The Slippery Slope

(This video will give you a look our first meeting)


I remember that the hospital room was dimly lit and the diminutive patient looked even smaller and more helpless amid the tangle of tubes and wires that were holding her together. Her body, salvaged from devastating injuries, was in the process of being “retro fitted” with bionic parts that would make her an indestructible fighting machine. Her mind had been wiped of memories and she was being psychologically and pharmacologically programmed to be an obedient, guilt free assassin. They asked me to stand by so I’d be the first thing she'd see when she awakened to her new identity. I felt like I should have greeted her with flowers or cuddly plush teddy bear but they told me that her life would be easier if she got used to her new status immediately-- so I placed a SIG P239, a semi-automatic pistol, on the coverlet.


Jean warned me that the first meeting would be hard to take and he was right. Henrietta was the same age as our sister was when she died in a terrorist bomb attack and she did look a lot like our little Enrika. But after the initial shock, I was surprised and kind of horrified at the ease with which I did everything they asked of me beginning with my offering her the gun. My instincts were shouting to comfort and protect this little girl but Dr. Belisario, Dr. Bianchi and my brother, Jean all convinced me to follow their orders. The two Doctors wore white coats and I wondered if I was being manipulated like the subjects in the Milgram Experiments that took place in 1961. You’ll see the similarities if you read about it. Penn State owns the original historic footage and offers it for sale and you can see a short segment here. I'm also giving you a link to an interesting reenactment here.


The experiment used authority figures in white lab coats to urge test subjects given the role of “teacher” to give other test subjects given the role “learner” increasingly strong electric shocks when they answered questions incorrectly. Milgram wanted to know if regular individuals would obey orders rather than follow their own set of values. Milgram’s experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and he summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

That first day I met Henrietta, I pushed away my own instincts of protection and care and began my descent into obeying orders that were incompatible with my own values and in fact with fundamental morality. Throughout our time together, I would ask her to do things that a 10 year old should not even hear about and I would stand by and watch other handlers mistreat their young charges without trying to stop them. I let myself be convinced by the doctors and their white coats that what I was doing was necessary and in fact was the kindest way of dealing with this child.



When she finally did awaken and I looked into her eyes, I saw the trust and love (provided by the psychotropic drugs they euphemistically call conditioning) and I felt the bond they promised. I imprinted her with her new name, Henrietta, and her signature weapon, the SIG P239--then she drifted back to sleep. My role as her handler and teacher would begin as soon as her body healed. Like Milgram's experiment, I would become the “teacher” who would train the “student” by following orders and inflicting the Agency’s brand of manipulation on these budding cyborg assassins. Over the next few months, Henrietta and I would train hard, bond emotionally, and I would teach her to kill the Padania terrorists and anyone else the Agency deemed to be enemies of our country.

I prided myself in the fact that I did not let them give her too much "conditioning" and I tried to treat her like a normal little girl by taking her out for ice cream. Doing these little favors let me convinced myself that I was better than the other handlers but the low dosage presented a new set of dilemmas that I'll talk about next time. Aside from my lame attempts to treat her humanely, I was no better than the subjects in the experiment, I ignored her vulnerability and emotional pain and continued to use her in the name of Agency for the good of the nation.