Curious report here from the BBC suggesting that the CIA was in fact to blame for the “mass hysteria” that erupted in the small town of Pont Saint Espirit in south east France in 1951. Wonder why the BBC felt obliged to indulge Mike Thomson in this regard?
NEVER TRUST THE CIA..
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interesting to see how the BBC will deal with the contemporaraneous findings by medics.
This report http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2069953/pdf/brmedj03511-0030.pdf from the BMJ of Sept 1951 , published just one month after the event, notes that the delirium began 10-12 days after ingestion of the bread.
The other effects suffered don’t appear to fit LSD either.
Merck report that LSD usually takes effect 30-60 minutes after ingestion.
http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec15/ch198/ch198l.html
I am sure that the BBC will want to ensure that it complies with the highest journalistic standards in dealing with this case and it would not want to produce some kind of sensationalist anti american propaganda….
I wonder if the “crucial document ” – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tg1y1
– the smoking gun letter from the White House, no less – have been subjected to independant forensic analysis ?
I would have thought , if there is one subject Beeboids know about , it is drugs !
Not wishing to be boring but I thought this was a well known case of an unusual form of mercury poisoning ? It was certainly mentioned as such in at least one of my old O level chemistry textbooks.
I loved the way they claim LSD research was being done ‘just a few hundred kilometres away’
In other words, nowhere near.
Next week, the story about how CIA operatives eat babies?
Hah ! BBC’s expert witness is busted by a proper scientist ;-http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/03/11/nonsense_about_lsd.php
Next week on the Today programme, Sarah Montague asks David Cameron why he won’t ban the USAF chemtrail planes from overflying the UK….
File under Leftwing Moonbattery
I wonder if the “crucial document ” – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tg1y1
– the smoking gun letter from the White House, no less – have been subjected to independant forensic analysis ?
The fact that the document is undated arouses suspicion. There is a number in the bottom left – X73317–53. The fifty three might refer to a year.
A search of the internet shows me that a ‘Dana Scully’ doll was created as a result of the popularity of the X -Files series (shown on the BBC). Amongst the accessories the doll came with was an X file. And the number of that X file was X-73317.
Methinks the author of this book was having a little joke. Are you laughing ,BBC?
To follow up on Beeboidal’s superlative investigative reporting (don’t see that on the BBC!) The X-files case number X73317 was opened on the abduction of Dana Scully and was first referenced in the episode “3” that first aired on November 8th 1994.
This precedes the ‘investigation’ by Albarelli. Based on Albarelli’s web biography he didn’t start looking at the topic until 1998-1999 and presumably he ‘received’ this ‘smoking gun’ far later since the book was published in 2009.
This nonsense would be hilarious if it wasn’t license fee funded. The BBC are reporting the same tripe as David Icke because it shows the CIA in a bad light.
And yes, Hank Albarelli believes the CIA assassinated Kennedy:
RT: Can the CIA undermine the president, if they don’t like what the president is doing, saying or advocating?
HA: Absolutely. They can undermine the president. And I think the proof of that is what happened with JFK [John F. Kennedy]. I don’t believe that Lee Harvey Oswald alone assassinated JFK. And it’s my belief after studying the assassination for years and years, that the CIA had a direct hand in that.
http://inteldaily.com/2010/03/hank-albarelli-cia-keeps-testing-drugs-on-people/
Let’s hope the CIA are undermining Obama.
Great stuff!
Talking of The X-Files, and purely coincidentally (as Agent Scully would have said early on), Mr Albarelli is a contributor to a left-wing website called Truth-Out:
http://www.truth-out.org/about
The Truth is Out There!
(Though rarely on the BBC!)
Are we supposed to take this more seriously because the guy is using a dramatic, low stage whisper?
The BBC are probably pissed off they couldn’t get doped up at the time.
Perhaps the CIA should experiement on the BBC?
And I love the melodramatic ending with the voice actor hissing the French pensioner’s words that he’d want to shoot whoever drugged him up.
So manipulative. Yet when certain other issues are on the table, the Beeboids claim they don’t like to use emotional footage or do this kind of manipulation. They even told us that they didn’t want to use the word “terrorist” because it was an emotional term, although they had to give that one up eventually. But emotional manipulation is one of the BBC’s key weapons, and it’s obvious.
During a USA game in the World Cup there was a helicopter flying above the stadium. Adrian Chiles – then on ITV but having cut his ‘journalistic’ teeth at the BBC (making him a Beeboid if ever there was one) – said something like ‘It could be the CIA. You never know.’
So I guess CIA is just ones of those hate figures for the BBC. Maybe CIA could take stock from their failed invasion of Cuba and invade BBC Television Centre. That’d be both hilarious and ironic.
An appalling programme. Great reliance was placed upon the bogus photoshopped X file as the reporter repeatedly shoved it under the noses of the French townspeople and asked how they felt about being poisoned by the CIA.
The latency problem was not addressed properly.
Nor was the apparent death of 4 elderly people from cardiovascular collapse.
LSD does not cause cardiovascular collapse.
All in all, a shoddy programme lacking in intellectual rigour. As they say in France ,( when not being attacked by the eeeevil CIA) Plus ca change , plus ca meme chose !
Say, does anyone else get the feeling that the bar for the BBC announcing CIA involvement in mass hallucinations is lower than the one for Islamic involvement in terror attacks?
Document specializes in this sort of subject – the West behaving badly. If it’s not the CIA that’s up to no good then it’s MI5. (Funnily, it’s never the KGB. Given the opening up of the Soviet Archive, this is surely not easy to justify).
So this week it’s the Americans ‘up to no good’ in France. Next week it’s the British ‘up to no good’ in British Guiana – trying to prevent a noble Marxist from coming to power at the behest of the Americans.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tj74v
So far this year we’ve had:
– wicked oil companies
– British intelligence trying to besmirch the good name of Irish terrorists after ‘Bloody Sunday’
– the mistreatment of poor German POWs by the British government during and after the war
– the British government ‘up to no good’ during the civil war in North Yemen.
Last year it was:
– “shady” dealings by Winston Churchill to keep Franco’s Spain out of the war
– Britain ‘up to no good’ “in oil rich Oman” (“worried that the country’s faltering regime could fall to communism and so threaten its vital oil interests”)
– how British intelligence used “shocking” interrogation techniques in North Africa during the war (over which Harold MacMillan “misled the country”)
– “why black soldiers in the French army were denied the glory of liberating Paris in 1944”
– “allegations that the CIA sabotaged a shipment of buses from Britain to Cuba.”
The only episode that seems to fall outside the programme’s left-wing worldview was the one that examined “papers which accused the BBC of biased reporting of the Iranian revolution.”
On the plus side, Craig, I’m guessing that when it came to the treatment of POWs in WWII, it was the first time in years the BBC referred to the opposition as ‘Germans’ rather than ‘Nazis’.