MKUltra was real. From 1953 to 1973, the CIA ran secret mind-control experiments on people who never agreed to be part of them. The agency drugged unsuspecting Americans with LSD. One government scientist, Frank Olson, was secretly dosed in 1953 and, nine days later, fell to his death from a New York hotel window — a death the government first called suicide and his family has long argued was murder. When the Senate finally dug into it in 1977, lawmakers promised the victims would be found, compensated, and cared for.

That never happened. So when Congress announced its first MKUltra hearing since 1977, there was a real chance to do something useful: open the files, name the victims, and keep a broken promise.

Instead, Anna Paulina Luna turned it into a conspiracy theory showcase.

What happened at the hearing

On June 30, Luna chaired the hearing as head of the House Oversight Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. According to Mother Jones, things went off the rails fast.

Luna asked witnesses whether USAID — the foreign aid agency — "may have been used overseas" to further MKUltra. There is no evidence for that. She also announced the discovery of "new MKULTRA boxes" tied to a supposed "forgery program," with nothing to back it up yet.

Then her Republican colleagues took it somewhere else entirely: COVID. Rep. Nancy Mace pressed a former NIH research psychologist, Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, on whether "the NIH or Dr. Fauci lied to the American people about Covid."

Her answer: "No."

Even the Washington Examiner — a conservative outlet — described the hearing as an "intense grilling" of the NIH researcher. And here's the strange part: Ginexi wasn't an MKUltra expert at all. She was the Democrats' own minority witness — and Republicans used her appearance to relitigate COVID instead of asking about the program the hearing was supposed to be about.

The experts saw it coming

Before the hearing even started, the National Security Archive — the nonprofit that has spent decades prying real government secrets loose — published a warning aimed straight at Luna's task force: focus on real secrets, not conspiracy theories.

Afterward, the Archive's Mike Evans summed up what happened instead: "Why were they talking about COVID and Anthony Fauci at a hearing about MKULTRA?" He called the hearing "underwhelming" and said it didn't break any new ground.

Think about that. The people who most want these files opened — the professional declassifiers — watched Luna's hearing and came away shaking their heads.

The real victims got left behind — again

The saddest part is that there was a real story sitting right in front of Luna, and a real wrong to fix.

Author Tom O'Neill, who has spent years documenting MKUltra, reminded the task force what Congress promised back in 1977:

"Committee members like yourselves promised that victims of MKULTRA would be identified, compensated and provided lifetime medical care. None of that ever happened."

Real people were experimented on by their own government. Their families still don't have answers. A serious hearing would have been about them — subpoenas, document deadlines, a compensation plan. Luna's hearing offered none of that. It produced dramatic sound bites instead — a former CIA officer even told the task force he doesn't "believe that the research stopped" — while the promise Congress made to the victims in 1977 stayed broken.

This is what she does with her seat

Luna represents Pinellas County, where families are dealing with exploding housing costs and insurance bills. Just one week before this hearing, she was one of only 32 House members — and one of six Florida Republicans — to vote against the biggest housing affordability bill in decades, because Trump wanted it held hostage for an unrelated voting bill.

So in the span of eight days, her constituents got: a "no" vote on cheaper housing, and a taxpayer-funded hearing about CIA mind control that wandered into Fauci conspiracy theories.

Congress's oversight power is one of the most important tools the American people have. It's supposed to be used to check the government — to get real answers about real abuses, like MKUltra actually was. When it's spent chasing theories with no evidence, the people who pay are the victims still waiting for the truth, and the voters still waiting for their representative to work on things that matter.

Source

Read the original reporting by Anna Merlan at Mother Jones. Photo via Mother Jones/ZUMA.