Justice Served — But Injustices Remain
Posted: June 4, 2007
The Canadian government settles with Janine Huard, brainwashing victim of former American Psychiatric Association President Ewen Cameron …
After a decades-long legal battle, the government of Canada has agreed to settle a claim by Janine Huard, brutalized in “brainwashing” experiments by psychiatrist Ewen Cameron. Montreal attorney Alan Stein brought the action on behalf of Huard, now 79, one of hundreds of Cameron’s patients to be subjected to his Cold War-era experiments.
Terms of the settlement, reached May 28, are confidential. Stein told Freedom, however, that Huard was “very pleased” with the outcome.
“She never knew that she was being subjected to these experiments or that she was being used by Dr. Cameron and his staff as a guinea pig,” Stein told the court in January 2007, according to Canadian press accounts.
Cameron pioneered “psychic driving,” by which he believed he could erase the memories of people and then “repattern” them in a manner he determined.
One of the world’s leading psychiatrists until his death in 1967, Cameron enjoyed tenures as president of the Quebec Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatric Association.
Cameron’s ideas intrigued Sidney Gottlieb of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, who sponsored his work at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute under the agency’s top secret “mind control” program, code-named MK ULTRA.
Huard reported being electric shocked and forced to listen to recorded messages for hours on end, day after day, all while heavily drugged. Her experiences with the psychiatrist so destroyed her life and her ability to function that her mother had to move in with her to care for her children.
Many Other Victims
In February 2007, Stein attended a press conference in Montreal organized by Freedom Magazine and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights Canada that spotlighted the abuse and torture of other Quebec psychiatric victims - innocent, normal children known as the Duplessis Orphans. (Survivors took their name from the former premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis.)
At the press conference, Stein spoke about Huard’s case and expressed solidarity with the Duplessis Orphans’ struggle, spotlighted in Freedom’s award-winning investigative feature, “North America’s Crime of the Century?”, by Christine Hahn and Thomas G. Whittle.
That probe exposed that tens of thousands of children had been transferred from orphanages to psychiatric institutions during Duplessis’ mid-20th century regime in a corrupt scheme to divert funding to psychiatric coffers. It also reported that as many as 50,000 children may have died or disappeared in those facilities.
Freedom’s investigation into those human rights abuses is continuing. As part of that, any reader with information regarding Cameron’s possible involvement in “treatment” of children, including Duplessis Orphans, is encouraged to come forward.
Compensation
Huard is one of nine adult victims of Cameron who received nearly $67,000 (U.S.) each from the CIA in 1988 for what they had suffered. But her claim for compensation from the Canadian federal government, which jointly funded the experiments, was rejected three times.
In 1994, 77 people were awarded $100,000 each from the Canadian government, but more than 250 others saw their claims denied because it was deemed they had not been “totally depatterned.”
A federal appeals court overruled that criterion in 2004, awarding Gail Kastner of Montreal $100,000, but the government continued to deny Huard’s claim.
Huard’s lawyers, however, argued that Huard had suffered serious harm and had failed to file a lawsuit earlier only because she didn’t have enough money.
Stein told Freedom he was pleased that “justice has been done for Madame Huard after so many years.”
Freedom welcomes your views and information relevant to its ongoing investigation of human rights abuses involving the Duplessis Orphans or other victims of coercive psychiatric methods. E-mail your comments or information to editor@freedommag.org or mail them to Editor, Freedom Magazine, 6331 Hollywood Blvd., Suite 1200, Los Angeles, CA 90028.
