ce399 | research archive

Left Gatekepper Naomi Klein on MK-ULTRA: Disasterous Disinformation

...the true purpose of MK-ULTRA was not to research brainwashing (that was a mere side project) but to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from "resistant sources."49 In other words, torture. Pg 39-40. Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. 

Related Archives:

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, owner of the DailyKos website, now admits that he spent six months in the employ of the US Central Intelligence Agency in 2001," writes Holland. "In a one-hour interview on June 2, 2006 at the Commonwealth Club, Moulitsas, also known as 'Kos,’ admitted that he was a CIA employee and would have 'no problem working for them’ in the present.--Kurt Nimmo

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I was and still remain strongly for military action in Afghanistan as a legitimate and necessary act in response to 9/11: an attack on two American cities and on the infrastructure of government cannot be ignored... - Dave Neiwert aka 'Hunter'  - Daily Kos, May 10, 2006

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ce399 note, 11 April 2008:

No mention of Sanger and Eugenics in a recent Democracy Now! program detailing the history of  Reproductive Rights and Abortion Activism. No mention of Sanger or Eugenics at all in the DN! online archive.

Meanwhile, Dave Neiwert the pseudo anti-fascist who apparently has never heard of  the term Zionism, yet likes to assume National Alliance related screen names while writing mainstream Democratic 'con and bullshit' (or is it endlessly blathering kitsch?) at CIA-Mockingbird front Daily Kos, stoops to the level of outright disinformation and lying regarding Sanger and Eugenics: 

Foremost among these was the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, as well as other multiculturalists such as Margaret Mead and Franz Boas. These thinkers specifically and ardently rejected the tenets of white supremacism and "negative" eugenics. Of course, in subsequent years, all of these people have been tarred -- mostly by anti-abortion activists -- with guilt by association to the eugenics movement. (Planned Parenthood has a thorough and well-argued defense of Sanger up on its Web site.) But there was no mistaking the differences between them at the time.

Dave Neiwert is now managing editor at Firedoglake.

With gatekeepers like Neiwert at the levers of information control for citizens seeking an alternative to the corporate media, is it any wonder the U.S. has become an uninhabitable Fourth Reich, populated by selectively bred 'imbeciles' ? .

Dave Neiwert (aka 'Hunter') Daily Kos, Left 'Gate Keeping,' the CIA and Two Minutes Hate

Amy Goodman Omits and Dave Neiwert Whitewashes History of Margaret Sanger, Eugenics

Amy Goodman and James Bamford Omit ECHELON, UKUSA Agreement from NSA Discussion

Michael Parenti Shreds JFK Assassination Conspiracy Debunkers (mp3 file)

Michael Parenti Shreds JFK Assassination Conspiracy Debunkers (mp3 file)

Michael Parenti: The JFK Assassination and the Gangster Nature of the State
When Oliver Stone’s movie JFK opened in December 1991 a huge PR campaign was mobilized against the film. Even progressives spoke out. Noam Chomsky wrote in support of the Warren Commission's findings – in contrast Michael Parenti gave one of his highly acclaimed talks criticizing the lone assassin theory. The bitter questions that haunted defenders and critics alike was whether government agencies of a democratic country would do such a thing as assassinate an elected President.

In this talk Michael Parenti turns to that question first – he examines, in part one, what he calls “the gangster nature of the state.” In part two he goes over details of the assassination and critiques The Nation, The Progressive, Chomsky and Cockburn. He spoke in Berkeley, CA, on the 30th anniversary of the JFK assassination.

This is one of many "standing ovations" talks by Parenti. The master for this program was lost and this appears to be the only copy of the original recording.
TUC Radio

In 1966 LBJ Ordered FBI to Target Warren Commission Researchers

See Mae Brussell's Dialogue Conspiracy 243 for more information. Memo from LBJ ordering FBI to "get the Warren Commission researchers." Researchers became FBI COINTELPRO intelligence targets if they disagreed with Warren Commission findings. 

Related Archives: 

COINTELPRO

Homeland Security Includes "Alternative Media" in "Domestic Extremism Lexicon" (pdf file)

Related Articles: 

Obama Information Czar Outlined Plan for Government to Infiltrate Conspiracy Groups

Obama Staffer Wants Cognitive Infiltration of 911 Conspiracy Groups

Rumsfeld's P20G Revisited

Rumsfeld's influential Defense Science Board 2002 Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism says in its classified "outbrief" -- a briefing drafted to guide other Pentagon agencies -- that the global war on terrorism "requires new strategies, postures and organization."

The board recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception.

Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces.

Such tactics would hold "states/sub-state actors accountable" and "signal to harboring states that their sovereignty will be at risk," the briefing paper declares.

Original Archive:

Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG): "stimulating reactions" among terrorists

State Secrets Privilege, Wiretapping and "Speculation"

image pending

...

Al Haramain, an Oregon group that the government declared to be a terrorist organization in 2004, and which has since gone out of business, sued the Bush administration in 2006. It claimed that federal authorities had illegally listened in on its lawyers' phone calls and is seeking damages. Its officials denied the group was a terrorist outfit.

Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, who has rebuffed Bush and Obama administration requests to dismiss the suit, did not reveal his views on the legality of the program. But he told a government lawyer that Al-Haramain had presented strong evidence that it had been wiretapped and had the right to sue.

The hearing was the first in California, and the second in the nation, to address the constitutionality of Bush's post-Sept. 11 order to intercept communications between Americans and suspected foreign terrorists without a warrant.

Since the New York Times revealed the program, and Bush confirmed it, in December 2005, would-be plaintiffs have struggled to prove they were targeted for surveillance and were entitled to challenge it.

A federal judge in Michigan declared the program unconstitutional in 2006, in the only other instance in which the issue has gone to court. But an appeals court threw the case out because none of the plaintiffs could show that their calls had been intercepted.

Al-Haramain's lawsuit is unique because the charity was inadvertently sent a classified document in 2004 that reportedly showed that its lawyers had been wiretapped.

Nevertheless, said a lawyer for Obama's Justice Department, Al-Haramain can't prove it was subject to electronic surveillance, because the document - which the group returned to the government, at officials' request - and virtually everything else about the program are secrets.

People can't sue over a confidential government program "based on speculation," said Justice Department attorney Anthony Coppolino.

A ruling on the legality of the program "is simply inappropriate," he told Walker, and even a decision on whether Al-Haramain has the right to sue would reveal information about "intelligence sources and methods."

Walker, however, has already ruled that public statements by Bush administration officials indicated that the Islamic organization had probably been wiretapped.

The judge told Coppolino that Al-Haramain "has presented a substantial array of evidence" that indicated it had been subject to electronic surveillance.

Walker did not say what he would do next. He could limit his ruling to whether Al-Haramain has the right to sue, and allow either side to appeal. Or he could decide whether Bush's program violated Al-Haramain's rights.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/24/MNQB19RL8R.DTL

Related Articles:

The NSA and Domestic Espionage (Part Four)

The NSA and Domestic Espionage (Part One)

The NSA and Domestic Espionage (Part Three)

The NSA and Domestic Espionage (Part Two)

The NSA and Domestic Espionage Revisited

Amy Goodman and James Bamford Omit ECHELON, UKUSA Agreement from NSA Discussion

Court Recognizes Electronic Harassment: Documents from the Walbert Case

MEDUSA Microwave Auditory Effect Might Cause Brain Damage

A US company claims it is ready to build a microwave ray gun able to beam sounds directly into people's heads.

The device dubbed MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio)  exploits the microwave audio effect, in which short microwave pulses rapidly heat tissue, causing a shockwave inside the skull that can be detected by the ears. A series of pulses can be transmitted to produce recognisable sounds.

The device is aimed for military or crowd-control applications, but may have other uses.

Lev Sadovnik of the Sierra Nevada Corporation in the US is working on the system, having started work on a US navy research contract. The navy's report states that the effect was shown to be effective.

Scarecrow Beam?

MEDUSA involves a microwave auditory effect "loud" enough to cause discomfort or even incapacitation. Sadovnik says that normal audio safety limits do not apply since the sound does not enter through the eardrums.

"The repel effect is a combination of loudness and the irritation factor," he says. "You can't block it out."

Sadovnik says the device will work thanks to a new reconfigurable antenna developed by colleague Vladimir Manasson. It steers the beam electronically, making it possible to flip from a broad to a narrow beam, or aim at multiple targets simultaneously.

Sadovnik says the technology could have non-military applications. Birds seem to be highly sensitive to microwave audio, he says, so it might be used to scare away unwanted flocks.

Sadovnik has also experimented with transmitting microwave audio to people with outer ear problems that impair their normal hearing.

Brain Damage Risk

James Lin of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago says that MEDUSA is feasible in principle.

He has carried out his own work on the technique, and was even approached by the music industry about using microwave audio to enhance sound systems, he told New Scientist.

"But is it going to be possible at the power levels necessary?" he asks. Previous microwave audio tests involved very "quiet" sounds that were hard to hear, a high-power system would mean much more powerful  and potentially hazardous shockwaves.

"I would worry about what other health effects it is having," says Lin. "You might see neural damage."

Sierra Nevada says that a demonstration version could be built in a year, with a transportable system following within 18 months. They are currently seeking funding for the work from the US Department of Defence.

Microwave Ray Gun Controls Crowds with Noise
David Hambling
4 July 2008

http://i.abcnews.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/story?id=5305386&page=1

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14250-microwave-ray-gun-controls-crowds-with-noise.html?full=true&print=true

Related Archive:

Xtreme Defense (Washington Post 2005)

http://ce399.typepad.com/weblog/2005/11/medusa_and_the_.html

Mind Games (Washington Post 2007)

http://ce399.typepad.com/weblog/2007/10/mind-games.html

Satanic Subversion of the U.S. Military

Michael and Lilith Aquino

On February 5, 1999, in U.S. District Court in Lincoln, Nebraska, an extraordinary hearing occurred in Paul A. Bonacci v. Lawrence E. King, a civil action in which the plaintiff charged that he had been ritualistically abused by the defendant, as part of a nationwide pedophile ring linked to powerful political figures in Washington and to elements of the U.S. military and intelligence establishment. Three weeks later, on February 27, Judge Warren K. Urbom ordered King, who is currently in Federal prison, to pay $1 million in damages to Bonacci, in what Bonacci's attorney John DeCamp said was a clear signal that "the evidence presented was credible."

During the February 5 hearing, Noreen Gosch stunned the court with sworn testimony linking U.S. Army Lt. Col. Michael Aquino (ret.) to the nationwide pedophile ring. Her son, Johnny, then 12 years old, was kidnapped off the streets of West Des Moines, Iowa on September 5, 1982, while he was doing his early-morning newspaper deliveries. Since his kidnapping, she has devoted all of her time and resources to finding her son, and to exposing the dangers that millions of children in American face from this hideous, literally Satanic underground of ritualistic deviants.

"We have investigated, we have talked to so far 35 victims of this said organization that took my son and is responsible for what happened to Paul, and they can verify everything that has happened," she told the court.

"What this story involves is an elaborate function, I will say, that was an offshoot of a government program. The MK-Ultra program was developed in the 1950s by the CIA. It was used to help spy on other countries during the Cold War because they felt that the other countries were spying on us.

"It was very successful. They could do it very well."

Then, the Aquino bombshell: "Well, then there was a man by the name of Michael Aquino. He was in the military. He had top Pentagon clearances. He was a pedophile. He was a Satanist. He's founded the Temple of Set. And he was a close friend of Anton LaVey. The two of them were very active in ritualistic sexual abuse. And they deferred funding from this government program to use [in] this experimentation on children.

"Where they deliberately split off the personalities of these children into multiples, so that when they're questioned or put under oath or questioned under lie detector, that unless the operator knows how to question a multiple-personality disorder, they turn up with no evidence."

She continued: "They used these kids to sexually compromise politicians or anyone else they wish to have control of. This sounds so far out and so bizarre I had trouble accepting it in the beginning myself until I was presented with the data. We have the proof. In black and white."

Under questioning from DeCamp, Gosch reported: "I know that Michael Aquino has been in Iowa. I know that Michael Aquino has been to Offutt Air Force Base [a Strategic Air Command base, near Omaha, which was linked to King's activities]. I know that he has had contact with many of these children."

Paul Bonacci, who was simultaneously a victim and a member of the nationwide pedophile crime syndicate, has subsequently identified Aquino as the man who ordered the kidnapping of Johnny Gosch. In his February 5 testimony, Bonacci referred to the mastermind of the Gosch abduction as "the Colonel."

A second witness who testified at the February 5 hearing, Rusty Nelson, was King's personal photographer. He later described to EIR another incident which linked King to Aquino, while the Army special forces officer was still on active reserve duty. Some time in the late 1980s, Nelson was with King at a posh hotel in downtown Minneapolis, when he personally saw King turn over a suitcase full of cash and bearer-bonds to "the Colonel," who he later positively identified as Aquino. According to Nelson, King told him that the suitcase of cash and bonds was earmarked for the Nicaraguan Contras, and that "the Colonel" was part of the covert Contra support apparatus, otherwise associated with Lt. Col. Oliver North, Vice President George Bush, and the "secret parallel government" that they ran from the White House.

Just who is Lt. Col. Michael Aquino (ret.), and what does the evidence revealed in a Nebraska court hearing say about the current state of affairs inside the U.S. military? Is the Aquino case some kind of weird aberration that slipped off the Pentagon radar screen?

Not in the least.

Aquino, Satan and the U.S. Military

Throughout much of the 1980s, Aquino was at the center of a controversy involving the Pentagon's acquiescence to outright Satanic practices inside the military services. Aquino was also a prime suspect in a series of pedophile scandals involving the sexual abuse of hundreds of children, including the children of military personnel serving at the Presidio U.S. Army station in the San Francisco Bay Area. Furthermore, even as Aquino was being investigated by Army Criminal Investigation Division officers for involvement in the pedophile cases, he was retaining highest-level security clearances, and was involved in pioneering work in military psychological operations ("psy-ops").

On August 14, 1987, San Francisco police raided Aquino's Russian Hill home, which he shared with his wife Lilith. The raid was in response to allegations that the house had been the scene of a brutal rape of a four-year-old girl. The principal suspect in the rape, a Baptist minister named Gary Hambright, was indicted in September 1987 on charges that he committed "lewd and lascivious acts" with six boys and four girls, ranging in age from three to seven years, during September-October 1986. At the time of the alleged sex crimes, Hambright was employed at a child care center on the U.S. Army base at Presidio. At the time of Hambright's indictment, the San Francisco police charged that he was involved in at least 58 separate incidents of child sexual abuse.

According to an article in the October 30, 1987 San Francisco Examiner, one of the victims had identified Aquino and his wife as participants in the child rape. According to the victim, the Aquinos had filmed scenes of the child being fondled by Hambright in a bathtub. The child's description of the house, which was also the headquarters of Aquino's Satanic Temple of Set, was so detailed, that police were able to obtain a search warrant. During the raid, they confiscated 38 videotapes, photo negatives, and other evidence that the home had been the hub of a pedophile ring, operating in and around U.S. military bases.

Aquino and his wife were never indicted in the incident. Aquino claimed that he had been in Washington at the time, enrolled in a year-long reserve officers course at the National Defense University, although he did admit that he made frequent visits back to the Bay Area and to his church/home. The public flap over the Hambright indictment did prompt the U.S. Army to transfer Aquino from the Presidio, where he was the deputy director of reserve training, to the U.S. Army Reserve Personnel Center in St. Louis.

On April 19, 1988, the ten-count indictment against Hambright was dropped by U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello, on the grounds that, while there was clear evidence of child abuse (six of the children contracted the venereal disease, chlamydia), there was insufficient evidence to link Hambright (or the Aquinos) to the crimes. Parents of several of the victims charged that Russoniello's actions proved that "the Federal system has broken down in not being able to protect the rights of citizens age three to eight."

Russoniello would later be implicated in efforts to cover up the links between the Nicaraguan Contras and South American cocaine-trafficking organizations, raising deeper questions about whether the decision not to prosecute Hambright and Aquino had "national security implications."

Indeed, on April 22, 1989, the U.S. Army sent letters to the parents of at least 56 of the children believed to have been molested by Hambright, urging them to have their children tested for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), because Hambright, a former daycare center worker, was reported to be a carrier.

On May 13, 1989, the San Jose Mercury reported that Aquino and his wife had been recently questioned by Army investigators about charges of child molestation by the couple in two northern California counties, Sonoma and Mendocino. A 9-year-old girl in Santa Rosa, California, and an 11-year-old boy in Fort Bragg, also in California, separately identified Aquino as the rapist in a series of 1985 incidents, after they had seen him on television.

Softies on Satan

When the San Francisco Chronicle contacted Army officials at the Presidio to find out if Aquino's security clearances had been lifted as the result of the pedophile investigations, the reporters were referred to the Pentagon, where Army spokesman Maj. Greg Rixon told them, "The question is whether he is trustworthy or can do the job. There is nothing that would indicate in this case that there is any problem we should be concerned about."

Indeed, the Pentagon had already given its de facto blessings to Aquino's long-standing public association with the Church of Satan and his own successor "church," the Temple of Set. This, despite the fact that Aquino's Satanic activities involved overt support for neo-Nazi movements in the United States and Europe. On October 10, 1983, while traveling in West Germany on "official NATO business," Aquino had staged a Satanic "working" at the Wewelsburg Castle in Bavaria. Aquino wrote a lengthy account of the ritual, in which he invoked Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler: "As the Wewelsburg was conceived by Heinrich Himmler to be the 'Mittelpunkt der Welt' ('Middle of the World'), and as the focus of the Hall of the Dead was to be the Gate of that Center, to summon the Powers of Darkness at their most powerful locus."

As early as April 1978, the U.S. Army had circulated A Handbook for Chaplains "to facilitate the provision of religious activities." Both the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set were listed among the "other" religions to be tolerated inside the U.S. military. A section of the handbook dealing with Satanism stated, "Often confused with witchcraft, Satanism is the worship of Satan (also known as Baphomet or Lucifer). Classical Satanism, often involving 'black masses,' human sacrifices, and other sacrilegious or illegal acts, is now rare. Modern Satanism is based on both the knowledge of ritual magick and the 'anti-establishment' mood of the 1960s. It is related to classical Satanism more in image than substance, and generally focuses on 'rational self-interest with ritualistic trappings.'

No so fast! In 1982, the Temple of Set fissured over the issue of Aquino's emphasis on Nazism. One leader, Ronald K. Barrett, shortly after his expulsion, wrote that Aquino had "taken the Temple of Set in an explicitly Satanic direction, with strong overtones of German National Socialist Nazi occultism ... One fatality has occurred within the Temple membership during the period covered May 1982-July 1983."

The handbook quoted "Nine Satanic Statements" from the Church of Satan, without comment. "Statement Seven," as quoted in the handbook, read, "Satan represents man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all fours, who, because of his 'divine and intellectual development' has become the most vicious animal of all."

From 'Psy-Ops' to 'Mindwars'

Aquino's steady rise up the hierarchy of the Satanic world closely paralleled his career advances inside the U.S. military. According to an official biography circulated by the Temple of Set, "Dr. Aquino is High Priest and chief executive officer of the Temple of Set, the nation's principal Satanic church, in which he holds the degree of Ipissimus VI. He joined the original Church of Satan in 1969, becoming one of its chief officials by 1975 when the Temple of Set was founded. In his secular profession he is a Lieutenant Colonel, Military Intelligence, U.S. Army, and is qualified as a Special-Forces officer, Civil Affairs officer, and Defense Attaché. He is a graduate of the Command and General Staff College, the National Defense University and the Defense Intelligence College, and the State Departments' Foreign Service Institute."

Indeed, a more detailed curriculum vitae that Aquino provided to EIR, dated March 1989, claimed that he had gotten his doctorate at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1980, with his dissertation on "The Neutron Bomb." He listed 16 separate military schools that he attended during 1968-87, including advanced courses in "Psychological Operations" at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and "Strategic Intelligence" at the Defense Intelligence College, at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.

Aquino was deeply involved in what has been called the "revolution in military affairs" ("RMA"), the introduction of the most kooky "Third Wave," "New Age" ideas into military long-range planning, which introduced such notions as "information warfare" and "cyber-warfare" into the Pentagon's lexicon.

In the early 1980s, at the same time that Heidi and Alvin Toffler were spinning their Tavistock "Third Wave" utopian claptrap to some top Air Force brass, Aquino and another U.S. Army colonel, Paul Vallely, were co-authoring an article for Military Review. Although the article was never published in the journal, the piece was widely circulated among military planners, and was distributed by Aquino's Temple of Set. The article, titled "From PSYOP to Mindwar: The Psychology of Victory," endorsed some of the ideas published in a 1980 Military Review article by Lt. Col. John Alexander, an affiliate of the Stanford Research Institute, a hotbed of Tavistock Institute and Frankfurt School "New Age" social engineering.

Aquino and Vallely called for an explicitly Nietzschean form of warfare, which they dubbed "mindwar." "Like the sword Excalibur," they wrote, "we have but to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have but the courage and the integrity to guide civilization with it. If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they then devise moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level."

And what is "mindwar?" "The term is harsh and fear-inspiring," Aquino wrote. "And it should be: It is a term of attack and victory-not one of rationalization and coaxing and conciliation. The enemy may be offended by it; that is quite all right as long as he is defeated by it. A definition is offered: Mindwar is the deliberate, aggressive convincing of all participants in a war that we will win that war."

For Aquino, "mindwar" is a permanent state of strategic psychological warfare against the populations of friend and foe nations alike. "In its strategic context, mindwar must reach out to friends, enemies and neutrals alike across the globe ... through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth. These media are, of course, the electronic media-television and radio. State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasts make possible a penetration of the minds of the world such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago." Above all else, Aquino argues, mindwar must target the population of the United States, "by denying enemy propaganda access to our people, and by explaining and emphasizing to our people the rationale for our national interest. ... Rather it states a whole truth that, if it does not now exist, will be forced into existence by the will of the United States."

Satanic Subversion of the U.S. Military
Jeffrey Steinberg

http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/satanic_subversion.htm

Brain will be Battlefield of Future, Warns US Intelligence Report

The human brain could become a battlefield in future wars, a new report predicts, including 'pharmacological land mines' and drones directed by mind control

Rapid advances in neuroscience could have a dramatic impact on national security and the way in which future wars are fought, US intelligence officials have been told.

In a report commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, leading scientists were asked to examine how a greater understanding of the brain over the next 20 years is likely to drive the development of new medicines and technologies.

They found several areas in which progress could have a profound impact, including behaviour-altering drugs, scanners that can interpret a person's state of mind and devices capable of boosting senses such as hearing and vision.

On the battlefield, bullets may be replaced with "pharmacological land mines" that release drugs to incapacitate soldiers on contact, while scanners and other electronic devices could be developed to identify suspects from their brain activity and even disrupt their ability to tell lies when questioned, the report says.

"The concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possible that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects," the report states.

The report highlights one electronic technique, called transcranial direct current stimulation, which involves using electrical pulses to interfere with the firing of neurons in the brain and has been shown to delay a person's ability to tell a lie.

Drugs could also be used to enhance the performance of military personnel. There is already anecdotal evidence of troops using the narcolepsy drug modafinil, and ritalin, which is prescribed for attention deficit disorder, to boost their performance. Future drugs, developed to boost the cognitive faculties of people with dementia, are likely to be used in a similar way, the report adds.

Greater understanding of the brain's workings is also expected to usher in new devices that link directly to the brain, either to allow operators to control machinery with their minds, such as flying unmanned reconnaissance drones, or to boost their natural senses.

...

The report warns that while the US and other western nations might now consider themselves at the forefront of neuroscience, that is likely to change as other countries ramp up their computing capabilities. Unless security services can monitor progress internationally, they risk "major, even catastrophic, intelligence failures in the years ahead", the report warns.

"In the intelligence community, there is an extremely small number of people who understand the science and without that it's going to be impossible to predict surprises. This is a black hole that needs to be filled with light," Green told the Guardian.

The technologies will one day have applications in counter-terrorism and crime-fighting. The report says brain imaging will not improve sufficiently in the next 20 years to read peoples' intentions from afar and spot criminals before they act, but it might be good enough to help identify people at a checkpoint or counter who are afraid or anxious.

"We're not going to be reading minds at a distance, but that doesn't mean we can't detect gross changes in anxiety or fear, and then subsequently talk to those individuals to see what's upsetting them," Green said.
...

Ian Sample
UK Guardian
13 August 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/13/military.neuroscience/print

via:

No World System

http://noworldsystem.com/category/psychotronic-weapons/

Information War More Important than Combat

COL. SAM GARDINER: Yeah. I must say that my criticism is of the Pentagon. After the first Gulf War, there was sort of a culture change, and it occurred not only in the leadership of the civilian part of the Pentagon, but also in military people, which was the idea that they had to manipulate the press to get support. They called it different things. It was called “information warfare,” it was called “strategic communications.” But never before have we had so much of a cultural focus on the message as almost being more important than what they do.

And we’ve seen that all through the operations in Iraq, from the naming of terrorist death squads in ways to connect to 9/11 to the most recent experience where we’re talking about special groups so you can connect it with the Iranians being in Iraq. It is a cultural change that even leads officers to lie. And that occurs both of active-duty and retired officers. And that is a painful change in a culture where truth has been the essence of what an officer was, and that seems to be fading.

Col. Sam Gardiner, retired Air Force colonel, he has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College, Air War College and Naval War College.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/22/pentagons_pundits_a_look_at_the

COL. SAM GARDINER: Yeah. I must say that my criticism is of the Pentagon. After the first Gulf War, there was sort of a culture change, and it occurred not only in the leadership of the civilian part of the Pentagon, but also in military people, which was the idea that they had to manipulate the press to get support. They called it different things. It was called “information warfare,” it was called “strategic communications.” But never before have we had so much of a cultural focus on the message as almost being more important than what they do.

And we’ve seen that all through the operations in Iraq, from the naming of terrorist death squads in ways to connect to 9/11 to the most recent experience where we’re talking about special groups so you can connect it with the Iranians being in Iraq. It is a cultural change that even leads officers to lie. And that occurs both of active-duty and retired officers. And that is a painful change in a culture where truth has been the essence of what an officer was, and that seems to be fading.

Col. Sam Gardiner, retired Air Force colonel, he has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College, Air War College and Naval War College.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/22/pentagons_pundits_a_look_at_the

Constant Conflict

 

[A look behind the philosophy and practice of Americas push for domination of the worlds economy and culture. First published From Parameters, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14: US Army War College]

Constant Conflict

US Army War College Quarterly

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

We have entered an age of constant conflict. Information is at once our core commodity and the most destabilizing factor of our time. Until now, history has been a quest to acquire information; today, the challenge lies in managing information. Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize, and apply relevant knowledge soar--professionally, financially, politically, militarily, and socially. We, the winners, are a minority.

For the world masses, devastated by information they cannot manage or effectively interpret, life is "nasty, brutish . . . and short-circuited." The general pace of change is overwhelming, and information is both the motor and signifier of change. Those humans, in every country and region, who cannot understand the new world, or who cannot profit from its uncertainties, or who cannot reconcile themselves to its dynamics, will become the violent enemies of their inadequate governments, of their more fortunate neighbors, and ultimately of the United States. We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent.

We live in an age of multiple truths. He who warns of the "clash of civilizations" is incontestably right; simultaneously, we shall see higher levels of constructive trafficking between civilizations than ever before. The future is bright--and it is also very dark. More men and women will enjoy health and prosperity than ever before, yet more will live in poverty or tumult, if only because of the ferocity of demographics. There will be more democracy--that deft liberal form of imperialism--and greater popular refusal of democracy. One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.

In the past, information empowerment was largely a matter of insider and outsider, as elementary as the division of society into the literate and illiterate. While superior information--often embodied in military technology--killed throughout history, its effects tended to be politically decisive but not personally intrusive (once the raping and pillaging were done). Technology was more apt to batter down the city gates than to change the nature of the city. The rise of the modern West broke the pattern. Whether speaking of the dispossessions and dislocations caused in Europe through the introduction of machine-driven production or elsewhere by the great age of European imperialism, an explosion of disorienting information intruded ever further into Braudel's "structures of everyday life." Historically, ignorance was bliss. Today, ignorance is no longer possible, only error.

The contemporary expansion of available information is immeasurable, uncontainable, and destructive to individuals and entire cultures unable to master it. The radical fundamentalists--the bomber in Jerusalem or Oklahoma City, the moral terrorist on the right or the dictatorial multiculturalist on the left--are all brothers and sisters, all threatened by change, terrified of the future, and alienated by information they cannot reconcile with their lives or ambitions. They ache to return to a golden age that never existed, or to create a paradise of their own restrictive design. They no longer understand the world, and their fear is volatile.

Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure (of note, the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community). The attempt of the Iranian mullahs to secede from modernity has failed, although a turbaned corpse still stumbles about the neighborhood. Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its children. Our victims volunteer.

These noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or the rejectionist segment of our own population, are enraged. Their cultures are under assault; their cherished values have proven dysfunctional, and the successful move on without them. The laid-off blue-collar worker in America and the Taliban militiaman in Afghanistan are brothers in suffering.

It is a truism that throughout much of the 20th century the income gap between top and bottom narrowed, whether we speak of individuals, countries, or in some cases continents. Further, individuals or countries could "make it" on sheer muscle power and the will to apply it. You could work harder than your neighbor and win in the marketplace. There was a rough justice in it, and it offered near-ecumenical hope. That model is dead. Today, there is a growing excess of muscle power in an age of labor-saving machines and methods. In our own country, we have seen blue-collar unions move from center stage to near-irrelevance. The trend will not reverse. At the same time, expectations have increased dramatically. There is a global sense of promises broken, of lies told. Individuals on much of the planet believe they have played by the rules laid down for them (in the breech, they often have not), only to find that some indefinite power has changed those rules overnight. The American who graduated from high school in the 1960s expected a good job that would allow his family security and reasonably increasing prosperity. For many such Americans, the world has collapsed, even as the media tease them with images of an ever-richer, brighter, fun world from which they are excluded. These discarded citizens sense that their government is no longer about them, but only about the privileged. Some seek the solace of explicit religion. Most remain law-abiding, hard-working citizens. Some do not.

The foreign twin is the Islamic, or sub-Saharan African, or Mexican university graduate who faces a teetering government, joblessness, exclusion from the profits of the corruption distorting his society, marriage in poverty or the impossibility of marriage, and a deluge of information telling him (exaggeratedly and dishonestly) how well the West lives. In this age of television-series franchising, videos, and satellite dishes, this young, embittered male gets his skewed view of us from reruns of Dynasty and Dallas, or from satellite links beaming down Baywatch, sources we dismiss too quickly as laughable and unworthy of serious consideration as factors influencing world affairs. But their effect is destructive beyond the power of words to describe. Hollywood goes where Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable to touch the reality of America, is touched by America's irresponsible fantasies of itself; he sees a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world from which he is excluded, a world of wealth he can judge only in terms of his own poverty.

Most citizens of the globe are not economists; they perceive wealth as inelastic, its possession a zero-sum game. If decadent America (as seen on the screen) is so fabulously rich, it can only be because America has looted one's own impoverished group or country or region. Adding to the cognitive dissonance, the discarded foreigner cannot square the perceived moral corruption of America, a travesty of all he has been told to value, with America's enduring punitive power. How could a nation whose women are "all harlots" stage Desert Storm? It is an offense to God, and there must be a demonic answer, a substance of conspiracies and oppression in which his own secular, disappointing elite is complicit. This discarded foreigner's desire may be to attack the "Great Satan America," but America is far away (for now), so he acts violently in his own neighborhood. He will accept no personal guilt for his failure, nor can he bear the possibility that his culture "doesn't work." The blame lies ever elsewhere. The cult of victimization is becoming a universal phenomenon, and it is a source of dynamic hatreds.

It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry "American culture," with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites--figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians--human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people's culture. It stresses comfort and convenience--ease--and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare.

Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather "Baywatch." America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no "peer competitor" in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its "disposable" products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection. American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works are transient, then so are life's greatest gifts--passion, beauty, the quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself. American culture is alive.

This vividness, this vitality, is reflected in our military; we do not expect to achieve ultimate solutions, only constant improvement. All previous cultures, general and military, have sought to achieve an ideal form of life and then fix it in cement. Americans, in and out of uniform, have always embraced change (though many individuals have not, and their conservatism has acted as a healthy brake on our national excesses). American culture is the culture of the unafraid.

Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than exclude. The films most despised by the intellectual elite--those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex--are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere. American action films, often in dreadful copies, are available from the Upper Amazon to Mandalay. They are even more popular than our music, because they are easier to understand. The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a basic understanding. They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad). They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended or won--and violence and sex. Complain until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.

When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video images is more immediate and intense than that of computers. Image trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine. When we and they collide, they shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win.

As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by information, or dispossessed by the effects of information-based technologies, there will be more violence. Information victims will often see no other resort. As work becomes more cerebral, those who fail to find a place will respond by rejecting reason. We will see countries and continents divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic trends. Developing countries will not be able to depend on physical production industries, because there will always be another country willing to work cheaper. The have-nots will hate and strive to attack the haves. And we in the United States will continue to be perceived as the ultimate haves. States will struggle for advantage or revenge as their societies boil. Beyond traditional crime, terrorism will be the most common form of violence, but transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars will continue to plague the world, albeit with the "lesser" conflicts statistically dominant. In defense of its interests, its citizens, its allies, or its clients, the United States will be required to intervene in some of these contests. We will win militarily whenever we have the guts for it.

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

We are building an information-based military to do that killing. There will still be plenty of muscle power required, but much of our military art will consist in knowing more about the enemy than he knows about himself, manipulating data for effectiveness and efficiency, and denying similar advantages to our opponents. This will involve a good bit of technology, but the relevant systems will not be the budget vampires, such as manned bombers and attack submarines, that we continue to buy through inertia, emotional attachment, and the lobbying power of the defense industry. Our most important technologies will be those that support soldiers and Marines on the ground, that facilitate command decisions, and that enable us to kill accurately and survive amid clutter (such as multidimensional urban battlefields). The only imaginable use for most of our submarine fleet will be to strip out the weapons, dock them tight, and turn the boats into low-income housing. There will be no justification for billion-dollar bombers at all.

For a generation, and probably much longer, we will face no military peer competitor. Our enemies will challenge us by other means. The violent actors we encounter often will be small, hostile parties possessed of unexpected, incisive capabilities or simply of a stunning will to violence (or both). Renegade elites, not foreign fleets, should worry us. The urbanization of the global landscape is a greater threat to our operations than any extant or foreseeable military system. We will not deal with wars of Realpolitik, but with conflicts spawned of collective emotions, sub-state interests, and systemic collapse. Hatred, jealousy, and greed--emotions rather than strategy--will set the terms of the struggles.

We will survive and win any conflict short of a cataclysmic use of weapons of mass destruction. But the constant conflicts in which we selectively intervene will be as miserable as any other form of warfare for the soldiers and Marines engaged. The bayonet will still be relevant; however, informational superiority incisively employed should both sharpen that bayonet and permit us to defeat some--but never all--of our enemies outside of bayonet range. Our informational advantage over every other country and culture will be so enormous that our greatest battlefield challenge will be harnessing its power. Our potential national weakness will be the failure to maintain the moral and raw physical strength to thrust that bayonet into an enemy's heart.

Pilots and skippers, as well as defense executives, demand threat models that portray country X or Y as overtaking the military capability of the United States in 10 to 20 years. Forget it. Our military power is culturally based. They cannot rival us without becoming us. Wise competitors will not even attempt to defeat us on our terms; rather, they will seek to shift the playing field away from military confrontations or turn to terrorism and nontraditional forms of assault on our national integrity. Only the foolish will fight fair.

The threat models stitched together from dead parts to convince Congress that the Russians are only taking a deep breath or that the Chinese are only a few miles off the coast of California uniformly assume that while foreign powers make all the right decisions, analyze every trend correctly, and continue to achieve higher and higher economic growth rates, the United States will take a nap. On the contrary. Beyond the Beltway, the United States is wide awake and leading a second "industrial" revolution that will make the original industrial revolution that climaxed the great age of imperialism look like a rehearsal by amateurs. Only the United States has the synthetic ability, the supportive laws, and the cultural agility to remain at the cutting edge of wealth creation.

Not long ago, the Russians were going to overtake us. Then it was oil-wealthy Arabs, then the Japanese. One prize-winning economist even calculated that fuddy-duddy Europe would dominate the next century (a sure prescription for boredom, were it true). Now the Chinese are our nemesis. No doubt our industrial-strength Cassandras will soon find a reason to fear the Galapagos. In the meantime, the average American can look forward to a longer life-span, a secure retirement, and free membership in the most triumphant culture in history. For the majority of our citizens, our vulgar, near-chaotic, marvelous culture is the greatest engine of positive change in history.

Freedom works.

In the military sphere, it will be impossible to rival or even approach the capabilities of our information-based force because it is so profoundly an outgrowth of our culture. Our information-based Army will employ many marvelous tools, but the core of the force will still be the soldier, not the machine, and our soldiers will have skills other cultures will be unable to replicate. Intelligence analysts, fleeing human complexity, like to project enemy capabilities based upon the systems a potential opponent might acquire. But buying or building stuff is not enough. It didn't work for Saddam Hussein, and it won't work for Beijing.

The complex human-machine interface developing in the US military will be impossible to duplicate abroad because no other state will be able to come from behind to equal the informational dexterity of our officers and soldiers. For all the complaints--in many respects justified--about our public school systems, the holistic and synergistic nature of education in our society and culture is imparting to tomorrow's soldiers and Marines a second-nature grasp of technology and the ability to sort and assimilate vast amounts of competitive data that no other population will achieve. The informational dexterity of our average middle-class kid is terrifying to anyone born before 1970. Our computer kids function at a level foreign elites barely manage, and this has as much to do with television commercials, CD-ROMs, and grotesque video games as it does with the classroom. We are outgrowing our 19th-century model education system as surely as we have outgrown the manned bomber. In the meantime, our children are undergoing a process of Darwinian selection in coping with the information deluge that is drowning many of their parents. These kids are going to make mean techno-warriors. We just have to make sure they can do push-ups, too.

There is a useful German expression, "Die Lage war immer so ernst," that translates very freely as "The sky has always been falling." Despite our relish of fears and complaints, we live in the most powerful, robust culture on earth. Its discontinuities and contradictions are often its strengths. We are incapable of five-year plans, and it is a saving grace. Our fluidity, in consumption, technology, and on the battlefield, is a strength our nearest competitors cannot approach. We move very fast. At our military best, we become Nathan Bedford Forrest riding a microchip. But when we insist on buying into extended procurement contracts for unaffordable, neo-traditional weapon systems, we squander our brilliant flexibility. Today, we are locking-in already obsolescent defense purchases that will not begin to rise to the human capabilities of tomorrow's service members. In 2015 and beyond, we will be receiving systems into our inventory that will be no more relevant than Sherman tanks and prop-driven bombers would be today. We are not providing for tomorrow's military, we are paralyzing it. We will have the most humanly agile force on earth, and we are doing our best to shut it inside a technological straight-jacket.

There is no "big threat" out there. There's none on the horizon, either. Instead of preparing for the Battle of Midway, we need to focus on the constant conflicts of richly varying description that will challenge us--and kill us--at home and abroad. There are plenty of threats, but the beloved dinosaurs are dead.

We will outcreate, outproduce and, when need be, outfight the rest of the world. We can out-think them, too. But our military must not embark upon the 21st century clinging to 20th-century models. Our national appetite for information and our sophistication in handling it will enable us to outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures, information-controlling societies, and rejectionist states. The skills necessary to this newest information age can be acquired only beginning in childhood and in complete immersion. Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage the free flow of information simply will not be competitive. They might master the technological wherewithal to watch the videos, but we will be writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties. Our creativity is devastating. If we insist on a "proven" approach to military affairs, we will be throwing away our greatest national advantage.

We need to make sure our information-based military is based on the right information.

Facing this environment of constant conflict amid information proliferation, the military response has been to coin a new catchphrase--information warfare--and then duck. Although there has been plenty of chatter about information warfare, most of it has been as helpful and incisive as a discussion of sex among junior high school boys; everybody wants to pose, but nobody has a clue. We have hemorrhaged defense dollars to contractors perfectly willing to tell us what we already knew. Studies study other studies. For now, we have decided that information warfare is a matter of technology, which is akin to believing that your stereo system is more important to music than the musicians.

Fear not. We are already masters of information warfare, and we shall get around to defining it eventually. Let the scholars fuss. When it comes to our technology (and all technology is military technology) the Russians can't produce it, the Arabs can't afford it, and no one can steal it fast enough to make a difference. Our great bogeyman, China, is achieving remarkable growth rates because the Chinese belatedly entered the industrial revolution with a billion-plus population. Without a culture-shattering reappreciation of the role of free information in a society, China will peak well below our level of achievement.

Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened identities--usually with marginal, if any, success--and yes, they are attempting to escape our influence. But American culture is infectious, a plague of pleasure, and you don't have to die of it to be hindered or crippled in your integrity or competitiveness. The very struggle of other cultures to resist American cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of the future. We should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their peoples' failure, while further increasing our relative strength.

It remains difficult, of course, for military leaders to conceive of warfare, informational or otherwise, in such broad terms. But Hollywood is "preparing the battlefield," and burgers precede bullets. The flag follows trade. Despite our declaration of defeat in the face of battlefield victory in Mogadishu, the image of US power and the US military around the world is not only a deterrent, but a psychological warfare tool that is constantly at work in the minds of real or potential opponents. Saddam swaggered, but the image of the US military crippled the Iraqi army in the field, doing more to soften them up for our ground assault than did tossing bombs into the sand. Everybody is afraid of us. They really believe we can do all the stuff in the movies. If the Trojans "saw" Athena guiding the Greeks in battle, then the Iraqis saw Luke Skywalker precede McCaffrey's tanks. Our unconscious alliance of culture with killing power is a combat multiplier no government, including our own, could design or afford. We are magic. And we're going to keep it that way.

Within our formal military, we have been moving into information warfare for decades. Our attitude toward data acquisition and, especially, data dissemination within the force has broken with global military tradition, in which empowering information was reserved for the upper echelons. While our military is vertically responsible, as it must be, it is informationally democratic. Our ability to decentralize information and appropriate decisionmaking authority is a revolutionary breakthrough (the over-praised pre-1945 Germans decentralized some tactical decisionmaking, but only within carefully regulated guidelines--and they could not enable the process with sufficient information dissemination).

No military establishment has ever placed such trust in lieutenants, sergeants, and privates, nor are our touted future competitors likely to do so. In fact, there has been an even greater diffusion of power within our military (in the Army and Marines) than most of us realize. Pragmatic behavior daily subverts antiquated structures, such as divisions and traditional staffs. We keep the old names, but the behaviors are changing. What, other than its flag, does the division of 1997 have in common with the division of World War II? Even as traditionalists resist the reformation of the force, the "anarchy" of lieutenants is shaping the Army of tomorrow. Battalion commanders do not understand what their lieutenants are up to, and generals would not be able to sleep at night if they knew what the battalion commanders know. While we argue about change, the Army is changing itself. The Marines are doing a brilliant job of reinventing themselves while retaining their essence, and their achievement should be a welcome challenge to the Army. The Air Force and Navy remain rigidly hierarchical.

Culture is fate. Countries, clans, military services, and individual soldiers are products of their respective cultures, and they are either empowered or imprisoned. The majority of the world's inhabitants are prisoners of their cultures, and they will rage against inadequacies they cannot admit, cannot bear, and cannot escape. The current chest-thumping of some Asian leaders about the degeneracy, weakness, and vulnerability of American culture is reminiscent of nothing so much as of the ranting of Japanese militarists on the eve of the Pacific War. I do not suggest that any of those Asian leaders intend to attack us, only that they are wrong. Liberty always looks like weakness to those who fear it.

In the wake of the Soviet collapse, some commentators declared that freedom had won and history was at an end. But freedom will always find enemies. The problem with freedom is that it's just too damned free for tyrants, whether they be dictators, racial or religious supremacists, or abusive husbands. Freedom challenges existing orders, exposes bigotry, opens opportunity, and demands personal responsibility. What could be more threatening to traditional cultures? The advent of this new information age has opened a fresh chapter in the human struggle for, and with, freedom. It will be a bloody chapter, with plenty of computer-smashing and head-bashing. The number one priority of non-Western governments in the coming decades will be to find acceptable terms for the flow of information within their societies. They will uniformly err on the side of conservatism--informational corruption--and will cripple their competitiveness in doing so. Their failure is programmed.

The next century will indeed be American, but it will also be troubled. We will find ourselves in constant conflict, much of it violent. The United States Army is going to add a lot of battle streamers to its flag. We will wage information warfare, but we will fight with infantry. And we will always surprise those critics, domestic and foreign, who predict our decline.

Major (P) Ralph Peters is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he is responsible for future warfare. Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical level. He is a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College and holds a master's degree in international relations. Over the past several years, his professional and personal research travels have taken Major Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Pakistan, Turkey, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Mexico, as well as the countries of the Andean Ridge. He has published widely on military and international concerns. His sixth novel, Twilight of Heroes, was recently released by Avon Books. This is his eighth article for Parameters. The author wishes to acknowledge the importance to this essay of discussions with Lieutenant Colonels Gordon Thompson and Lonnie Henley, both US Army officers.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3011.htm

Thought Reading Capacity

 

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Thought Reading Capacity

John J. McMurtrey, M. S., Copyright 2004,[a]    12 Sept. 05

Co-authorship is negotiable towards professional publication in an NLM indexed journal, Email- Johnmcmurt@aol.com

Donations toward future research are gratefully appreciated at http://www.slavery.org.uk/FutureResearch.htm

ABSTRACT 

Reports of specific concept recognition in humans by technical means on hearing words, viewing images or words, and prior to vocalization are examined.  These reports are consistent with an extensive literature on word category differentiation by electrophysiology and blood flow, which is reviewed.  EEG discrimination literature of emotional states, and deception is surveyed along with non-invasive brain computer interface reports.  Non-contact and remote methods of brain wave assessment are also considered.  The literature treated lends some substantiation to press accounts indicating thought reading is possible, and has had covert development.

INTRODUCTION

The Bible attributes to God the capacity to know the thoughts of men. [1]  Most scientists are unaware that thought reading by electroencephalogram (EEG) was reported as feasible in work begun over 30 years ago, [2] which more recently a number of groups confirm by EEG, Magnetoencephalograpy (MEG), and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technologies.  This review focuses on literature relating to technologic thought reading, though also treated are the discrimination of more general cognitive states, brainwave capture methods, and reports of thought reading development apparently covert to open literature.   

METHODS OF SPECIFIC CONCEPT RECOGNITION

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1972 contracted Pinneo & Hall for work that a 1975 US technical report entitled “Feasibility Study For Design of a Biocybernetic Communication System.”   The study concludes “that it is feasible to use the human EEG coincident with overt and covert speech as inputs to a computer for such communication” (covert speech is defined as verbal thinking). 2  The 149 page report [b] states:  “enough information has been obtained . . . to specify the optimum parameters to use for an EEG operating system, and to suggest future research towards that end.”

Pinneo & Hall utilized templates for EEG word recognition constructed by averaging EEG patterns evoked by 9 words in each subject for visually presented words, and primarily utilized 4 electrodes over brain language areas for prediction.  People with high hemispheric lateralization had EEG patterns for some words that frequently classified 100% correctly, regardless of the number of repetitions with stablity over time.  Over all words, however, classification accuracy for these people was 85% for overtly, and 72% for words repeated to oneself, but solely by mental means without vocalization.  Across all subjects specific word EEG patterns were classified 35% correctly for overtly, and 27% correctly for covertly spoken words, but more people were in the 70-100% classification range than in the 10-15% range. [c]  Subjects with low hemispheric laterality, particularly stutterers had near chance EEG classification.  EEG concept recognition was actually 10-15% higher for pictures rather than words.  Phrases containing similarly articulated words or homonyms were better recognized than these words alone without context.

Suppes et. al. have the most extensive recent publications supporting and reporting specific EEG thought recognition. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]  This work largely compares recognition improvement methods with some emphasis on a relative invariance of EEG concept representations across individuals.  The procedures generally utilized Fourrier transforms of both templates for recognizing words, and test samples with an optimal EEG frequency window, or filter selected for each subject.   EEG word templates constructed by averaging each subject’s responses (50 trials) at single electrodes resulted in less EEG word recognition, 3 than recognition templates averaged across all subjects (700 trials) [d] for bipolar electrode difference.  The latter technique produced recognition rates over seven words of 100% for visual images and auditory words. 5 [e]  However, for visually presented words, recognition templates generated by excluding from the average the subject tested was better--75% than averaging within subject or over all subjects.  The waveforms for each presentation modality were very similar, and when recognition templates averaged across subjects in the modalities of visual images or words were utilized for recognizing other modalities (visual images or words & auditory), recognition still was generally 60-75%.  Such results were despite inclusion of three subjects with English as a second language, and obvious hemispheric laterality confounds important to Pinneo & Hall, [f] such as one left handed and another ambidexterous subject.  These results indicate a relative invariance of EEG representations for different concepts between subjects and perception modality, when averaging out and filtering noise.  Matching templates to words is derived by amplitude difference between template and test word waveforms, when sampled at 814 difference points as squared and summed (Pinneo & Hall had 255 samples per word).

Also examined are brain wave patterns for sentences.  Recognizing the first sentence word by the same words individually presented, and the same words in sentences when cut and pasted was successful at a 50% recognition rate (with 8.3% as chance). 4  Even when excluding a subject from the averaged template, over 90% recognition was obtained for 48 sentences, as visually presented one word at a time. 6

Averaged unfiltered auditory responses are classified 100% correctly by the superposition of 3 sine waves chosen from the frequency domain maxima for each word.7  The same procedure when averaged across subjects and presentation modalities (visual images, visual and auditory words) classifies 100% of the words by 5 frequencies per word, while data fit decreased only 6% compared to the filtered templates.  Syllable classification is less successful, with six correct classifications out of eight examples from superposition of nine frequencies.

A Korean group reports yes/no decision discrimination of 86% by spatio-temporal cross correlation. [8]  This was achieved from 4 electrodes over bilateral frontal and occipital sites.  Differential equation measures of synchronization rate and average polarity also had high recognition rates of 78% and 81% respectively.

Other investigators publish magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recognition of viewed words above chance significantly by 27% for recognition and 44% for accuracy. [9]  Although these results were only somewhat above chance, MEG also was less successful for Suppes et al., 3 4 and a speech recognition optimized artificial intelligence system was utilized without filters or recognition templates.  The authors expressed surprise that any recognition was possible, considering that input utilized only a simple technique; root mean squares of foci. 

There is apparently a Russian report of specific EEG word recognition before 1981. [10]  The work is only known from a science reporter, and specifically unavailable, but is mentioned to aid this report’s discovery, and because of the claim that specific words contain category information, which is of possible significance for word category differentiation studies.

Patents for EEG thought recognition exist.  Electroencephalographic (EEG) instant detection by syllables of “a content of category which the testee wishes to speak” quotes Kiyuna et. al. Patent # 5785653 “System and method for predicting internal condition of live body.” [11]  A stated use:  “the present invention may be use (sic) to detect the internal condition of surveillance in criminal investigation” by EEG.  NEC Corporation licensed this patent.  Mardirossian Patent # 6011991 “Communication system and method including brain wave analysis and/or use of brain activity” includes remote EEG communication with armed forces or clandestine applications. [12]   This patent proposes transmitter capable skin implants, utilizes artificial intelligence, and is licensed by Technology Patents, LLC.

Studies of brain blood flow changes detected by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), confirms that viewing pictures of objects activates specifically identifiable brain patterns.  Comparing the distributed brain activity observed by fMRI for viewing faces, houses, cats, chairs, bottles, shoes, and scissors were 90-100% correct in all two category comparisons (with 50% as chance). [13]  A different group replicates the results of this report. [14]  Even though all these objects are described as categories because different exemplars and views were presented, discrimination of these objects generally requires an adjective, so that the distinctions qualify as specific concepts.  A further report examined just 20 seconds of fMRI data rather than one half of an fMRI session in the previous studies, and utilized different exemplars of an object category for training classifiers from those utilized during classification.  A support vector classifier provided the best results with 59-97% accuracy among ‘categories’ of baskets, birds, butterflies, chairs, teapots, cows, horses, tropical fish, garden gnomes, and African masks (with 10% as chance). [15]  “Brain reading” are descriptive terms titling the report.

Numerous fMRI studies show similarly activated brain regions for viewing images or words, and hearing words.  Viewing pictures of objects or the word naming them activates similar distributed brain systems for storing semantic knowledge, [16] [17] [18] and auditory presentation also shares the same [19] or a similar [20] system with that of viewing these words.  These studies give anatomical basis for the high cross modality recognition rates of concepts observed by Suppes et al. 5 7

PHYSIOLOGIC DISCRIMINATION OF WORD CATEGORIES

Broca and Wernicke originally defined anatomy pertinent to aphasia resulting from brain injury. [21]  More recently described are brain lesion patients who have very selective agnosias, which is an inability to name or recognize specific object classes. [22] [23] [24]  Many word category differentiation reports reviewed below were initiated to explain and substantiate such deficits.  This literature is consistent with specific word recognition, because word responses are averaged by category, and distinguished with only statistical inspection without template generation or specific comparison thereto as is required for thought recognition.  Brain cell assembly activation provides a theoretical framework for both specific concept recognition, and word category discrimination. [25]

Electroencephalogram and Magnetoencephalogram Word Category Discrimination

Evoked EEG responses discriminate nouns and verbs.  Nouns elicit more theta power than verbs, but verbs have greater theta coherence decrease, particularly in frontal versus posterior sites. [26]  Noun waveforms generally are more negative than verb responses at post-stimulus intervals of both 200-350 and 350-450 milliseconds (msec.) [27] [28] [29] [30]  Ambiguous noun/verbs are more negative than unambiguous nouns or verbs in the early latency interval, and when context indicates noun meaning versus verb use, are more negative over both these latency windows. 30  Anterior-posterior electrode activity also differs for ambiguous versus unambiguous nouns and verbs. 30 [31] 

Action verb waveforms differ in amplitude, 28 and central versus posterior distribution compared to visual nouns, [32] with particular 30 Hz increase over the motor cortex for action verbs, and over the visual cortex for visual nouns. [33] [34]  Face, arm, or leg action verbs differ in amplitude by time interval, and activity increases over the specific corresponding motor strip locus as well as by frontal electrode. [35] [36]  Low resolution electromagnetic tomography finds irregular verb activity more in the left superior and middle temporal gyri, while regular verbs are more active in the right medial frontal gyrus at 288-321 msec. [37]  Irregular verbs respond more in the left ventral occipito-temporal cortex than regular verbs at ~340 msec. by MEG, which localizes perpendicular sources undetectable by EEG. [38]  Regular verb activity modulates more the left inferior prefrontal region including Broca’s area at ~470 msec with MEG, but irregular verbs have more right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity at ~570 msec.  Priming evoked patterns occur for regular but not irregular verbs, [39] [40] while incorrect irregular noun plural [41] and verb participle [42] [43] waveforms differ from that of incorrect regular forms.

Abstract word waveforms onset more positively about 300 msec., persist longer at lateral frontal sites, and distribute more to both hemispheres compared to concrete words.28 [44] [45]  β-1 frequency coherence during memorization of concrete nouns indicates left hemisphere electrode T5 as the main brain processing node. [46]  Left hemisphere electrode T3 is similarly important for abstract nouns, which have more frontal area contribution, and massive right posterior hemisphere coupling.  Abstract versus concrete memorization distinctly changes other frequency bands, [47] [48] and theta synchronization predicts efficient encoding. [49]      

Content words yield a more negative peak at 350-400 msec. than functional grammar words, with a subsequent occipital positivity that function words lack, and more electrode and hemisphere differences from 400- 700 msec. [50] [51]  In sentences, the late component of function words resembles preparatory slow waves that apparently subserve their introductory and conjunctive grammatical function. [52]  Other studies show content versus function word differences at additional intervals and more bi-hemispheric effects,[53] with right visual field advantage for function words. [54]  MEG distinguishes functional grammar words, or content words such as multimodal nouns, visual nouns, or action verbs, each by response strength and laterality at intervals of both ~100 and greater than 150 msec. [55]

Proper name amplitudes peak more just after 100 msec. negatively, and just after 200 msec. positively than common nouns, while one’s own name accentuates these peaks relative to other proper names with further positive and negative components. [56]  Proper names, animals, verbs, and numerals show electrode site differences:  proper name temporal negativity extends to inferior electrodes bilaterally; verbs and animal names are less negative and similar, but verbs have left frontal inferior positivity; while numerals have less waveform negativity, and bilateral parietal positivity. [57]   Non-animal objects are more negative in both the 150-250 and 350-500 msec. intervals than animals, while animals are more positive in the 250-350 msec. interval. [58] [59]  Animals are more positive in approximately the same latter interval than vegetables/fruits, while vegetables/fruits are more negative in about the earlier interval (150-250 msec.), and have stronger frontal region current sources than animals. [60]  Animals in natural scenes evoke different waveforms than just natural scene or building pictures. [61]  Responses to words for living things are less negative over the right occipital-temporal region than artifactual objects, while pictorial presentations of the same items further differ and have hemisphere effects noted as unreported. [62]  EEG waveforms for specific meanings could be as discretely categorized as indicated by the reported but unspecified Russian work, which claims that “the waves for such concepts as “chair”, “desk”, and “table” are all overlapped by another wave that corresponds” to the concept of furniture. 10

Affective word meanings such as good-bad, strong-weak, or active-passive are discriminated [63] by both category and meaning polarity according to response latency, amplitude, and scalp distribution at intervals of 80-265 and 565-975 msec. [64]  Positive words have amplitude increases peaking at 230 msec. compared to negative words, and relative to neutral words increase a subsequent peak amplitude as well as a slow wave component. [65]  Emotional words also show less amplitude decrease on repetition than neutral words. [66]

Some of these word category differentiation reports are consistent with both the specific recognition reports, and/or the discrimination of non-verbal cognition.  Based on EEG/MEG responses, words are readily distinguished from non-words, [67] [68] [69] pictures, [70] and as to length. [71]  Even commas have a characteristic waveform similar to the speech phrase closure evoked pattern called closure positive shift. [72]  Color selection modulates the EEG. [73]  EEG discriminates the judgement of gender for both faces and hands. [74]

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Word Category Discrimination

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) localize brain blood flow, with ability to distinguish perceptual categories.  Some studies locate recognition of places [75] [76] and faces [77] within certain brain areas, however, expertise can recruit the face recognition area, [78] and other studies show these areas only responding maximally for specific stimuli. [79]  Word category activity is both distributed and overlapping 79 [80] in a somewhat lumpy manner. [81]  Though regions of word category difference are indicated below, brain comprehension is not solely dependent on these areas.  Discrete category responsive emergence may have some resemblance to category segregation in the feature processing of artificial neural networks that self organize without programming. [82]

Meta-analysis of 14 studies locating activity for face, natural, and manufactured object recognition shows ventral temporal cortex difference.  Face recognition activates more inferior ventral temporal portions including the fusiform gyrus of which manufactured objects activate more medial aspects than face or natural objects, yet natural objects distribute more widely in this region. [83]  Eighty eight percent of face studies converged for mid fusiform gyrus activity, while natural and manufactured objects converged no more than 50% for any discrete area.   Manufactured object activity locates to the middle temporal cortex from natural objects, which locate more in the superior temporal cortex.  Face and natural object activity is more bilateral, and in the left inferior frontal cortex, while particularly tools activate the premotor area.  These studies also feature activity in the inferior occipital/posterior fusiform and the medial occipital structures of lingual gyrus, calcarine sulcus, and cuneus.

There is some agreement that verbs have greater activity in temporal, parietal, and premotor/prefrontal regions than nouns, while nouns have little [84] or no [85] greater activated areas than verbs, yet no noun/verb difference is also reported. [86]  German regular noun and verb fMRI responses compared to irregular words differ significantly in the right precentral gyrus, the left prefrontal cortex, bilateral posterior temporal lobes, and bilateral complexes including superior parietal lobules, supramarginal gyri, and angular gyri. [87]  Regular words are left hemisphere lateralized, while irregular words have somewhat greater distribution to the right hemisphere, and a greater activation over all cortical areas.    Irregular verbs activate more total cortex than regular verbs, but lack motor strip, insular, and most occipital cortex activity present for regular verbs. [88]  Though both forms activate the inferior parietal lobule, irregular verbs activate more posterior and superior portions than regular verbs

Depending on control task correction, naming actions activates the left inferior parietal lobule, which is lacking for locative prepositions, which activate the left supramarginal gyrus selectively from actions. [89]  Furthermore, naming abstract shape location compared to locating concrete items increases right supramarginal gyrus activity,89 which specifically also activates on long-term memory for spatial relations [90] and in American sign language prepositions. [91]  The supramarginal gyrus is encompassed by the temporal-parietal-occipital junction active for location judgments, and is separate from temporal activity for judging color. [92]  Action word generation activity is just anterior to the motion perception area, while color word generation activity is just anterior to the color perception area. [93]  Naming object color activates distinct brain regions from naming the object, with color knowledge retrieval activity being slightly removed from that of naming colors.  [94]  Irrespective of language and visual or auditory modality, the naming of body parts activates the left intraparietal sulcus, precentral sulcus, and medial frontal gyrus, while naming numbers activates the right post central sulcus as joined to the intraparietal sulcus. 19 

Concrete words are discriminated from abstract words in both noun or verb forms,85 with more right hemisphere activity for abstract words than concrete words. [95] [96] [97]   Abstract/concrete contrasts feature both right or left temporal areas, while the reverse concrete/abstract comparison features frontal activity. [98] [99] [100] [101] [102]  Besides distinction from abstract nouns, the concrete categories of animals contrasted to implements respond selectively in the posterior-lateral temporal, and frontal cortex areas across studies. 95 100  Limbic activity, particularly the cingulate, distinguishes emotional words from both abstract and concrete words. 96      

Naming pictures of animals, tools, and famous people are discriminated [103] by increased regional blood flow in the left inferior frontal gyrus for animals, premotor area for tools and left middle frontal gyrus for people. [104]  Faces activate the right lingual and bilateral fusiform gyri, while the left lateral anterior middle temporal gyrus response differs to famous faces, famous proper names, and common names. [105]  Particularly the left anterior temporal cortex responds to names, faces, and buildings when famous relative to non-famous stimuli. 105 [106]  Viewing photographs of faces, buildings, and chairs evokes activity distributed across several cortical areas, which are each locally different in both the visual ventral temporal 79 and occipital cortices. [107]  Photograph perception of these same categories has more hemispheric lateralization and activation than non-perceptual imagery, [108] while short term memory face imagery activity is stronger than that of long term memory. [109] 

More advanced fMRI techniques discriminate further word or object classes.  In a high resolution fMRI limited brain cross section study, the activity differs for animals, furniture, fruit, or tools in discrete sites of the left lateral frontal and 3 separate medial temporal cortex loci respectively. [110]  The application of artificial intelligence to fMRI pattern distinguishes between 12 noun categories (fish, four legged animals, trees, flowers, fruits, vegetables, family members, occupations, tools, kitchen items, dwellings, and building parts). [111]  Finally are the reports of discriminating the viewing of 7 13 14 and 10 15 different ‘categories’ so discrete as to require an adjective for distinction as previously discussed.   

Some cognitive functions are related to or partly dependent on language.  Letters activate the left insula more than objects and exclusively activate the left inferior parietal cortex. [112]  Letters also activate an area in the left ventral visual cortex more than digits in most subjects. [113] [114]  Brain activations of mathematical thinking are partly dependent on language. [115]  Subtraction activates bilaterally the anterior intraparietal sulcus and a phoneme area in the intraparietal sulcus mesial to the angular gyrus, selectively from simple motor tasks. [116]  Number comparison activates right hemisphere intraparietal and prefrontal areas, while multiplication localizes more to the left hemisphere. [117]   

ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAM DISCRIMINATION OF OTHER COGNITIVE STATES

Other literature indicates EEG differentiation of completely non-verbal cognition.  Greater left prefrontal activity predicts positive affect, while greater right prefrontal activity predicts negative disposition in psychological testing. [118]  However, the stability of hemispheric activation is important for such a trait characteristic, [119] and more transient mood states have exactly the opposite arousal symmetry. [120]   Decreased left prefrontal activity is also found in depression, [121] [122] and the anxiety situations of social phobics. [123]  Patented is more specific attitude, mood, and emotion differentiation, by plotting at least two and as many as five EEG frequencies, with reference to Air Force research. [124]   EEG patterns discriminate relative misanthropy and philanthropy in facial preferences, and favorable or negative responses to faces, [125] while waveform topography identifies sad face perception. [126]  Another EEG emotion indicator is the stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN).  Although slight SPNs can precede instruction cues, this wave is most pronounced while awaiting performance assessment and reward or aversive feedback. [127] [128] [129] [130]

A number of groups have developed procedures to detect deception based on the P300 (positive @ 300 millisec) event related potential (ERP) from EEG. [131] [132] [133] [134] [135] [136]  A commercial system, Brain Fingerprinting, [137] which includes additional frequency analysis, particularly a late negative ERP potential, cites 100% accuracy over five separate studies. [138] [139] [140] [141] [142]  Though most EEG deception detection concerns situation specific knowledge, a late positive potential approximate to the P300, is reported to vary as a function of real attitude rather than attitude report. [143]

BRAIN COMPUTER INTERFACES

EEG cortical potentials are detected for both actual movement, [144] and movement readiness potentials (bereitschaftspotential). [145] [146]  EEG sufficiently differentiates just the imagination of movement to operate switches, [147] move a cursor in one [148] or two dimensions, [149] control prosthesis grasp, [150] and guide wheel chairs left or right [151] in a prompted manner.   EEG detects such potentials to play Pac Man, [152] and imagining the spinning of cubes, or arm raising in appropriate direction guides robots through simulated rooms, [153] [154] [155] both achieved without response prompting.  Unprompted slow cortical potentials also can turn on computer programs. [156]  Signals from implanted brain electrodes in monkeys achieve even more complex grasping and reaching robot arm control without body arm movement. [157]  Some ability to recognize evoked responses to numbers [158] and tones [159] in real time by a commercial system called BrainScope has limited report.

REMOTE AND PROXIMATE BRAIN WAVE CAPTURE METHODS

EEG is typically recorded with contact electrodes with conductive paste, while MEG detectors are in an array slightly removed from the head.  Remote detection of brain rhythms by electrical impedance sensors is described. [160]  Though non-contact is the only remote descriptor for EEG, this same detector design is applied to monitoring electrocardiogram with wrist sensor location. [161]  Passive brain wave fields extend as far as 12 feet from man as detected by a cryogenic antenna. [162]  This device is entirely adaptable to clandestine applications, and pointed comments are made on the disappearance of physiological remote sensing literature since the 1970’s for animals and humans, while all other categories of remote sensing research greatly expanded. [163]

In 1976, the Malech Patent # 3951134  “Apparatus and method for remotely monitoring and altering brain waves” was granted. [164]  Example of operation is at 100 and 210 MHz, which are frequencies penetrating obstruction. [165]  “The individual components of the system for monitoring and controlling brain wave activity may be of conventional type commonly employed in radar”; and  “The system permits medical diagnosis of patients, inaccessible to physicians, from remote stations” are quotes indicating remote capacity.  License is to Dorne & Margolin Inc., but now protection is expired with public domain.  The Malech patent utilizes interference of 210 and 100 MHz frequencies resulting in a 110 MHz return signal, which is demodulated to give EEG waveform.

The capability of remote EEG is predicted by electromagnetic scattering theory using ultrashort pulses, [166] which is different from the unpulsed Malech patent.  Ultrashort pulses are currently defined in the range of 10-12 to 10-15 second.  Considering that EEG word elicited potentials are comparatively long (hundreds of milliseconds), indicates that remote radar brain wave capture is adequate to word recognition, with ultrashort pulses allowing some 109 or more radar reflections in a millisecond (10-3 sec.)

THOUGHT READING COVERT DEVELOPMENT EVIDENCE

The research arm of agencies with missions to covertly acquire information would certainly develop to operational capability any thought reading potential, which was reported feasible 30 years ago to the Department of Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  Reports that such development has progressed are multiple, and two are confirmed by details of the 1975 DARPA EEG specific word recognition report, which itself is evidence of development covert to open databases. 2  An International Committee of the Red Cross Symposium synopsis states EEG computer mind reading development by Lawrence Pinneo in 1974 at Stanford. [167]  A letter by the Department of Defense Assistant General Counsel for Manpower, Health, and Public Affairs, Robert L. Gilliat affirmed brain wave reading by the Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1976, [168] the same year as Malech remote EEG patent grant.  Such a capacity would be unlikely to neglected by DARPA in the 22 years between the current confirmations and the Pinneo report. 

In fact news reports assert such development.  Articles quote Dr. John Norseen of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics that thought reading is possible and has had development.[169] [170]  He predicted by 2005 the deployment of thought reading detectors for profiling terrorists at airports. 170  A further acknowledgement of developing a device to read terrorists’ minds at airports was made in a NASA presentation to Northwest Airlines security specialists. [171]  Statements in all articles indicate remoteness of brain wave detection, though somewhat proximate.

“Thought reading or synthetic telepathy” communications technology procurement is considered in a 1993 Jane’s [g] Special Operations Forces (SOF) article:  “One day, SOF commandos may be capable of communicating through thought processes.” [172]  Descriptive terms are “mental weaponry and psychic warfare”  Although contemplated in future context, implied is availability of a technology with limited mobility, since troop deployment anticipation must assume prior development.  Victim complaints that mind reading is part of an assault upon them are very similar to such a capacity.  Other complaints by these victims, such as technologic internal voice assault are upheld by considerable documentation that internal voice transmission is feasible, even at a distance and within structures, 165 and a presumptive diagnosis of such complaints is largely consistent with microwave exposure [173]--a basis for both internal voice and EEG capture technologies.

DISCUSSION

There is considerable confirmation of an ability to recognize specific concepts by brain activity across subjects.  Identifying visual images viewed by a subject solely by measures of mental activity is replicated across five groups by two methods, with best recognition rates of 100%.  Three groups report success in visually viewed word identification by brain waves in two methods with best recognition rates of 75%.  Isolated groups report EEG word recognition by auditory perception and prior to vocalization, with best results of 100% for auditory perception and 35% for vocalization.  Although single reports examine lesser vocabularies, over all open studies of thought recognition, some 80 words have been examined.  In all, seven groups have reported some level of specific concept recognition by EEG, MEG, or fMRI.  Word category distinctions would be expected from such individual differences.  EEG, MEG, PET, or fMRI techniques discriminate some 42 word class or dimension distinctions, many of which would survive separate direct comparison just by reported results.

The finding that words can be classified by superposition of sine waves suggests an obvious interpretation, when considering word category blood flow activations of cell assemblies. 7  The frequencies resulting from neuron firing rates in the distributed, yet somewhat discrete regions, when interference phase summed and subtracted by arrival from different locations results in word representation in the brain’s language. 

Considerable capacity to specifically detect and differentiate mental states is evident from literature reports by EEG.  The fact that EEG signals are detected on a voluntary unprompted basis for turning on computer programs, 156 playing Pac Man, 152  and robot guidance 153 154 155 suggests the feasibility of a similar capacity for specific EEG concept recognition.  Although most concept recognition work is related to stimulus prompted responses, unprompted detection of numbers apparently as a class, has limited report. 158  The references to remote EEG provide plausibly exploitable mechanisms, for which covert development has some indication.  Making those more proximate electromagnetic detectors (MEG, cryogenic antenna, or electrical impedance sensor) the focus of a parabolic antenna, would be obvious to remote brain wave detection engineers to extend the range and provide directionality, and is a simple, common design innovation.

The plausibility of thought reading has not completely escaped scientific attention, as a French government panel expresses concern about the potential for thought reading and such a remote capacity. [174]  Complete rejection of reports of a remote mind reading capability is just as presumptuous, in the face of complaints, as has been the dismissal of internal voice capacity. 165  News reports of covert thought reading development have confirmation in the Pinneo study, and independent assertions of more proximate thought reading development “against terrorists” affirm each other.  Special operations officials consider procurement of a similar remote capacity to that of which many victims complain.  Though victims will regard their experience to affirm such a thought reading capability, professional prejudice regards such complaints as defining psychiatric condition.  The certain fact is that these claims have had no adequate investigation, and the available evidence questions the routinely egregious denial of civil rights to such individuals.  Mind reading development must at least be considered as plausible, even regarding very remote methods.

It is known that government elements have done work in thought reading development.  The logic that in the 30 years since the Pinneo work started, this capacity is operationally applied is too sound to dismiss victim corroboration and other evidence, without appropriate investigation.  It would have to be admitted that funding for projects by the defense and security agencies is considerably greater than for open science, and that thought reading would be a priority area.  Particularly disturbing is the existence of a remote EEG method in the public domain.  Educated democracies should not be complacent at any prospect of mind reading, given the potential for privacy loss, civil rights violation, and political control.

Acknowledgements:  Thanks are given to God for inspiration and guidance as well as Mr. John Allman, Secretary of Christians Against Mental Slavery for invaluable materials and support (website http://www.slavery.org.uk/ ).

EEG concept recognition articles are printable thru Pubmed as designated.

All patents are printable from the U. S. Patent Office website.   

Each is free

REFERENCES

[a] This article has been partly supported by substantial financial contributions from Christians Against Mental Slavery http://www.slavery.org.uk

[b] Pinneo’s report does not include all experiments reported to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the six annual reports over the 3 year contract.

[c] Over the experiments presented by the report, chance would be from 6.5 to 14% depending on the size of tested vocabulary.

[d] Suppes points out that this may have been due to increased averaging per se.

[e] Though apparently only single electrodes or pairs were utilized for prediction, the best recognition rates were not always from the same electrode of pair.

[f] Almost half of the Pinneo report is devoted to resolving such confounds.

[g] Jane’s is the most respected and authoritative of defense reporting services.

[1] The Bible Job 42: 2, Psalms 139: 2,  94: 11, I Chronicles 28: 9, Isaiah 66: 18.

[2] Pinneo LR and Hall DJ. “Feasibility Study for Design of a Biocybernetic Communication System” Report #ADA017405 National Technical Information Service (NTIS), 1975.  Prepared for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Order #2034, Program Code #2D20, Contractor: Stanford Research Institute Contract dates: 2/9/72-8/31/76, SRI Project LSU-1936. (US cost ~$50.)  Available at http://www.slavery.org.uk/Pinneo.doc and http://www.sysos.co.uk/Pinneo.doc

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[170] Pasternak D. “Reading your mind-and injecting smart thoughts” U S News and World Report p 67-8, Jan 3, 2000. Also at http://www.raven1.net/norsee2.htm

[171] Murray FJ. “NASA plans to read terrorists’ minds at airports” Washington Times, Aug 17, p A1, 2002.

[172] Lopez R. “Special operations survives Pentagon budget constraints” Jane’s International Defense Review 26(3): 247-51, 1993.

[173] McMurtrey JJ. “Microwave Bioeffect Congruence with Schizophrenia”  In press, 2004.  Available at  http://www.slavery.org.uk/MicrowaveCongruenceSchiz.doc and  http://www.grn.es/electropolucio/microwav.rtf

[174] Butler D. “Advances in neuroscience ‘may threaten human rights’” Nature 22 January 391: 316, 1998.  Also at http://raven1.net/nature1.htm

MK-ULTRA SubProject 130: Personality Theory (ACIM, Unity Church, MK-OPRAH)

26 May 2007

National Security Archive
Gelman Library
2130 H St NW Ste 701
Washington DC, District of Columbia 20037
1-202-994-7000 (T)
1-202-994-7005 (F)

Dear

I wish to thank you again for your excellent assistance and detailed answers to my queries the other day on the telephone. Thanks again, you were very kind, tolerant, and thoughtful.

As per our conversation of Friday, May 25, 2007, please mail all available government documents (redacted or otherwise – I believe you said there were thirty-five pages in total) regarding MK-ULTRA  SubProject 130: Personality Theory, to the above listed mailing address.

You quoted me a price of $7.92 for attaining these documents. Please find attached a money order in that amount for the aforementioned documents.

The information that follows is primarily for my own personal records, but also might be of interest to you, The National Security Archive or other persons and organizations. What follows is by no means new or original research and has been documented by a wide variety of other researchers and authors in the past.  (The exception being the ACIM milleu’s connection to SRI-Scientology).

The following information essentially serves as a rough bullet point outline and should not by any means be construed as a cohesive narrative of events, past or present, regarding Dr. William Thetford or the A Course In Miracles book.

Beware, the “critique” I engage in here (especially in the latter half) is not “structuralist”. There are also the usual concerns regarding “conspiracy theories”. I have extensively studied, deconstructed and analyzed this term over the years. Please refer to the following compendium of information regarding this subject.

Most of the following biographical information regarding Dr. William Thetford and A Course in Miracles is primarily available from online Wikipedia documents. As of this revision 3/2010, Wikipedia has deleted the criticism and controversy section from their ACIM page.

http://ce399.typepad.com/weblog/2009/12/wikipedia-removes-a-course-in-miracles-controversy-and-criticism-section-.html

Dr. William Thetford, along with David Saunders, headed CIA MK-ULTRA SubProject 130: Personality Theory, while at Columbia University between 1971-1978.

Dr. Thetford’s Professional Vita (also available on the A Course in Miracles web site) makes reference to his involvement in a Personality Theory Research Project while Professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia University, though the information does not specifically cite this as a CIA MK- ULTRA SubProject. (The information might have recently been altered to reflect involvement in MK-ULTRA.)

Dr. William Thetford also directly assisted Dr. Helen Schucman as a so-called ‘scribe’ in the initial transcription (or ‘channeling’) of the A Course in Miracles book originally published in 1975 by an organization called The Foundation for the Investigation of Para Sensory Phenomena.

Dr. Thetford was working for the CIA conducting Personality Theory experiments under MK-ULTRA at the same time the A Course in Miracles book was published in 1975.

A Course in Miracles is commonly known as “the Bible of the New Age.”

The Foundation for the Investigation of Para Sensory Phenomena may have been funded by members involved with or employed by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Menlo Park, California, as Remote Viewers at the time. One of the individuals with connections to SRI was Judith Skutch, the president and founder of The Foundation for the Investigation of Para Sensory Phenomena, which, once again, originally published A Course in Miracles in 1975.

Other researchers in this area have speculated that Judith Skutch’s Foundation for the Investigation of Para Sensory Phenomena may have even been an outright front organization for the CIA. The publishing of A Course in Miracles may have been a CIA operation from the beginning.

It has also been claimed Skutch funded many of the early experiments by Israeli telepath Uri Geller. Geller worked for SRI during this same time period.

A Course in Miracles legal documents have revealed that Skutch met with David Hurt (an engineer associated with SRI), Russell Targ, Thetford and Schucman at a luncheon in 1974. Russell Targ was co-founder of the Stanford Research Institute´s CIA funded Remote Viewing program at SRI during this same time period. Targ´s collegue at SRI was chief researcher Dr. Harold Puthoff.  Puthoff was a high ranking ‘Operating Thetan’ for the Church of Scientology and was also working under the auspices of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program along with Targ when this meeting took place. As previously stated, William Thetford, the so-called co-’scribe‘ of ACIM, was also under the payroll of the CIA during the same period, conducting research under MK-ULTRA SubProject 130: Personality Theory at Columbia University.

In 1998 Russell Targ wrote a book entitled Miracles of Space. Targ and Scientology claim Targ was never a member of L. Ron Hubbard´s so-called ´church.´

According to the Washington Post of August 7, 1977, high-level ‘Operating Thetans‘ (Harold Puthoff, Pat Price, Ingo Swann) from the Church of Scientology were in charge of all Remote Viewing and other related CIA mind control operations at Stanford Research Institute under the auspices of CIA MK-ULTRA during this time period, which began sometime in 1973. (See the Washington Post article of August 7, 1977, Psychic Spying? by John L. Wilhelm regarding the connection between the Stanford Research Institute, CIA mind control operations via MK-ULTRA and the Church of Scientology.)

MK-ULTRA was ‘investigated’ by the US Congress’ Church Committee and the group appointed by President Ford known as the Rockefeller Commission in 1975. MK-ULTRA is now obviously a matter of public record.  As you stated, all of the scanned CIA MK-ULTRA documents are available to the public from the CIA itself on CD-ROM format.

Fast forwarding to the present: Unity Church, a ‘Christian New Age’ tax exempt organization, with locations in numerous communities across the United States, hosts many A Course In Miracles seminars on a weekly basis, and includes the information contained in the book as part of their regular ‘church services.’

I spoke with a woman named ‘Mxxxx’ at the Unity Church in Eugene, Oregon, via telephone on Friday, May 25, 2007, and she stated Unity Church holds seminars in A Course In Miracles twice a week. I requested documentation from her to this effect via regular mail. She claimed that she would comply with this request. And, I might add, she seemed quite ‘happy’ and ‘joyful’ to mail any and all material made available from the church.

Unity Church also sponsors or hosts UFO seminars with titles like: ´UFOs: Earth’s Cosmic Watergate´ and ´Flying Saucers ARE Real.’ These seminars espouse a ‘spirituality’ similar to those found in UFO cults such as the former Heaven’s Gate in San Diego, California and the Church of Scientology. Usually, the ‘information’ disseminated at these UFO seminars claims that a giant, invisible UFO mother ship – containing the spirits of deceased humans, famous leaders from history and supernatural beings such as angels or even Jesus Christ himself – is hovering just above the earth’s atmosphere.

The Scientology UFO ‘religious’ belief system is very similar, though much more detailed, complicated and multifaceted. Part of Scientology’s ‘creation mythos’ advocates passive acceptance of what basically constitutes ‘galactic genocide’ as part of its cult programming. Indeed, from the limited contact I have had with people who have been programmed by these and other similar types of off shoot UFO cult groups such as those found at Unity Church, advocacy of euthanasia or suicide are causally incorporated into their belief systems; even in their interpersonal relationships with others and are completely devoid of any critical analysis as to the larger implications of upholding such philosophies. Briefly, in this respect, similarities to Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World (1932) have come to mind.

Scientology is considered to be a destructive, totalitarian cult by the German government and other European countries and is highly regulated there.

Unity Church and A Course In Miracles are ultimately all about forgiveness and prayer; yet this forgiveness exists in a spiritual construct devoid of basic human social justice.

This construct basically constitutes the same old, repacked and regurgitated snake oil peddled by ‘confidence men’ since the days of PT Barnum. The mantra goes something like this: ‘God will take care of everything and God will forgive everything;’ and therefore, accountability, responsibility, and oversight are not necessary. Thus, the organized crooks, mass murderers, torturers, destroyers of culture, various two bit thugs and other assorted sub humans are  allowed to continue perpetuating their endless cycle of banal criminality at the expense of the innocent and the powerless. As a result,  human justice and even human memory itself has now, for all intents and purposes, been  eviscerated. This is the literal apotheosis of what the authors Gore Vidal and Studs Terkel have each separately called: ‘The United States of Amnesia‘ and ‘The United States of Alzheimer’s.‘

For example, in 2004, the A Course in Miracles website had an very interesting article regarding the Abu Graib Prisoner Abuse Scandal, in which it stated the following:

Let us, then, take a closer look at the Iraq prison scandal from the perspective A Course in Miracles gives us. We will be looking at the monstrous acts of other people, but the point is not to pass judgment on these people, but to use their example to illuminate ego dynamics common to all of us. I’m reminded of what Jesus once said to Helen [Dr. Helen Schucman] before giving an account of the ego lapses she and Bill [Dr. William Thetford] had fallen into on a particular day: “There is nothing of special interest about the events described below, except their typical nature” (Absence from Felicity, by Ken Wapnick, p. 260). The “monster” revealed by the Iraq prison scandal is all too typical, but if we are willing to look at it calmly, we will put ourselves in a position to let it go through forgiveness.

(What the Iraq Prison Abuse Scandal Reveals: Looking Calmly at the Monster and Letting It Go by Greg Mackie. Circle of Atonement, P.O. Box 4238, W. Sedona, AZ 86340. http://www.circlofa.org. info@circleofa.org, 1-928-282-0790.)

This is an excellent example of what many other commentators, researchers, and authors have coined New Age Fascism (also see: From UFO’s to Yoga) and this particular type of mind control programming perfectly compliments the fascism promoted by the Christian and Religious Right or Right Wing Christian Evangelical movements in the United States. I fail to see the fundamental difference between the views espoused by Mr. Mackie above and the opinions communicated by Rush Limbaugh on his talk show. They are both essentially being apologists for the Bush Administration’s use of torture in conducting the so-called ‘War on Terror.‘

‘Students’ in A Course in Miracles programs (which evidently includes devotion to Oprah Winfrey – who has avidly and enthusiastically promoted the book on her television show) might also be involved in an experimental trauma healing treatment program called See Morg Matrix, which includes hypnosis and the evisceration (or ‘clearing’) of memories. Other research in this area has referred to these techniques as ‘pseudo-therapies’.

Involvement in the Unity Church mind control and UFO cult usually comes about through association with some form of unlicensed ‘therapist,’ healer or guru type figure. Possibly even ‘ordained ministers’ in Unity Church serve dual functions as ‘counselors’ or ‘therapists.’ In other words, possible involvement with Unity religion manifests itself as a result of someone seeking some form of psychotherapy, usually to heal childhood or adult trauma and abuse.

An unfortunate possible result and side effect of an individual being involved in this network of healing programs and therapies (and there are many more which I have not mentioned in this brief overview) can be the apparent disability of higher brain functions, including a basic inability to think clearly and engage in basic relationship psychodynamics. The book utilizes hypnotic, mantra-like repetition of concepts which are, more often than not, logically incoherent and are meant to brainwash and control the thoughts of the ‘student.’ I personally know of one person who has been reading A Course In Miracles almost exclusively, (in other words, without reading anything else – like a New York Times best seller, for example) for over twenty years. Indeed, these and other similar types of side effects are relayed in the criticism section from the A Course In Miracles web page documented by Wikipedia:

Some Doctrinal Christian apologists have considered it heretical or counterfeit. Author and Yogi, Joel Kramer, states that the Course could be considered a classic authoritarian example of programming thought to change beliefs. Anton van Harskamp, a German scholar of religion, says that the Course contains, “…endless variation on some universally meant insights in life…” that, “…brings readers of the book, [or] in any case this reader, [to] a mood in which bewilderment and boredom take turns”. Long time teacher of the Course, Hugh Prather, notes that ACIM students often become, “far more separate and egocentric,” with many ultimately, “[losing] the ability to carry on a simple conversation”. He admits that he and his wife Gayle, “…had ended up less flexible, less forgiving, and less generous than we were when we first started our path!

I believe that at the turn of the previous to the last century, similar procedures were carried out through damage to, or the surgical severing of, the nerve fibers connecting the pre frontal cortex to the thalamus of the brain. These were known as lobotomies to the functionaries at ‘Houses of Bedlam’ or asylums for the ‘insane.’ The end result of the procedures described in the above previous paragraphs is, in my opinion, basically the same as a lobotomy.

As mentioned previously, this letter is meant to be a brief overview of the connections between Unity Church, A Course In Miracles, CIA MK-ULTRA Artichoke Subproject 130 and the Stanford Research Institute.

There are many other high level individuals of dubious sanity who espouse equally unsound philosophies surrounding the ACIM millieu. Some of  these individuals include: Lee Carroll (Kryon), who apparently channels nonsense with the blessing and  sanction of the United Nations and Barbara Marx Hubbard, who openly advocates genocide. Further information about these and other caustic so-called New Age leaders is currently beyond the scope of this letter.

Though the MK-ULTRA program has been official declassified and considered terminated, the effects of the damage wrought by this program of psychological warfare (PSYOP) or ‘Mind War’ are still being felt in the year 2007.

Indeed, as I have stated in letters to Senator xx and Peter Dale Scott, among many others, I suspect a new and more high-tech COINTELPRO / MK-ULTRA hybrid domestic surveillance and harassment program may be currently operational today in the United States and is currently being used against US citizens.

One only need look at the stellar work of Nick Begich, MD, Mr. Kucinich in the House of Representatives (see HR 2977) and especially John J. McMurtrey, M.S., and his 2003 paper, Inner Voice, Target Tracking, and Behavioral Influence Technologies (see previous link), to really understand the extent of the potentially bottomless pit of a Pandora’s Box that has been opened by those Aldous Huxley called the ‘power elite.’

As a side note, John J. McMurtrey’s aforementioned paper contains eleven excellent and eye-opening pages of footnotes, with a great many US Patent Office numbers issued for related inventions, dating back to the early 1960’s. The complete document should still be available via Wikipedia, keyword search: Microwave Auditory Effect or Microwave Hearing.

All of the patents referenced in that document are readily available and easily accessible via the US Patent Office website complete with abstracts, claims and detailed descriptions.

Of special interest is Apparatus and Method for Remotely Monitoring and Altering Brain Waves, (United States Patent 3951134), which was issued in 1974, coincidentally, approximately the same year A Course In Miracles was published (1975). To the best of my knowledge, the United States Patent Office does not give patent numbers to inventions that do not work.

Similarly, Nick Begich, MD has done extensive research into the area of what the US military calls the Microwave Auditory Effect, a so-called non-lethal weapon capable of producing intra-cranial sound inside the head of a human target :

This area of research is one of the most important because it points to the ultimate weapon of political control: the ability to place information directly into the human brain, bypassing all normal filtering mechanisms.

In 1995, the US Department of Defense put forward the contract, “Communicating via the Microwave Auditory Effect; Awarding Agency: Department of Defense; SBIR Contract Number: F41624-95-C-9007″. The description of this technology, which would be used for direct communications with military personnel, is written as follows:

“Title: Communicating via the Microwave Auditory Effect. “Description: An innovative and revolutionary technology is described that offers a means of low-probability-of-intercept Radio Frequency (RF) communications. The feasibility of the concept has been established using both a low intensity laboratory system and a high power RF transmitter. Numerous military applications exist in areas of search and rescue, security and special operations.”

(Mind Control: The Ultimate Brave New World, Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 13, Number 2, February – March 2006)

In the August 28, 2005 edition of the Washington Post, an article entitled Xtreme Defense by Sharon Weinberger, stated that similar ’non-lethal’ weapons, as previously described above, are currently being utilized by private contractors and the US military in Iraq:

His latest is to use ultrasonic waves in the dazzler not just to blind enemies, but also to convey messages in their heads, similar to Gibbs’ Medusa project. Hearing voices from God is a ‘big thing’ in Arab culture according to Bitar. “We flash-blind them. And, while their eyes are shut, you could send a recorded message or deep guttural voice that echoes in the inside of their head…“

There is absolutely no doubt that these and other similar types of technologies and programs have been privatized and are being used extensively in theatre today in the Middle East to combat the so-called ‘War on Terror.’ These technologies may also be exasperating the ‘civil wars’ currently raging in Iraq and the Occupied Territories in Palestine.

Ultimately, the point that really needs to be emphasized, above any other is that which has been categorized as an ‘exotic or non-lethal weapon’ is a form of information weapon (the book A Course In Miracles serves a similar purpose – as an information weapon or a weapon of propaganda). Thus, the warfare engaged in is an information type of warfare (or PSYOP) which, by default, constitutes propaganda. Propaganda or PSYOP, by its very definition under US code is lying, speaking an untruth or distorting the truth; as such, propagandizing the citizens of the US or using PSYOP against the citizens of the US is a criminal act under the current laws of the United States of America.  [This law might have been overturned by Patriot Act Two]

Most Sincerely,

Revised 7/2010

Psycho-Acoustic Correction

   

Mind Justice Home Page
A human rights group working for the rights and protections of mental integrity and freedom from new technologies and weapons which target the mind and nervous system.

Sythetic Telepathy. The Early Mind Wars

The Holographic Concept of Reality

Unclassified Documents on Mind Control

Mind Control. The Ultimate Brave New World

"We need a program of psychosurgery and political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.

"The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective.

"Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electrical stimulation of the brain."

Dr. Jose Delgado (MKULTRA experimenter who demonstrated a radio- controlled bull on CNN in 1985)
Director of Neuropsychiatry, Yale University Medical School
Congressional Record No. 26, Vol. 118, February 24, 1974

The State of Unclassified and Commercial Technology Capable of Some Electronic Harassment Effects

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An ABC News Special about the human mind and experiments in mind control.

Best Mind Control Documentary Excerpts
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Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG): "stimulating reactions" among terrorists

The Secret War: Frustrated by intelligence failures, the Defense Department is dramatically expanding its 'black world' of covert operations

Abstract:
The development of the Pentagon's covert counter-terror capability has its roots in the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The Army created a highly compartmentalized organization that could collect clandestine intelligence independent of the rest of the U.S. intelligence community and follow through with covert military action.

Meantime, old commands are being morphed into new ones for the covert war. The two Joint Interagency Task Forces in the United States previously devoted to fighting drugs now have the war on terrorism as their highest priority.

The epicenter of the Pentagon's covert operations remains the North Carolina-based Joint Special Operations Command, often referred to as Delta Force. The super-secret command is still not officially acknowledged to exist. Its two-star commander, Army Maj. Gen. Dell L. Dailey, who spent much of the Afghan war in Oman, has no public biography.

In what may well be the largest expansion of covert action by the armed forces since the Vietnam era, the Bush administration has turned to what the Pentagon calls the "black world" to press the war on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

The Defense Department is building up an elite secret army with resources stretching across the full spectrum of covert capabilities. New organizations are being created. The missions of existing units are being revised. Spy planes and ships are being assigned new missions in anti-terror and monitoring the "axis of evil."

The increasingly dominant role of the military, Pentagon officials say, reflects frustration at the highest levels of government with the performance of the intelligence community, law enforcement agencies and much of the burgeoning homeland security apparatus. It also reflects the desire of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to gain greater overall control of the war on terror.

Insulated from outside pressures, armed with matchless weapons and technology, trained to operate below the shadow line, the Pentagon's black world of classified operations holds out the hope of swift, decisive action in a struggle against terrorism that often looks more like a family feud than a war.

Coupled with the enormous effort being made throughout the government to improve and link information networks and databases, covert anti-terror operations promise to put better information in the hands of streamlined military teams that can identify, monitor and neutralize terrorist threats.

"Prevention and preemption are ... the only defense against terrorism," Rumsfeld said in May. "Our task is to find and destroy the enemy before they strike us."

The new apparatus for covert operations and the growing government secrecy associated with the war on terrorism reflect the way the Bush administration's most senior officials see today's world:

First, they see fighting terrorism and its challenge to U.S. interests and values as the 21st century equivalent of the Cold War crusade against communism. Second, they believe the magnitude of the threat requires, and thus justifies, aggressive new "off-the-books" tactics.

In their understandable frustration over continued atrocities such as the recent Bali attack, however, U.S. officials might keep two points in mind.

Though covert action can bring quick results, because it is isolated from the normal review processes it can just as quickly bring mistakes and larger problems. Also, the Pentagon is every bit as capable as the civilian side of the government when it comes to creating organization charts and bureaucracy that stifle creative thinking and timely action.

The development of the Pentagon's covert counter-terror capability has its roots in the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The Army created a highly compartmentalized organization that could collect clandestine intelligence independent of the rest of the U.S. intelligence community and follow through with covert military action.

Known as the Intelligence Support Activity, or ISA, when it was established in 1981, this unit fought in drug wars and counter- terror operations from the Middle East to South America. It built a reputation for daring, flexibility and a degree of lawlessness.

In May 1982, Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci called the ISA "uncoordinated and uncontrolled." Though its freelance tendencies were curbed, the ISA continued to operate under different guises through the ill-starred U.S. involvement in Somalia in 1992 and was reportedly active in the hunt for Bosnian Serbs suspected of war crimes.

Today, the ISA operates under the code name Gray Fox. In addition to covert operations, it provides the war on terrorism with the kind of so-called "close-in" signals monitoring -- including the interception of cell phone conversations -- that helped bring down Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

Gray Fox's low-profile eavesdropping planes also fly without military markings. Working closely with Special Forces and the CIA, Gray Fox also places operatives inside hostile territory.

In and around Afghanistan, Gray Fox was part of a secret sphere that included the CIA's paramilitary Special Activities Division and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command.

These commands and "white" Special Forces like the Green Berets, as well as Air Force combat controllers and commandos of eight different nations report to a mind-boggling array of new command cells and coordination units set up after Sept. 11.

An Army brigadier general commands the Joint Interagency Task Force at Bagram air base north of Kabul to coordinate CIA, Defense Department and coalition forces in Afghanistan. A new Campaign Support Group has been established at Ft. Bragg, N.C. The Special Operations Joint Interagency Collaboration Center has been created in Tampa, Fla.

In Europe, the Joint Interagency Coordination Group handles information-sharing and logistical support with NATO. Hawaii's Pacific Command stood up a Joint Interagency Counter-Terrorist Group this summer.

Meantime, old commands are being morphed into new ones for the covert war. The two Joint Interagency Task Forces in the United States previously devoted to fighting drugs now have the war on terrorism as their highest priority.

The epicenter of the Pentagon's covert operations remains the North Carolina-based Joint Special Operations Command, often referred to as Delta Force. The super-secret command is still not officially acknowledged to exist. Its two-star commander, Army Maj. Gen. Dell L. Dailey, who spent much of the Afghan war in Oman, has no public biography.

Among Dailey's assets is a fleet of aircraft specially equipped for secret operations -- conventional and covert military planes and helicopters, and even former Soviet helicopters. The bulk of those craft, including the reconfigured Russian choppers, fly from airfields in Uzbekistan and from two Pakistani air bases, Shahbaz and Shamsi.

The Air Force and the CIA collect additional intelligence from unmanned Predator and Global Hawk drones. They also have low- profile reconnaissance assets that look like transport planes and operate under such code names as ARL-Low, Keen Sage, Scathe View and Senior Scout.

Not to be left out, the Navy's Gray Star spy vessel, reminiscent of the old Pueblo, captured by North Korea in 1968, now sweeps up sophisticated -- and obscure -- "measurements and signatures intelligence" to monitor the ballistic missile capabilities of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Even with all this, the Pentagon wants to expand covert capabilities.

Rumsfeld's influential Defense Science Board 2002 Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism says in its classified "outbrief" -- a briefing drafted to guide other Pentagon agencies -- that the global war on terrorism "requires new strategies, postures and organization."

The board recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception.

Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces.

Such tactics would hold "states/sub-state actors accountable" and "signal to harboring states that their sovereignty will be at risk," the briefing paper declares.

Never to be outdone in proposing hardware solutions, the Air Force is designing its own Global Response Task Force to fight the war on terrorism. The all-seeing, all-bombing Air Force envisions unmanned A-X aircraft capable of long-range, nighttime gunship operations and an M-X covert transport, as well as hypersonic and space-based conventional weapons capable of delivering a "worldwide attack within an hour."

Who says the arms race is over? Rumsfeld's science board warns against overemphasis on equipment even as it recommends more. Washington is well on its way to an arms race with itself.

And for those who worry that all these secret operations and aggressive new doctrines will turn the United States into the world's policeman, there is a ray of hope.

Rumsfeld is now the field marshal of the war on terrorism, but the Pentagon is also creating new layers of bureaucracy that may save it from itself. Not to mention the rest of us.

William M. Arkin
The Los Angeles Times
27 October 2002