I wrote:
"Ward Churchill collaborated on those reports [on mercenaries in CAIB], and wrote a more general article on CIA mercenaries. That was before he changed his position to support of collaboration with the CIA in Laos and Nicaragua."
Louis Proyect replied:
"Can you elaborate on this?"
KL answer: This was the subject of our original exchange, in which Louis preferred to bully, abuse, and insult me on the list in response to my off- line communications with him. If he had bothered to read what I wrote, rather than the words he attributed to me that I did not write, he would know the answer. Unfortunately, the particular reference is neither on-line nor available by fax, but since the issue seems to haunt him, I have ordered it, and will reply further when it arrives.
On an earlier exchange, Sam Pawlett wrote,
"I recall your fine research on mind control in CovertAction from many years ago. I was briefly in touch with a women several years ago who was a victim/survivor of Ewen Cameron. She was doing her PHd in education but was having a very tough time. I gave her some of your work. Here in Canada, the Ewen Cameron 'experiments' at Mcgill have become public knowledge through the bourgeous media. Several victims have won lawsuits and received some compensation for having their minds destroyed. What do you think of the work of Walter Bowart and the other researchers? How do you react to being called a 'conspiracy theorist'? What is your take on the CHomsky/Cockburn line on 'conspiricism'? "
KL: I was and am grateful for the compliment. I plan to reply in detail when I have the time, because I believe this subject ought to be of widespread concern to activists. For now I'll make a couple of brief points. The bourgeoisie and its armed agents are continually conspiring; that is their nature. Most of the time we never learn the details, or by the time we learn them, the moment of outrage has passed -- for example, the recent disclosures of Eisenhower-era planned provocations for an invasion of Cuba. The Church Committee investigation in 1975 yielded an entire bookshelf full of conspiracies by the various U.S. intelligence agencies, and those publications were merely exemplary, not comprehensive. In most instances, such as the Kennedy assassination, Occam's Razor is sufficient to dispense with lone gunman and similarly preposterous official explanations for political events of great moment. It is odd to see Chomsky -- who has mined Moshe Sharrett's private notes for important insights into the conspiratorial aspects of Israel's war against Palestine -- in agreement with Cockburn, who consistently adopts the enfant terrible posture. I agree that Peter Dale Scott's work that I've read seems sound, though I'm not an expert in his fields of investigation. In the case of CIA mind control conspiracies, from the stuff I've read I think John Marks was a more thorough scholar than Walter Bowart. But -- and these will be my subjects when I can devote adequate attention to them -- the CIA to this day continues to torment an ever-wider group of victims whose plight traces to Ewen Cameron's experiments at McGill, and also continues to sponsor mind control experiments on a level far more fearsome than the ones Cameron conducted in the sixties. I apologize for the delay, but I have not forgotten the interest.
Ken Lawrence