stein, I heard him interviewed about this, and he's decided specifically not to sue the CIA because he knew that would take too long and you've got families that want results sometime soon. And so they're looking for about $850,000 per family, and they're just suing the Canadian authorities, which seems like probably is going to work a little better.

0:36:56 Thomas: Okay.

0:38:01 Thomas: You think they'll say sorry or unfortunate?

0:38:04 Matt: What they're hoping is for a big story. University acknowledges that these results were unfortunate, that these experiments were controversial, but they're claiming, yeah, very unfortunate. They're claiming that Cameron was autonomous and independent and that he was not actually working directly with the university. So they're trying to get out of that.

0:38:25 Thomas: He brainwashed us, man. And we tried to tell him, hey, don't do this. And he turned the powers on us. And then it was like, ah, what can we do?

0:38:26 Matt: Yeah. He just kept leaving these messages that says, I am autonomous and independent.

0:38:33 Thomas: Yeah. Keep funding me. Keep funding. Keep funding, keep funding me, keep forever.

0:38:38 Matt: Exactly. Yeah, just psychic driving. But the class action just was in the news pretty recently. It's what got me remembering that I really want to talk about all of this. So in 2019, Attorney Jeff Orstein in Canada filed on behalf of the families of the victims. They're saying potentially up to 300. And it still hasn't been certified because the U.S., understandably, has been fighting its inclusion in this lawsuit. And the interesting legal question around this is about the 1985 State Immunity Act. And most countries at this point have some kind of State Immunity Act. It essentially means that you can't sue a foreign jurisdiction in your courts. It's just kind of something that all countries agree to do it.

It makes sense. It's pretty hard to do. U.S. equivalent of this was passed in 1975 under 28 U.S.C. 1604. It just says that subject enactment, a foreign state shall be immune from the jurisdiction of the courts of the U.S. and the states except as provided, et cetera, et cetera. So it's pretty straightforward. The Canadian one has an exception under R.S.C. 1985, section 18. Foreign state is not immune from the jurisdiction of a court in any proceedings that relate to any death or personal or bodily injury. So obviously, we do have personal and bodily injury here. Passed in 1985. And of course, the injuries happened a couple of decades earlier.

So the United States has been vigorously arguing that this is not a retroactive statute and that the statute should be applied as it was in 1961, when these experiments, the funding of these experiments ended. Prevailed, unfortunately. On the 30th, the Supreme Court of Canada finally declined to review the appeals court's finding that the U.S. was immune from suit. Appeals court had found that a 3-0 decision.

And the U.S. will not be included in this lawsuit, which is really unfortunate because again, they were the major funder of this. Himself said he couldn't have done this without the U.S. funds, and they're going to move forward against the Canadian authorities. So at least that'll be happening. That is probably the last chance these families had to get real money out of it, because Foreign Tort Claims Act potentially does allow for this kind of thing.

And that was a big issue at the time in the 80s case as well. Was just in the news a couple of of months ago. So MKUltra continues. I will say that the legacy of MKUltra is still with us because a lot of the things that they did learn during these many, many experiments over 13, 14 years ended up being used at black sites around the world after 9-11, unfortunately, when, as Obama put it, when we tortured some folks.

With the information that we learned from the kind of stuff that Sidney Gottlieb got from the Japanese and the Germans and their unspeakable experiments in those places. So real stuff. It's real people's lives. And very of it is actually able to be proven through primary sources because the CIA destroyed so much. And we only know as much as we do because of a lot of lawyers who did this work.

Rao actually published an article that I read called "Anatomy of a Public Interest Case Against the CIA." It's well worth reading, which I'll link to as well. He concluded in that, that instead

0:39:18 Thomas: Yeah.

0:41:25 Thomas: [Bleep] the CIA.

0:41:26 Matt: Yes, exactly. Entirely. Of admitting its wrongdoing and accepting responsibility, the CIA chose simply to ignore the plight of its victims. The importance to all Americans of curbing this continued arrogance by a secret agency of our government could hardly be overstated. We felt that judicial accountability for these past abuses could help to do so. And I will submit that is one of the best reasons to be a lawyer is to look for judicial accountability for government action. And I think there's really, I think it's one of the highest callings that we have as attorneys. And I'd encourage anybody who's thinking about going to law school or wants to do that to consider ways they can do that because it's, very a very, different culture in the fifties and sixties about this kind of thing. It was much, much harder to hold the government to account and they knew it. And we're in a different time now, even for as much as we have all these concerns about immunity, still ways that you can break these things out.

0:42:14 Thomas: I don't know. We got away with a lot. The CIA got away With A lot, 20 years ago, and and after that still. And I just don't know. Every time I read anything or listen to anything about this, it's, of the weird, I don't, I guess, incompetence and just stupidity combined with the evil and the harm and the pain and the suffering is just like so hard to stomach. And the fact that like we, the stuff that this country did to people after 9-11 is so horrible, and not a single person that feels like faced the the slightest of consequence. Yeah.

0:42:16 Matt: Sure did. Yeah.

0:42:45 Matt: And no one here either for any of the immeasurable stuff. No one was ever held responsible in any way. The thousands of people affected, and of course, intergenerationally too, because you're talking about people whose parents and relatives and loved ones were destroyed, just ruined forever. Forever. There a lot of things that the US government has done to its citizens over the years and to citizens of other countries. And certainly, I'm not going to compare some of these things to something like the bombing of Cambodia or whatever, or just Vietnam itself. But I like internment of the Japanese, at least we weren't torturing people. Lives were ruined in many ways.

But I can't think of anything maybe short of the, I think it was at the Green Run, was did an experiment in Washington where they released, just to see what would happen, they released radiation and gave a lot of people cancer in Washington. Yeah, it's Up there with that. But I think it's worse because this was a sustained, long-term project done in the name of national security, run by psychotics, run by sadists and people who were just, I mean, really should not have been allowed to walk the streets, some of these people. I meant to read the quote from this before George White, who was a former narcotics agent, and he was the one who put together the safe house, this bordello thing.

So he actually wrote to Gottlieb at the end of his career, and on paper, he said this, just to give you an idea of what kind of person was involved in this. "I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun.

Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest. Pretty good stuff, brother, with two D's." Uh, that's George White, that's who he was, and he was one of the main MKL, MK Ultra guys in California. Um, how we were funding to do these things, I would like to think that there's a lot more, uh, over these kinds of things today.

I don't know that, but I assume after all this and the scrutiny of the Church Committee, I'd optimistically like to believe that the CIA is not doing anything like this on American citizens today. But once learn about these things, I'm pretty much open to believing the US government would do anything.

0:42:53 Thomas: Sure.

0:43:24 Thomas: I Wow. Jeez.

0:44:33 Thomas: Really is, yeah, it's, it's crazy when you hear about the details of how they got away with certain things. I, like, what would the limit be? What actually limits that, that level of power and that level of, um, like what is the limiting factor on that? I don't know. Well.

0:44:48 Matt: When you have the factors of the Cold War, where we didn't know what our enemies were doing, and we were just kind of guessing, and we thought maybe we should just do the worst we can because they're probably doing the worst they can. When you're talking about after 9-11, when the war and terror -justified doing pretty much anything, this stuff brings out the worst in governments.

0:45:03 Thomas: Anti-Muslim bigotry as well. Just,

0:45:05 Matt: Oh, of course. Yeah, no, sure. Just opening black sites and Guantanamo Bay itself, which I want to talk about pretty soon. Big news in Guantanamo recently as well.

0:45:12 Thomas: Perhaps my new favorite season of Serial.

0:45:15 Matt: Yeah, it's been pretty good, actually. I want to get somebody to talk about this because there's been some big Guantanamo news. But these things that our government does at the edges, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. And these things, and we justify in the name of national security and keeping the country safe, These things that vitiate the values that we say that we are and stand for in the process, it's tough to read about. But it's also, as I said, it's some of the most interesting stuff in American history in the 20th century. So I'm really happy for an opportunity to talk about it.

0:45:23 Thomas: Yeah.

0:45:40 Thomas: If you were to sum it up, there's sounds like there's some amount of success overall in terms of getting them to, like, pay some money. But you're telling me there wasn't ever any, like acknowledgement by anyone on this kind of thing or what?

0:45:47 Matt: Yeah. Never. No. And I don't think any of the American lawsuits worked out to anything either, from what I could see. Certainly, but never, there has been, in any venue, there's never been any kind of acknowledgement of wrongdoing. And is out there. They know it's out there, they aren't going to actually say it, I guess.

0:46:03 Thomas: Right. Well, you know, stay safe out there. I don't know. Oh, my God. It's very fascinating, Matt. I think there will be a lot of show notes for this one because that's s crazy.

0:46:14 Matt: The longest show notes ever, than most citations. Guaranteed.

0:46:16 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Um, but that's, I mean, they really benefit from doing stuff. That's so insane. It really, like my knee jerk reaction has always been, you know, you hear about some of this stuff now and then, and it's always so easy to be like, ah, it's just a crazy person telling me crazy stuff, you Know, just in general, like, but it's like they benefit from that because no one would believe it, yeah.

0:46:34 Matt: Yeah. Do. And at this point, In popular culture, the fastest way to show somebody is a little out of it or not is just to have them start talking about CIA mind control. But it's real and it did happen. And there's probably a lot more than we'll ever know because so much of it was destroyed. And you don't even want to know what I think about JFK and RFK assassinations. That's a whole other couple of hours.

0:46:59 Thomas: There There goes the credibility, Matt. Oh.

0:47:00 Matt: No. Most people at this point, don't believe the official narrative on JFK, but that's not really an opening arguments show.

0:47:06 Thomas: I do, I do on the on, uh, on Oswald. I don't know about Jack Ruby, though, that might be a different story that I have no idea about

0:47:11 Matt: And RFK is a lot of the thing too. That motion for new trial, actually, I'd love to do an episode on sometime, But but I wasn't trying to go X -Files on you all. I just think that we really, it benefits from kind of being pulled out of X-Files territory and put straight into the mainstream. And that's what we're trying to do here. I just want to make sure people understand what our government's been up to. So maybe we don't do it again because

0:47:28 Thomas: But like, take this recent assassination attempt, though, I would just say, man, I don't know, you're more informed on this crap than I am, but in terms of the conspiracy theory stuff about JFK, like, like, look at how dumb this whole thing was. Like, incompetence explains so much more than people want to give it credit for. Like, this kid who didn't even have a political agenda, who just wanted to make a name for himself, it seems to, like, based on what I know, I don't know if that's changed, but like, wanted to kill both Biden and or Trump, but Trump was closer sooner or something, was on a roof for, what, 90 minutes? And like, people were like, ah, I think that's not good. Like, yeah, like it's the amount that incompetence and just luck and happenstance and nonsense can cause weird stuff is never to be underestimated.

0:47:46 Matt: Absolutely, no, got a gun, yeah, right. Oh, Sure, no. And I think the conspiracy theories around that can be pretty ridiculous, and actually, now that you mention it, I actually meant to mention that too, because the CIA had to deny publicly, uh, he was not an MK Ultra program, because people were, if you looked for MK ultratrump assassination, people were just going nuts talking About how...

0:48:32 Thomas: Have they ever confirmed like, oh, that one was one of ours.

0:48:36 Matt: Course not. Regarding MKUltra, the CIA's program was shut down more than 40 years ago and declassified information about the program is publicly available on CIA.gov. The CIA had no relationship whatsoever with Thomas Crooks. They had to say that.

0:48:50 Thomas: Yeah. But that's MKUltra. What about MKMagnum? You know, who knows the next, the next iteration? I don't, maybe.

0:48:54 Matt: Right. MKZeta. Yeah, it could be out there. Also really appreciate the CIA spokesperson had to say, these claims are utterly false, absurd, and damaging. I love that, damaging to the CIA, I guess. Can't have people believing that we're...

0:48:57 Thomas: Yeah.

0:49:08 Thomas: It's eroding my trust of the CIA.

0:49:10 Matt: But I mean, again, you can see where people are coming from with this stuff, because one of the things they were trying to do was turn people into assassins, into Manchurian candidates. That was the explicit goal of MKUltra. So you can certainly see how people think that might still be going on. Don't personally, but I don't know. Agree that I don't think there's very much to this assassination attempt. It's very strange. There's a lot of strange stuff around it, but there's no need to go full conspiracist on it.

0:49:34 Thomas: Right. We'll keep polishing that tinfoil there, Matt, and spooling that yarn. And then thanks for listening, everybody. And we'll see you on Wednesday for some T3BE and very soon on some more Gavel Gavel and all that. So keep on listening and thanks so much for supporting.

0:49:36 Matt: Got it.

0:49:50 Matt: Watch the skies.

0:49:53 Clip: This podcast is a production of Opening Arguments Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved. It is produced and edited by Thomas Smith, who also provided the fabulous intro and outro music used with permission.

0:50:10 Matt: Is a unanimous decision from Justice Berger. Did I just do that again? I just did that again. You know, I do a lot of reading and not a lot talking.

0:50:14 Thomas: Did it again. Guess. Guess. Funding me. Keep funding. Keep funding, keep funding me, keep