The Dark Side of the CIA: Assassinations, Drug Trafficking, Influencing Culture and the Press - YT VIDEO

The CIA has been the subject of many controversies, including human rights violations, domestic wiretapping and propaganda, and allegations of drug trafficking.

At least since World War II, a distinction has been drawn between assassination of civilian leaders, and targeted killings of leaders of fighting organizations,

including the British-Czech Operation Anthropoid (the killing of SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, acting Reichsprotektor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia),

a failed British attempt to kill Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, and Operation Vengeance, the shooting down of Isoroku Yamamoto by the US Air Force.

The CIA has admitted to involvement in assassination attempts against foreign leaders. Recently, there have been targeted killings of alleged terrorists,

typically with missiles fired from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones.

The Pakistani government, which may "have picked some targets of drone attacks"[76] has criticized the US for drones flying over its territory as an infringement of Pakistani sovereignty.

Increased criticism of the CIA drone program has come mostly during the later stages of the war in Afghanistan.

One of the main criticisms of the drone program is that "the surgical use of military force in self-defense itself creates a state of international armed conflict".[76]

Arguments and criticisms of the CIA drone program have been made, but as it is still relatively new, legal rulings have not yet been made.

Of the cases cited, it appears that no CIA personnel or even directly controlled foreign agents personally killed any leader, but there certainly were cases where the CIA knew of, or supported,

plots to overthrow foreign leaders. In the cases of Lumumba in 1960/61 and Castro in the 50s and 60s, the CIA was involved in preparing to kill the individual.

In other cases, such as Diem, the Agency knew of a plot but did not warn him, and communications at White House level indicated that the Agency had, with approval, told the plotters the US didn't object to their plan.

The gun or poison, however, was not in the hands of a CIA officer.

CIA personnel were involved in attempted assassinations of foreign government leaders such as Fidel Castro.

They provided support to those that killed Patrice Lumumba. In yet another category was noninterference in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) Coup d'état in which President Ngo Dinh Diem was killed.

A distinction has been drawn between political assassinations and "targeted killing" of leaders of non-state belligerents.

Project MKULTRA, or MK-ULTRA, was the code name for a CIA mind-control research program that began in 1950, involved primarily with the experimentation of drugs and other "chemical, biological and radiological" stimuli

on both willing and uninformed subjects.[71]

Brainwashing as a descriptive term entered the lexicon of the CIA in January 1950 .[72] Although widely used in science fiction novels, dystopian depictions of oppressive governments, and other popular culture mediums,

brainwashing as it relates to the CIA was disseminated by the CIA to “fuel public anxiety about communist methods”.[73] MK-Ultra, as verified with unsealed public documents, was a CIA program intended to brainwash.

Independent researchers have verified that the historical explanation for brainwashing in MK-Ultra could have only been accomplished through torture.[74]

Thus, torture on civilians and unwilling participants, itself a humans rights violation, comes to frame.

In December 1974, The New York Times reported that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens, during the 1960s.

The report prompted investigations by both the U.S. Congress (in the form of the Church Committee) and a presidential commission (known as the Rockefeller Commission).

The congressional investigations and the Rockefeller Commission report revealed that the CIA and the Department of Defense had in fact conducted experiments to influence and control human behavior

through the use of psychoactive drugs such as LSD and mescaline and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. Experiments were often conducted without the subjects' knowledge or consent.

MK-ULTRA was started on the order of CIA director Allen Dulles, largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind-control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea.

The goal of the experiments was to study mind-control in order to develop methods of interrogation and behavior modification and manipulation, as well as to develop a possible truth drug.