G. Thomas, "Journey into Madness"

Thomas, Gordon. Journey into Madness: Medical Torture and the Mind Controllers. London: Corgi, 1989. Print. 

 While political terrorism has been capturing widespread attention for some time, almost nothing has been made public of how doctors today use their knowledge and skills in its support...

 They recommend how much further torture can be applied. Physicians employed in state-sponsored terrorism also falsify autopsy reports and provide fake medical certificates for persons those doctors know were tortured to death. A common description is "cardiac failure" or "pneumonia" on those certificates. (p.1)

 All such routine malpractices violate medical ethics as defined by one of three oaths sworn by every physician before he or she starts to practice: to do no harm, provide assistance to all in need, and only treat with consent of the patient.

Yet every day these pledges are flaglantly abused by doctors whose actions conform to the generally accepted definition of torture produced by the United Nations, Amnesty International, and other human rights organizations: the deliberate infliction of pain by one person on another in an effort to break the will of the victims.

.. In 1988 this gross and pervasive violation was occurring in over ninety countries; a quarter of the world's population were living in arears where abuses have long become habitual.....

 Psychiatry, in particular, is highly vulnerable to being used by the state to maintain power and control on thoughts and actions of its citizens. George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World continue to exist within all those countries where a person's intentions and actions are interpreted by the state in a manner designed to destroy legitimate political dissent. 

In a high proportion of those instances psychiatrists provide the clinical label -- and the veneer of legitimacy -- that allows the state to incarcerate opponents. Doctors, therefore, are increasingly used to discredit and silence all those who oppose official policies; the description of political dissent as "insanity" would have no credence without their active support. 

  What remains for me the most disturbing aspect of my investigation is that even as I write, and later when it is read, there are physicians who continue to participate in torture. Nothing I had researched before could have prepared me for the dark reality of doctors who set out to deliberately destroy minds and bodies they were trained to heal. The realization that physicians are part of a killing machine provokes a special horror. (p.8)

 Modern medical knowledge and technologies are such that those with special skills know exactly how to use them to assault the physical and psychological constitutions of their victims. (p.12)

 Late in June 1972, Dr. Gottlieb had jigged back and forth on the carpet of the [CIA] director's office, and his carefully controlled stammer had surfaced as he enthused that at long, long last, here was the answer to mind control, that ESB [Electrical Stimulation of the Brain] was the key to creating not only a psychocivilized person but an entire psychocivilized society--a world where every human thought, emotion, sensation, and desire could be actually controlled by electrical stimulation of the brain.

 The possibilities, said Dr. Gottlieb, were far beyond the neurological masturbation of the pleasure centers. Not only could a [Delgardo's] rampaging bull be stopped in full charge, but humans could finally be programmed to attack and kill on command. (p.277)