Project Monarch — the Claim, the Record, and the Condition of the Record

Held in three parts, not reconciled here. THE CLAIM. Claimants describe a trauma-based programming programme run as a continuation of MKULTRA, using dissociation induced by abuse. The term enters circulation through the therapeutic and survivor-advocacy world of the early 1990s — most prominently a lecture by Dr D. Corydon Hammond, professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine, delivered as 'Hypnosis in MPD: Ritual Abuse' at the Fourth Annual Eastern Regional Conference on Abuse and Multiple Personality Disorder, Radisson Plaza Hotel, Alexandria, Virginia, on Thursday 25 June 1992, now circulated as the 'Greenbaum Speech'. Later book-length accounts follow (O'Brien and Phillips 1995; Taylor 1999; Springmeier). The primary material of the claimants has not been read here, and is not characterised from other people's summaries of it. That reading is outstanding. THE DOCUMENTARY RECORD. No declassified file names Project Monarch. Measured directly for this entry: the string does not occur in the 68,570 words of the 1977 Senate Joint Hearing on MKULTRA. Barkun (A Culture of Conspiracy) records that exhaustive investigations make no mention of it. An FBI investigator reached a parallel result on the surrounding claims after eighteen years (lanning_report_1992) — and in the same report wrote that 'a horror-filled yet inaccurate account of victimization is not only not a counterindication of abuse, but is in fact a corroborative indicator of extreme physical, psychological, and/or sexual abuse.' THE CONDITION OF THAT RECORD. The archive in which the name does not appear is not a neutral instrument, and the reasons are on the record from the institution itself: documentation was waived at authorisation in 1953 (mkultra_administrative_waivers_1953); the CIA's Inspector General found in 1963 that a substantial portion of the record 'appears to rest in the memories of the principal officers' (mkultra_ig_report_1963); the operational files were destroyed in 1973 in an act Helms conceded fell outside the regular pattern (mkultra_records_destruction_1973); and what survived is, per DCI Turner, finance folders containing no 'documents relating to operational considerations' (mkultra_surviving_archive_1977). Subjects were never notified and their names were withheld (mkultra_subjects_never_notified), so for any individual, testimony is the only evidence that could exist. NOTHING IS SETTLED HERE. The absence of a document does not establish that nothing happened; the absence of corroboration does not establish that it did. Both conditions stand. Neither resolves the other. [Report #192] The claimant side is now noded rather than summarised: hammond_greenbaum_speech_1992 (the earliest located use of the term, in which Hammond states on the record that 'There isn't great documentation of it'), monarch_claimant_chain (the later accounts' documented dependence on the earlier ones, and Springmeier's court record with three corrections to the circulating version), and utah_ag_ritual_crime_1995 (the state investigation Hammond cited to the room, which reported a null). No primary material by any claimant had been read when this entry was first written; it has now been read.