American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [60]
Dr. Mootoo did find evidence of cyanide in most of the victims’ stomachs, and he passed along his samples to a representative of the American Embassy in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown, fully expecting they’d be forwarded on to American forensic pathologists. Except, somehow, they disappeared.7 A study seven months later published in the New England Journal of Medicine found six leading medical examiners describing the handling of the bodies by the U.S. military and others as “inept,” “incompetent,” “embarrassing,” and so on, with only circumstantial evidence of “probable cyanide poisoning.” The prestigious Journal added that only one third of the bodies could be positively identified, and that a medico-legal autopsy should have been performed on each one.8
It turns out that only seven autopsies were ever performed—and not until a month after the bodies were embalmed! Some of the pictures from the scene showed victims wearing ID bracelets, but these also vanished somewhere between Jonestown and the U.S. air base where the bodies got shipped. The order to remove the medical tags is said to have come from the National Security Council’s staff coordinator for Latin American and Caribbean Affairs, Robert Pastor.9 (Adding to this macabre story, three bodies actually got lost and turned up years later in storage lockers in Southern California!)10
Shortly after the massacre became public, a psychiatrist and anti-cult activist named Dr. Hardhat Sukhdeo came to Georgetown to talk with the survivors. There were 33, most of them having run off into the jungle. Sukhdeo called Jim Jones “a genius of mind control, a master,” a statement that was widely quoted in the press and framed the official Jonestown story from then on. Although a native of Guyana, Sukhdeo lived in the U.S. He admitted later that his trip had been paid for by the State Department, and when he returned he met privately with FBI agents. So did Sukhdeo also secretly “debrief ” the Jonestown survivors on behalf of the government, trying to find out what they might have seen? Why were Dr. Mootoo’s conclusions ignored by the media, while Dr. Sukhdeo’s speculation was trumpeted?
It’s also curious that “virtually every survivor of the Jonestown massacre was eventually treated” at the Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco,11 where Jones himself had once been under psychiatric care. Except, despite attempts to obtain Jones’s medical file, it’s never been released. A lot of the research done at Langley-Porter happens to be classified, much of it by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It’s known, though, that some of this research involves the effect of electromagnetic fields on human beings, and behavior-modification techniques including hypnosis-from-a-distance.12
Before he went to Jonestown, Congressman Ryan had already been making a name as a government watchdog. One amendment that he cosponsored required the CIA to get congressional approval before it could undertake any covert activity. Stories about MK-ULTRA had appeared in the press and Ryan wrote a letter to the Agency, “requesting confirmation or denial of the fact of CIA experiments using prisoners at the California medical facility at Vacaville,” from which Jones was reportedly getting members of his church as part of a rehab program.13 Ryan wrote he was especially interested in a former inmate, Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze, who’d ended up leading the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) group that kidnapped Patty Hearst. The CIA responded that, yes, it had sponsored tests on