How painfully ironic that in the so-called “war on terrorism,” the U.S. finds itself at war with its own dark side. That is, most of the enemy terrorist configurations in the world trace back to horribly cynical western intelligence operations, especially the CIA, that remain in place to fester and wreak havoc even after the CIA is done with them.

Extremist cults capable of heinous acts against their fellow man are the brainchild of a certain strand of post-World War II covert intelligence operations spearheaded by the U.S. and British who saw them as useful cutouts for black bag and dirty trick operations that could not be readily traced to their source.

There developed a cookie-cutter formula for creating such cults in a wide variety of situations with a wide variety of intensity and potential for violence. Today’s ISIS and al Qaeda are products of this. Al Qaeda was created and armed to thwart the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and ISIS has been formed from U.S.-instigated elements who were intended for use against Assad in Syria.

In fact, few people dispute these realities who are anywhere near them. They are simply taken as collateral consequences of strategic war-making, on the one hand, and they also help to make sure the military industrial complex is humming in the U.S. with the weapons of war and destruction, including a domestic “readiness” component that has become tantamount to a declaration of war against every man, woman and child in the U.S., itself.

You want to know who’s hiding in that executioner’s mask who beheaded journalist James Foley? Try Allen or John Foster Dulles. You’d the closer than where the misdirection is leading now.

In the course of the prosecution of World War II and the Korean conflict, U.S. and British intelligence operations – the OSS and then the CIA – learned from the Chinese and others techniques for what they called “brainwashing” that is effective to the extent it is maintained in small cult configurations and targeted to specific objectives. The goal of “brainwashing” is to cause persons to act against their own self-interest, and that can go as far as mass murder and suicide.

This became all the rage in a wing of the intelligence community most cynical and disrespectful of core human values and inherent potentials. These operatives come through an intelligence training rooted in the “each versus all” amorality of the proto-fascist Frederich Neitzsche which defines “good” only in terms of individual freedom for our side and the denial of it for the other.

Any means of manipulating a situation through the exploitation and debasement of human beings is OK with them, ranging from torture to mass genocides to springing contagions, all in the name of “patriotism.”

The CIA’s covert domestic operation known as “MK-Ultra” was an ultra-secret component of this begun in the early 1950s directed against a U.S. population deemed as becoming too “soft” on progressive values. Coupled with the domestic terror operation known as the McCarthy Era, MK-Ultra operated on 40 major U.S. campuses and experimented with mind-altering drugs, especially LSD, to find ways to change behaviors by canceling healthy impulses rooted in rational self-interest.

There was no public knowledge of MK-Ultra until the Church Committee hearings on the CIA in the mid-1970s. Richard Helms, head of the CIA, had ordered all documents relevant to MK-Ultra destroyed, and all were except for one filing cabinet full of papers that had inadvertently been mislabeled.

Combined with tight cult like conditions involving demands of abject obedience and reinforced with sensory deprivation, including sleep and nutritional deprivation, and the use of monotonous patterns of self-deprecating behavior, persons could be “brainwashed,” they concluded.

Drugs like LSD were used to reinforce this by introducing mental instability and blurring the distinction between reality and fantasy. To this day, LSD is considered a “chemical weapon,” an “incapacitant” that causes “psychotic disorders, including incapacitation and an inability to make decisions” by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

What resulted was a sea-change in the American culture known as the 1960s counterculture.

(To be continued)