Eminent Monsters

We do not torture.

- The United States will not torture.

To have all necessary power.

- Our war on terror begins with Al-Qaeda.

To detain terrorists.

But it's just not in there.

Hello.

In the traditional motion picture story,

the villains are usually defeated,

the ending is a happy one.

I can make no such promise

for the picture you're about to watch.

The story isn't over.

- I remember the nurse bringing my father down,

and he'd gone from a man to this almost non-human creature.

Here he starts to try to get rid of the equipment

that they used to put him in sensory isolation.

He's mumbling incoherently.

He's trying to remove his goggles.

He's trying to remove his cuffs.

Over and over again that he's incoherent.

We trust doctors.

We put our lives in their hands.

But some betray that trust.

For the last 60 years,

doctors working for the British and American governments

have used psychological torture to destroy people.

- They start off each interrogation saying,

"Can I have your name?"

I'm mentally trying to spell my own name.

I don't know what the mistake is,

but I know the way I'm spelling it is wrong.

To tell this story,

we need to go back to the 1950s,

when Scottish psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron

experimented on his own patients.

- It is a period of tremendous change in psychiatry.

With the enormous amount of world unrest,

we are seeing an enormous demand

for knowledge concerning the effects of stress.

- That door's locked, this one, Ziggy.

This one.

- The MI5 agent, he'd simply identified himself as Andy.

When they lifted the hood over my head,

I see Andrew standing in front of me

in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan.

Andrew would simply say, repeatedly,

"There's nothing I, or we the British government,

"can do about your situation.

"You have to cooperate with the Americans."

- They said, "What do you think about waterboarding?"

I said, "I like it a lot, I don't think it's tough enough."

- Psychiatrists have a special responsibility

to act as leaders and guides

in entering and opening up this new territory.

And internment.

In the past, we have foolishly released

hundreds and hundreds of dangerous terrorists,

only to meet them again on the battlefield.

I just signed an order to keep open the detention facilities

in Guantanamo Bay.

- A few moments ago, Dr, Ewen Cameron of Montreal,

chairman of the organizing committee,

opened this Third World Congress of Psychiatry

with these words.

- These are the days, and ours are the occasions

that summon up determination, fire the imagination

and drive us forward in this greatest of endeavors.

- I'm about to go see the Allan Memorial Institute,

where my father spent, on and off, four tragic years.

I remember my dad before and I remember my dad after.

It was one year after my Bar Mitzvah, so I was 14.

And I remember the Christmas holidays that year

with my father pacing the house,

going back and forth, back and forth,

singing this sort of crazy song from,

I think, it's the '30s, called

"Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey,"

over and over and over again,

and my being very puzzled

and not understanding what was happening.

Which is how he ended up, in 1956,

going to see Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute.

The infamous stables.

This building, for me, represents Cameron.

So I'm face-to-face right now with my nemesis.

I get this very strange feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Inside were all these terrible things happening.

And here I am in my seventh decade,

and it's like it all happened yesterday.

By far the most

chilling experiments we have uncovered

took place at this Gothic estate called Ravenscrag,

halfway up Mount Royal in Montreal.

- Then the drug began to take hold very rapidly.

Things became very furry and very frightening.

Nobody explained it to me.

Nobody ever asked me if I was willing to do it or anything.

I thought this was the coldest and most impersonal treatment

that anybody could give to anybody in the world.

- Well, I haven't ever had to talk about this publicly.

I don't like to reflect on what happened to her

because it breaks my heart.

My mom and dad both worked,

so I would go over to her house after school

and we would hang out and watch TV and eat chips

and drink Coca-Cola.

But even as a young kid, I remember being like,

"That's my grandma.

"You watch out, you don't mess with her." (laughs)

- She did suffer from postpartum depression,

which probably was misdiagnosed.

So she was depressed a lot.

She was suicidal.

And my mother was very familiar with Montreal,

from having lived there, and so they chose the Allan.

- By the 1950s, the Allan Memorial Institute

was one of the world's leading psychiatric hospitals.

Its director, Dr. Ewen Cameron was the president

of the American, Canadian,

and World Psychiatric Associations.

- My mother thought that Dr. Cameron was God.

My mother thought Dr. Cameron was God.

- Rudolf Hess was once called

the conscience of the party.

- He had been a psychiatrist at the trials at Nuremberg

after the war, and she trusted him implicitly.

- In 1945, the US intelligence agencies

had asked Dr. Cameron to examine Hitler's former deputy,

Rudolf Hess, at the Nuremberg war crimes trial.

- Rudolf Hess, guilty of conspiracy

and crimes against peace.

Life imprisonment.

Examining Nazi indoctrination

at close quarters shaped the way Dr. Cameron thought

about the vulnerability of the mind.

- I'm tryna decide if that's a photograph of Cameron.

You know, it's very interesting

that his is the only photograph in which there is no name,

and that he was the founder of this place.

Isn't that odd?

It goes to the second, third, fourth, etc, directors.

How peculiar.

There's Cameron with his crew in this photograph.

Somehow do no harm got forgotten.

Pretty upsetting being in here, actually.

And I can hold it together only so long

and then I kind of get overwhelmed by the feelings.

How old were you when she went in?

Seven, I was seven when my mother went.

I think whatever happened to her at the Allan

never cured the depression and never cured the anxiety.

Actually, it probably exacerbated it.

Where is Cameron's office?

It's here.

Ewen Cameron was born

in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire in 1901.

The son of a Presbyterian minister,

Cameron soon outgrew Scotland.

In 1942, he became an American citizen.

Ambitious and driven,

Cameron dreamed of winning the Nobel Prize for his work

on the frontiers of psychiatry.

So we have just come into

the original office of Ewen Cameron.

On the wall, there's a article from the Montreal Star

about the donation of the mansion

for the development of this program.

As we look out the window, we can see the stables.

The stables is where the sleep rooms were,

where the psychic driving experiments took place.

We were very afraid of the sleep room.

People in there were like babies.

They cried and they were very disoriented.

We used to walk very carefully

against the side of the corridor

that was opposite the sleep room with our backs to the wall

when we'd go by.

(scoffs) Very strange.

I think it's very easy for people

to say that this is the story of one patient.

To see this only and simply as a horrendous experience

that happened in Montreal in the 1950s

is to really miss the big picture.

- There they are, citizens of Montreal,

going about their business

efficiently and politely.

Appearances are misleading.

- In 1951, Britain, America, and Canada

held a secret meeting in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Montreal.

Among those attending

were Henry T. Tizard of Britain's Ministry of Defence,