Contract X-38 and what came after it

This branch describes torture, sexual violence and the killing of prisoners as the record describes them. What was done in Kenya comes from Kenyan and British records. What Canada did comes from Canadian ones. The pictures are illustrations: they carry no evidence, and every finding rests on the documents cited.

• The manJohn Timmerman, born 13 March 1911. RCMP, 1932 to 1940. Canadian Intelligence Corps through the Second World War, then criminal investigation for the Allied occupation of West Germany.

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  18 February 1951 · NairobiAppointed Assistant Commissioner of the Kenya Police. He takes over the colony's Criminal Investigation Department, brought in to reorganise it. The Kenya Gazette publishes the appointment on 6 March.
• October 1952The colony declares a State of Emergency against the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, the movement the British call Mau Mau. Timmerman's CID is the department that questions suspects.

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  1953The Illustrated London News prints him “of the C.I.D., questioning Mr. Ferguson's Kikuyu cook” after a settler murder. By the end of the year he commands the Nairobi police: “the new broom at the head of Nairobi's police,” in the words of Time and Tide.

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  24 April 1954 · Operation AnvilThe army and police seal Nairobi and screen the city block by block. Tens of thousands of Kikuyu, Embu and Meru men are taken to the camps. East Africa and Rhodesia: “Timmerman, Assistant Commissioner of Police, was in charge of the police.”

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  10 June 1954 · six weeks laterThe London Gazette lists him among the Birthday Honours: the Queen's Police Medal for Distinguished Service. A later Gazette mentions him for “distinguished services in Kenya” from April 1954 to October 1955.
• His own wordsA defence lawyer at the Kenyatta trial, Dudley Thompson, remembers “a giant of a man” who “had once been a member of the Canadian Mounted Police,” and quotes him:We are not going to sit and talk with murderers, cattle thieves and barbarians.

• 1947 · who owned itControl of the Suffield Experimental Station passed from the Department of Defence to the civilian Defence Research Board. Four years later that same Board wrote contract X-38. Hebb was a grantee in Montreal. Suffield was the Board's own establishment.
• Before CS · the chamberWartime gas training put the trainee into a chamber filled with chlorine or adamsite, a vomiting agent, told him to remove his respirator, and had him re-enter without it.It was not uncommon for the trainees to be nauseous.A decontamination drill put a drop of mustard on the forearm. At least 20 sites across the country were equipped for it.
• The 1950s · the staffFew tests, and the subjects were likely all Suffield staff. Two of those experiments exposed staff members to the nerve agent sarin.
• The changeoverThe same decade, the training agent changes. Chlorine and adamsite give way to CS.
• Fall 1968 · Exercise VacuumSuffield runs its largest event. Almost 2,000 men on the Suffield range. Its stated aim:To test, under realistic battle conditions, new defensive doctrine, training agents, clothing and equipment designed as a result of shortcomings brought out in previous trials…And the agent:Simulants (mainly based on the tear gas CS) were used in the experimental phase.
• What that is, in the countIn the table of human subjects used in chemical trials at Suffield, Exercise Vacuum is a single line: 2,000 subjects, 51 per cent of every post-war subject at the station. The largest human-subject event in the whole post-war programme, and it ran on tear gas.
• Consent existed by thenInformed consent forms came into use at Suffield and at the Chemical Warfare Laboratories after the war. The earliest such document is dated 1966, two years before Vacuum.
• 2004 · the recognitionOttawa approves $50 million to recognise, with a $24,000 payment and a certificate, people who were human subjects in chemical warfare agent experiments in Canada between 1940 and 1975.
• Where the line fallsThe table puts Vacuum's 2,000 men in the column headed non-CWA simulants. Not a chemical warfare agent. Whether the largest group of subjects at Suffield was recognised by the programme built for Suffield's subjects is not answered by any document found.

• What the programme was forThe stated purpose was spaceflight. Sputnik had gone up in 1957 and nobody knew what prolonged monotony would do to an astronaut. Zubek's results suggested the problem was survivable.
• What his defenders concedeHis colleague A. W. Pressey, writing to defend him, allows the other question was there from the start: Was brainwashing ever discussed prior to the actual isolation of volunteers in the dome? Of course it was. On whether it appeared in the funding applications: Quite possibly he had.
• And that question has a written answerThe Board's own form made it compulsory. Every application in the file, 1964 to 1972, carries a printed section: State (a) general research objective, (b) aspects to be investigated in the year to which grant applies, setting forth the research plan in some detail, (c) relation to defense interest.Each one answers it in one to two typed pages. Nine years of written statements about what this had to do with defence, in a folder that is open for consultation.
• 1972 · The triggerThe Winnipeg Tribune reports it plainly: in London, a British brain expert told the Parker committee that Canadian research was in part responsible for the minority report which led to elimination of the hood-and-noise technique of extracting secrets from Irish Republican Army suspects.Canadian reporters go looking for Zubek.
• Where he answeredNot before a committee. In a newspaper.What bothers me about the cases in Northern Ireland is that these are non-convicted individuals on whom these techniques have been employed.— John Zubek, Winnipeg Free Press, 1972
• The only body that ever convenedRoughly one hundred students, in a room, in November 1972. His own press file dates the weeks around it: a Manitoban item on 16 November, a hand-drawn poster for 22 November, then Forum and Letters to the Editor together on 30 November 1972. It argued itself out in a student paper and stopped.
• Outside the faculty, thoughOn 21 August 1972 — five months after Parker, three months before the students met — a bereaved Winnipeg family published the usual instruction in the Tribune: in lieu of flowers, contributions to the Manitoba Mental Health and Research Foundation, care of Dr. John Zubek, Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba.He held the fund. In the middle of it all, a family who had just buried a child still put his name in the newspaper as the person to send the money to.
• Who stood with himNobody. No one of stature either in the administration or in any Faculty came to his defense. He believed his telephone was being tapped. He resigned from the Canadian Psychological Association board in April 1974, disappeared on 17 August, and was found three days later; the coroner recorded suicide.
• What never happenedNo royal commission. No parliamentary inquiry. No Defence Research Board accounting. No finding of fact by any Canadian tribunal about what was funded, what was learned, or where it went.
• The asymmetryThe subjects were compensated in dollars and the research was published in journals. The programme itself was never examined by anyone with the power to compel an answer. And none of it was secret. The funder was named in the student paper in 1961, the dome was item one in the calendar in 1971, and the purpose was conceded to a reporter in 1972. The missing inquiry is not explained by concealment. Canadians did look — students in a room, somebody with a marker and a sheet of paper, an Irish-Canadian civil rights association in Winnipeg, a reader still arguing it in the Free Press in October 1973. Not one of them could compel a single answer. Every body that could, declined to ask.

Exhibit · six days after Parker, he answers

• Which direction the science travelledNot the one the headline of this page might suggest. The Canadian work is credited with helping to end the technique — it fed the minority report, Gardiner's, the one the British government adopted. That is the honest shape of it and it belongs here.
• He names the vector himselfZubek points at his own edited volume, Sensory Deprivation, published in New York in 1969: it was likely the research contained in this text that contributed to the Canadian involvement in the British Army situation.No leak, no transfer, no secret channel. A textbook.
• The denialThere have been statements that we are involved in brainwashing techniques. This is not the case at all.By then about 400 experiments had been run since 1959, and he called his department the leading centre in the world for sensory-deprivation studies.
• The list of applications, 1972…northern living, and confinement in such quarters as bomb shelters, submarines, spacecraft and prisons.Prisons had joined the list since 1961.
• And then the sentence that undoes the headlineBrainwashing is an unfortunate application — but to be realistic, these techniques for extracting vital information may have their place in certain situations such as wartime.
• He describes the mechanism exactlyIsolation, he said, makes a person more easily influenced, and so susceptible to brainwashing for extracting information or changing beliefs and attitudes.Twenty-one years earlier the Defence Research Board had titled Hebb's contract Experimental Studies in Change of Attitude. The phrase had not moved.

Exhibit · the university's own calendar, the year it broke

• Item one of sevenIsolation dome for research in the field of sensory and perceptual isolation and deprivation.Listed ahead of the psychological clinic, ahead of the animal rooms. The same page names sensory and perceptual deprivation among the department's current research interests.
• Who was in the buildingThe same calendar lists J. P. Zubek as Research Professor — no longer head of department, which by 1971 was A. H. Shephard — and A. W. Pressey, who would write the memoir defending him, as an associate professor down the corridor.
• What this settlesThis calendar was in students' hands through the academic year that ran from Parker in March to the protest meeting in November. Anyone who wanted to know what the department did could read it on page 866.
• And three years later, unchangedThe 1974–75 calendar carries the same sentence, word for word: Isolation dome for research in the field of sensory and perceptual isolation and deprivation.Still item one. Still ahead of the clinic. Sensory and perceptual deprivation still named among the department's research interests. Parker had reported, the Tribune had run the interview, the students had held their meeting — and the university did not revise a syllable of how it described itself.

• The prohibition is realNational Defence's The Law of Interrogation forbids stress positions; sensory deprivation or manipulation by blindfolds, hoods, earmuffs, loud music or bright lights; and sleep deprivation or manipulation — applied as a minimum standard to every detainee.
• The authority is borrowedThe manual grounds that prohibition by quoting a foreign judgment and reciting a foreign case's facts.
• Why it has toThere is no Canadian ruling to cite. There is no Canadian ruling because there was no Canadian inquiry. There was no Canadian inquiry because nobody was ever made to hold one.
• The shape of itCanada funded the experiments that established what the method does to a person, and then prohibited the method by pointing at a court in another country that had to work it out for itself.

• 22 – 24 April 1915 · YpresWhy irritants are forbidden in war. Germany releases 160 tons of chlorine on the 22nd and attacks again in the same pattern on the 24th. Veterans Affairs Canada records 6,035 Canadian casualties in those 48 hours, more than 2,000 of them dead. Gas warfare began with irritants and climbed. The ban exists so that no one starts the climb.
• 1995 · the statuteCanada's Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act, section 7:No person shall use a riot control agent as a method of warfare.Section 11 asks one thing of anyone who holds a riot control agent for riot control purposes: report it, and keep the documents.
• The agent is the one from SuffieldThe powder released over 2,000 men on the Suffield range in 1968 is the powder fired into a Canadian city thirty-three years later.
• For everyone elseA device that discharges tear gas is a prohibited weapon under the federal firearms regulations. Section 117.08 of the Criminal Code exempts people acting for a police force or the Canadian Forces.
• What it isCS, which Ontario's G20 review defines as tear gas, 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile. Quebec's public health institute: it is not a gas. It is a white crystalline powder carried as smoke, several times heavier than air, so it stays near the ground. It acts in 10 to 30 seconds and lasts 15 to 30 minutes.
• The fourth hypothesisThe institute lists four explanations for how CS harms the body. The fourth is cyanide: CS breaks down into malononitrile and 2-chlorobenzaldehyde, and that breakdown generates cyanide.
• 20 – 22 April 2001 · Quebec CityThe Summit of the Americas. By the police's own count, 5,148 tear gas grenades in 26 hours of operations, two thirds of them on the Saturday. Residents of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, and parts of Montcalm and Saint-Roch, took heavy concentrations for long periods; several had to leave their homes. On Saturday evening the whole of Saint-Jean-Baptiste was gassed. The Ligue des droits et libertés found that police gave residents no clear warning, before the summit or during it.
• 13 November 2003 · the RCMP's watchdogAn interim report from Shirley Heafey, chair of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, on a complaint from MP Svend Robinson, who was hit by the gas:RCMP members used excessive and unjustified force in releasing tear gas to move the protesters when a more measured response could have been attempted first.
• 26 June 2010 · TorontoThe G20. Police use tear gas in the city for the first time. Ontario's independent review: the command centre's notes record muzzle blasts or tear gas in the Queen's Park area at 4:42, 5:04 and 6:05 pm, andcontain no reference to any warnings to the public about the imminent use of tear gas.
• Spring 2012 · QuebecCS is used again to disperse student demonstrations.