One Nation Under Psy-Ops

by **nomo** » Wed Mar 01, 2006 8:04 pm

One Nation Under Psy-Ops February 28, 2006 By Patricia Goldsmith <a href="http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/06/02/28_psyops.html">www.democraticunderground...syops.html</a> In my view, Mary McCrory got it right when she said that the Project for a New American Century manifesto reads like it was written in a tree-house. Nevertheless, it is documentary evidence showing the direction the worst aspects of our government - the ones who are now in power - have been taking for the last thirty plus years. Their goal, as laid out in various PNAC papers, is permanent world domination, and for these people, there is no doubt that the ends justify the means. <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/17/1522228">Professor Alfred McCoy</a> talks about that in his book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, a history of the CIA's decades-long study of techniques of psychological control, including torture. At first, McCoy says, the government dabbled heavily in drugs, including the notorious LSD experiments of the Vietnam era. But what really worked, they discovered after lots of trial and error (and billions of dollars), are a couple of simple principles: sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. When Professor McCoy saw the black-hooded figures from the Abu Ghraib photos, posed in stress positions with electrodes dangling from their fingers, he instantly recognized classic CIA technique: <blockquote>Quote:<hr>Oh, it's very simple. Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University (Canada), a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the CIA. In this research, he found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within 48 hours. It didn't take electroshock, truth serum, beating or pain. All he did was have student volunteers sit in a cubicle with goggles, gloves and headphones, earmuffs, so that they were cut off from their senses, and within 48 hours, denied sensory stimulation, they would suffer, first hallucinations, then ultimately breakdown. ... Now, then, the second major breakthrough that the CIA had came here in New York City at Cornell University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under contract from the CIA studied Soviet KGB torture techniques, and they found that the most effective KGB technique was self-inflicted pain. You simply make somebody stand for a day or two. And as they stand - OK, you're not beating them, they have no resentment - you tell them, "You're doing this to yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down." And so, as they stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt, they separate, hallucinations start, the kidneys shut down.<hr></blockquote> Looked at this way, you can understand their refusal to renounce their new "flexible" interrogation techniques and release <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4710966.stm">Guantanamo</a> detainees, even though prisoners who've been held for years are increasingly unlikely to possess urgent, actionable information. The fact is, Guantanamo is nothing less than a dream laboratory for those who've been working on psy-ops theory for decades: <blockquote>Quote:<hr>Now, this produced a distinctively American form of torture, the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries, psychological torture, and it's the one that's with us today, and it's proved to be a very resilient, quite adaptable, and an enormously destructive paradigm. Let's make one thing clear. Americans refer to this often times in common parlance as "torture light." Psychological torture, people who are involved in treatment tell us it's far more destructive, does far more lasting damage to the human psyche than does physical torture. ... It is far crueler than physical torture. This is something we don't realize in this country. ... And under General Miller at Guantanamo they perfected the CIA torture paradigm. They added two key techniques. They went beyond the universal sensory receptors of the original research. They added to it an attack on cultural sensitivity. ... And then they went further still. Under General Miller, they created these things called "Biscuit" teams, Behavior Science Consultation Teams, and they actually had qualified military psychologists participating in the ongoing interrogations, and these psychologists would identify individual phobias, like fear of the dark or attachment to mother, and by the time we're done ... it had a three-fold assault on the human psyche: sensory receptors, self-inflicted pain, cultural sensitivity, and individual fears and phobias.<hr></blockquote> This form of torture - self-inflicted pain - is entirely congruent with BushCo's general style of governance. Everything is always the victims' fault. The victim always does it to him/herself, from Harry Whittington to the black millionaire looters in New Orleans. To put it in Rovian terms, everyone's fair game. After we found out that Bush was putting taps on the main switches at all the phone companies - meaning quite simply that he's tapping the whole country - BushCo managed to switch the conversation from the staggering proportions of their crime, to the question of the guilt or innocence of ordinary American citizens. After all, the spin went, if you haven't done anything wrong, you've got nothing to worry about. Alberto Gonzales unabashedly announced the Bush family's <a href="http://www.washtimes.com/national/20060207-123209-5564r.htm">new legal interpretation</a> at the NSA "oversight" hearings that Congress quickly convened. We have to protect America, he said, from a domestic fifth column movement. During his confirmation hearing, <a href="http://www.gp.org/press/pr_2006_02_16.shtml">Samuel Alito</a> explained that a fifth column is "a movement known to every war where American citizens will sympathize with the enemy and collaborate with the enemy." If that's not enough, for those who still don't get the point, he went further and pledged, "I stand behind this president being commander-in-chief, to pursue fifth column movements." Gonzales claims that the commander-in-chief has inherent constitutional authority to order the military to spy on American citizens on the grounds that the continental United States, after September 11, is a theater of war ["The Memo," by Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, 2-27-06]. Eventually we're going to notice that that's just a nice way of saying martial law. Allister Sparks, the crusading anti-apartheid South African journalist, recently talked to Amy Goodman on <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/23/1454239"> Democracy Now!</a> about what it's like living in a brutal police state. <blockquote>Quote:<hr>And ... this is why I find it deeply disturbing to see what is happening in the United States today ... everything from detentions without trial to wiretapping to the torture of prisoners, which seems to be blatantly done and obviously condoned from very high quarters. So many of the odious things that I lived with for so long in my country, that poisoned our society, I now see them occurring in the United States, which I've always admired, and it's tarnished my admiration most seriously. It's a country I really have no great wish to visit again.<hr></blockquote> Goodman pointed out to Sparks that there were ties between recently-indicted Republican uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the South African apartheid regime. "Abramoff," Goodman explained, "helped launch the pro-apartheid International Freedom Foundation in the mid-1980s. ... While Abramoff headed the IFF in Washington, in South Africa it was run in part by Craig Williamson, a notorious military intelligence officer known for carrying out a series of bombings and assassinations." In other words, Williamson worked for the CIA. As it happens, Sparks testified against Williamson in a South African truth and reconciliation trial; Sparks knew the victims of one of Williamson's letter bombs, a family. <blockquote>Quote:<hr>He was also involved in the killing of the family of an Afrikaner, a white Afrikaner dissident named Marius Schoon - a letter bomb killed his wife, his daughter, and injured a two-year-old boy who was left floundering around in this devastated home for two days before anyone found him. Yeah, that's the record of Craig Williamson. ... He was also involved in an organization called Stratcom, which was Strategic Communications, which involved planting smear letters of anti-apartheid activists, or smear stories. Again, there were gullible journalists, or some of them were plants and colleagues of his. And he and his organization succeeded in getting stories published, which discredited, you know, really good brave activists. ... [T]hat's his career. That's his record. And you're telling me that Mr. Abramoff was a colleague, was involved with him.<hr></blockquote> But even South Africa, I dare say, did not conduct surveillance on the scale imagined by BushCo, which is building huge electronic storage space for all the data it's mining and collecting. I'm certain that they are perfecting a truly American form of spying, in the same way they've perfected torture, and the whole field of psy-ops, from the stories planted in headlines by the <a href="http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=299_0_1_0_C">Rendon Group</a> to <a href="http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=278532006">Muslim riots</a> right on cue. No doubt, just as psychologists participated in the torture experiments, expert data analysts are participating in the mining of the information this government is capturing. For people who want complete control, it is a gold mine. Given the parallels between surveillance and torture, it might be wise to consider Professor McCoy's most serious warnings: <blockquote>Quote:<hr>There's an absolute ban on torture for a very good reason. Torture taps into the deepest recesses, unexplored recesses of human consciousness, where creation and destruction coexist, where the infinite human capacity for kindness and infinite human capacity for cruelty coexist, and it has a powerful perverse appeal, and once it starts, both the perpetrators and the powerful who order them, let it spread, and it spreads out of control. ... There is no such thing as a little bit of torture. The whole myth of scientific surgical torture, that torture advocates, academic advocates in this country came up with, that's impossible. That cannot operate. It will eventually spread.<hr></blockquote> So what do we do? First, we have to stop relying so heavily on electronic communications, and that includes the net. We know that Rumsfeld recently completed <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4655196.stm">Internet war games</a>. Wouldn't you love to know how they plan to plant disinformation and sow discord? But somehow I have this feeling we might be skeptical enough to thwart them there. This is Sparks on life with bugs: <blockquote>Quote:<hr>And again, one had these meetings, and, you know, you would talk under trees in the garden to avoid all these listening devices. It became a way of life. You know, wiretapping intrudes on your life in a terrible way.<hr></blockquote> On the other hand, the need to get into face-to-face groups just might be our salvation. We're going to have to get to know each other outside of our usual political boxes, and the sooner the better. Republicans are becoming Dems, Dems are going <a href="http://www.gp.org/">Green</a>, the non-political among us are joining peace groups or the Sierra Club or starting feminist consciousness-raising groups for young women (boy, could we use some of those): doing whatever we have to do to heed Cindy Sheehan's call to <a href="http://progressive.org/mag_intv0306">leave the comfort zone</a>. I know some of you must be itching to get into <a href="http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/discus.cgi">a blackboxvoting cell</a>. Do it now. Don't think about it, just do it. You'll be glad you did later. I can even see a beneficial side-effect of losing the vote: when you don't have to worry about winning, because you know the game is rigged, you might actually start to think about what your true political ideals are. You might find that the majority of people agree on most things, including agreement on what's most important at this time, namely, our global climate crisis. I realize, now, that even when our votes were counted fairly, our choices were manipulated into a range of choices so narrow as to constitute an a priori defeat, and that's one of the reasons we are where we are today. We have to dig deeper. Only when we all stop believing the ends justify the means can we focus on fighting for a return to inalienable human rights and due process. The trick to coming together is seeing exactly who the enemy is. We have a shining example before us in South Africa, which was able to destroy its own vicious apartheid police state when all the people, black and white alike, got sick of being treated like the enemy by a criminal regime. Comment interests overcame divide-and-conquer politics. Sparks says, "(T)he solution ... is one secular country shared by all and ruled over by the majority. And if you find that unthinkable (as applied to Israel and Palestine, for example), then perhaps (you) have some appreciation of what we've done, because that is what we did. ... And it was a remarkable thing."

by **dbeach** » Thu Mar 02, 2006 12:34 am

VN Vets learned that the govt lies Agent Orange sprayed all over the place BUT the what me worry boys say oh its OK its only operation ranchand and harmless . they knew dioxins were deadly same as DU is now deadly in Gulf I remember seeing a Look mag in 1970 or so ..It showed CIA agents in black sunglasses..white short slieved shirts with dark dress pants ..armed with M-16s sitting atop tons of raw opium headed for labs in south america.. I though the govt is pushing dope to keep the citizens numb and dumb and some fat cat Chinese War lord is gettin a pay off.. My Dad told me to keep off dope cux criminals international in scope work with commies to overthrow the US govt.. He made have the terms wrong but he understood the concepts... I NEVER been the same since 11/22/63.

by **Gouda** » Thu Mar 02, 2006 7:59 am

Bump. Thanks Nomo. Personally, I think we'll be needing more fundamental, sweeping measures than what the Greens are about, but at least you are offering active solutions and linking us up. Way past time to move in active directions. It's probably going to have to hurt a little. But one more 11/22/63, one more 9/11/01, and it's curtains for a generation or two, or three...the windows are closing.

by **Gouda** » Thu Mar 02, 2006 8:25 am

I am sure many of you have read this essay by Carolyn Baker. While I feel there are some hard grains of truth in there, something about it puts me ill at ease. No, not exactly the forgo happiness and embrace suffering part. Maybe it's the 'allow the darkness to be our teacher' thing. Maybe her phrasing is off. Maybe my interpretation is skewed. Maybe it's her citation of ruppert and madsen - the inevitability of 'we are going to be rebooted, get ready to suffer, let this rebooting be part of our transformation'...Maybe my discomfiture proves her point. Maybe this is super subtle psycological manipulation. *** American Born, addicted to Happiness by Carolyn Baker www.globalresearch.ca 30 November 2004 The URL of this article is: <a href="http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BAK411C.html">globalresearch.ca/articles/BAK411C.html</a> Last week, as I do every November 22, I reflected again on that day in Dallas forty-one years ago, my second year in college, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. After reading Wayne Madsen’s fine article on the increasing inaccessibility to visitors of the grave of JFK in Arlington National Cemetery in 2004 (www.copvcia.com ), I pondered once more not only the unresolved and unanswered questions of November 22, 1963, but the lingering, lethal legacy of that moment in history which is now being visited upon America in the twenty-first century. As an historian, I am frequently confronted with the agonizing consequences of human history, including humanity’s sins of omission. I do not wish to re-hash the details of the assassination. Any astute researcher who is not serving the interests of the Central Intelligence Agency is forced to conclude that the murder of JFK was a complicated and meticulously organized coup which guaranteed the unscathed longevity of the military industrial complex and the political pre-eminence of the CIA for decades thereafter. My generation was never sufficiently committed to solving the crime of the assassination. It was much easier for us to protest the Vietnam War, revel in the counterculture we were creating, and convince ourselves that the JFK assassination was only one piece of the pie and that the revolution we thought we were creating would inevitably reveal all of its mysteries. But the revolution didn’t happen, and wounds to the psyche, whether individual or collective, do not simply vanish. As a nation, we paid, and are still paying a price, for the crime for which we refused to demand justice. What is more, we have repeated history by passively submitting to yet another “Warren Commission” (the 9-11 Commission), as yet another coup d’etat, the U.S. government-orchestrated atrocities of September 11, 2001, fade into distant memory. As Mike Ruppert reminded his audience in his Portland State University lecture of 2001 regarding the Kennedy assassination and the 9-11 hoax, “the bills are coming due, and now it’s your turn to pay.” The Bush coup of shamelessly rigged elections in November, 2000 paved the way for illegal mid-term “elections” throughout the country in 2002 and the most recent chapter in the overthrow of the American republic, the psuedo-election of 2004. These events ended democratic elections in the United States and guaranteed that within the next decade we will see the neocon agenda and all its horrors unleashed on the world and on the American people. It will be anything but a pretty picture. The majority of responses to my articles contain some plea for a solution: “What can we do?” goes the plaintive wail. While I am willing to offer suggestions, I have come to believe that the most important and useful one at this point would be: “Become willing to suffer.” Now, before you toss this article and pull the covers over your head, please hear me out. You will suffer in the next few years, whether you are willing or not, but your resistance to it can only exacerbate your misery. I enjoy conversing with individuals not born in the United States. Their perspective is truly refreshing because almost without exception, their countries of origin have at some time experienced war, famine, revolution, corruption, or abject poverty. They have no Declaration of Independence that entitles them to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Consequently, they are much more open to hearing “bad news” and have fewer questions about how to “fix” it. I hasten to add that Jefferson’s original phrase in the Declaration was “life, liberty and the pursuit of property.” Let us not forget that the profits from a capitalist land-conquering, land-holding system, not happiness, was the original intent of our founding fathers. Like the founders, the ruling elite of our day find “happiness” in ownership—hence Bush’s Orwellian “ownership society.” Americans, even so-called Progressives it seems, appear to be fixated in an eternal adolescence that wants to repair adversity as quickly as possible without living it, or God forbid, learning from it. One facet of maturity is the awareness that the challenges of human existence are rarely simplistic, usually fraught with complexity, and typically last much longer than we ever dreamed we could endure them. As a result, we inwardly (or outwardly) roll our eyes at the adolescents in our lives who insist on taking the path of least resistance as quickly as possible. Yet, like adolescents, we refuse to face the reality that clean, fair, democratic elections no longer exist in our country, if they ever did. Like puerile MTV viewers, we demand that the right politician, the right book, the right motivational speaker, the right spiritual teacher, the right journalist tell us what to do and make it “all better” so that we can avoid suffering. We lament that the uninformed populace around us doesn’t want to hear any bad news, but the real truth is, neither do we. One of the hallmarks of adulthood versus adolescence is the awareness that mistakes have consequences. Recently, a foreign-born friend of mine asked why the American people believe that they have the right to expand, exploit, rape, pillage, murder and conquer every area of the planet. I could only answer by explaining the history of the United States—an epic saga of what my friend had just verbalized. Indeed, the bills are coming due, and unfortunately, it is now time for us to pay. During the next four years, the Bush Administration plans to screen all Americans for mental illness (<a href="http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39078">www.worldnetdaily.com/new...E_ID=39078</a> ).The intent of the Bush mental health screening plan is not to legitimately diagnose and treat mental illness but rather determine who needs to be labeled “mentally unstable” or “subversive” and who needs to be medicated by the pharmaceutical industry from which the administration has added handsomely to its campaign coffers. Moreover, if the administration had the slightest interest in alleviating mental illness, it would have to begin with Lunatic In Chief, George W. Tragically, the nation is as mentally ill as its president, not only because the population has been entranced by the psuedo-Christian fascist paranoia of the religious right, but because overwhelmingly, most of us are pathologically “addicted to happiness.” As the psychologist Carl Jung noted “the foundation of all mental illness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.” Before anyone calls me a masochist, please hear me out. We live in a painful, uncertain, dangerous, heartless world. I hear the reader saying: “I have already suffered and hold many badges of courage or at the very least, survival, and I really don’t want to surrender to further suffering because I have had quite enough, thank you very much.” But let us also remember that as Americans, we do not have the perspective on suffering that most other citizens of the world have, nor will we until we experience similar adversities. Our children are unlikely to demand an end to a perpetual war on terrorism until they hold draft cards in their wallets which have been sucked dry by that war’s astronomical debt. We may never cherish our communities until we and our neighbors have to depend on each other for food and basic necessities of life. The preciousness of our resources will not be fully appreciated until they disappear or become very difficult to acquire. People often ask me if I plan to leave the country. My answer: “There’s nowhere to go.” Within the next decade we are likely to see a nuclear exchange, a dirty bomb exploded in the U.S. as well as in other parts of the world, the return of the draft, the criminalization of abortion and women who have them, the suspension of the Constitution, a full-blown police state, the end of health care entirely except for the very wealthy, and an economic catastrophe in America that will make 1929 look like a cornucopia of abundance. Add to this every form of pollution humankind has created within the past century, the end of clean air and water, and intolerable climate changes resulting from global warming. I noticed on November 3, 2004 that we were no longer living merely in the territory of political solutions or issues of social justice, but had crossed a watershed moment in history into the landscape of collective anguish that might test our mettle as a people and as individuals like nothing Americans have previously experienced. Throughout history, citizens of nations in torment have responded in a variety of ways. Some quite naturally want to die and escape the pain. Others prefer to “fiddle” as long as possible while Rome burns. Others join resistance movements or become healers or teachers. Surely by now, some reader is screaming: “But where is the hope?” I can’t answer that question at this moment. That is to say, I can’t give you hope. Hope is something we all must construct in the laboratory of our own suffering. What I do know is that as Americans, we are “hooked on hope” but generally unwilling to confront the suffering that allows us to find hope. Genuine hope is never found when we feel comfortable, affluent, safe, and secure. Ask Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, or Rosa Parks. Perhaps the poet, T.S. Eliot,said it best: I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting, Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought; So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. As we enter the dark time of year, and perhaps one of the darkest times in modern history, we celebrate in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the coming of the light. Darkness has never been able to unequivocally obliterate it. All great traditions and spiritual teachers declare that human existence is largely comprised of adversity interspersed with moments of light, beauty, and joy. They have also admonished us to remember that without suffering, there will never be transformation. The days of simply applying bandaids to America’s deplorably corrupt and unjust political, economic, and social institutions are over. It appears that nothing less than total transformation is being demanded of us. My wish for every American in 2005 is that we recover from our addiction to happiness—our refusal to hear, ponder, and struggle with “bad news”, and with informed, illumined minds and hearts, allow the darkness to be our teacher. That very “un-American” path may be our only hope for creating a new world

One Nation Under Psy-Ops

One Nation Under Psy-Ops

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