Four Prominent Experts Weigh In on the 2005 Government Mind Control Debate
Mind Justice Home PageBy Cheryl Welsh, director, Mind Justice, June, 2005, with special thanks to Harlan Girard, director of International Committee Against Offensive Microwave Weapons and world class researcher and the numerous victims who generously shared their research information.
All can agree that mind control weapons are classified but how advanced are they? Is mind control just science fiction and a conspiracy theory or the next weapon of mass destruction and one of the deepest secrets of the nation? How would we find out if the U.S. government did have mind control weapons? Four experts provide surprising and intriguing answers that challenge widely-held assumptions.
Gloria Naylor, author of 2005 book, 1996. 1983 National Book Award winner for Best First Fiction for Women of Brewster Place, author of numerous books, graduate of Yale University. Naylor has been distinguished with numerous honors including; Senior Fellow, The Society for the Humanities, Cornell University. Naylor is the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for her novel.
Jon Ronson, 2005 New York Times reviewed author, journalist
William Arkin, 2005 New York Review of Books reviewed author, NBC News military analyst, former army intelligence officer, former Los Angeles Times columnist, secrecy expert
Richard Garwin, Council on Foreign Relations nonlethal weapons report co-author, 2003 winner of the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for the fields of science and engineering.
Table of Contents
Introduction and Background Information on the Mind Control Debate
Introductory Comments by:
Gloria Naylor
Jon Ronson
William M. Arkin
Richard Garwin
The Debate So Far
The Government's Position:
Government mind control cover stories; mind control is science fiction, Russian mind control weapons do not work, mind control is nonsense and a conspiracy theory by nut cases.
The Scientist's Position:
Advanced mind control is still science fiction.
The Victim's Position:
Advanced mind control weapons are developed and highly classified but the government will never tell you.
Most neuroscientists shun discussions of advanced mind control, resulting in unreliable and hard to find mind control research information for the public
A rare find; prominent physicist's scientific theory for advanced mind control
Supersecret CIA mind control research continues.
The U.S. government is capable of widescale, long-term inhumane treatment by trusted officials; compare to the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal and the tobacco industry denial of addiction to tobacco and tobacco-related deaths
Deeper Issues Underlying the Government Mind Control Debate
Detailed Comments by Jon Ronson: A repeating pattern of new classified weapons and dismissed allegations
Excerpts from the New York Times, April 7, 2005, True Tales Odd Enough to Stop a Farm Animal's Heart
Excerpt from Ronson's book, page 53
Video clip excerpts of Ronson's Cspan book talk
A brief comparison of the Gulf war and Iraqi war
The London Guardian, February 2, 1991, War in the desert (Electronic Weapons)
Detailed Comments by William M. Arkin: A vastly changing government secrecy system without public input. What happens to democracy?
Excerpts of Arkin's book and Democracy Now interview below provide a reliable explanation for how mind control weapons would be classified.
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now 2005 interview with William Arkin
Detailed Comments by Richard L. Garwin: The government position on mind control weapons
Conclusions: An informed debate and caveats
Introduction and Background Information on the Mind Control Debate
To clarify the complex issue of government mind control, four prominent experts share their 2005 comments on government mind control and are quoted here and in detail below. For further citations and information please see Mind Justice at www.mindjustice.org.
Initial Comments By:
Gloria Naylor
Vanessa Bush of the American Library Association, wrote an editorial review of Gloria Naylor's 2005 book, 1996, and concluded;
...The intensely private Naylor found herself in the company of other prominent black writers and activists targeted by the government. She includes addenda with research and litigation regarding government experiments with mind control. ...her incredible book will spark debate about government surveillance and the blurring of the lines between fiction and nonfiction.
Gloria Naylor offers a professional voice to victim's claims that the government is targeting them and testing new classified remote mind control weapons. Naylor risked her reputation and publicly addressed a scorned, ridiculed, and troubling subject when neuroscientists, human rights experts, government representatives and almost everyone else completely shun the issue.
Jon Ronson
Jon Ronson's book, the 2005 New York Times reviewed book, Men Who Stare at Goats is an entertaining yet unsettling examination of the serious issues in the mind control debate. Ronson interviewed military experts who say there are no advanced mind control weapons, just claims of nonsense and science fiction. Ronson guardedly says mind control weapons are possible, given that mind control patents have been bought up by the government. Ronson reports on allegations of mind control experiments by Guantanamo detainees and Iraqi prisoners of war and concludes we don't know whether advanced mind control weapons really work and mind control research is classified.
William M. Arkin
William M. Arkin, author of the 2005 book Code Names Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World described government scandals in light of the 2005 world of government secrecy. Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News, Federation of American Scientists commented that Code Names was "perhaps the most concentrated act of defiance of official secrecy policies since Howard Morland wrote about the H Bomb Secret in the Progressive in 1979."
Arkin wrote; "As I have learned in compiling this directory, most genuine secrets ironically remain secret. ...Yet Abu Ghraib is like every other national security surprise: We cannot know who the players are or what they are up to until after disaster strikes." Arkin listed disasters including "...domestic spying operations, illegal weapons developments, and human experimentation". Some nonlethal weapons like blinding lasers were classified at some of the highest levels of secrecy only because the weapons are repugnant. Arkin reported that all can agree there is a lack of effective oversight, particularly in Congress.
Richard Garwin
Richard Garwin is co-author of the 1999 Council on Foreign Relations, (CFR) report entitled, Non-Lethal Technologies: Progress and Prospects. While nonlethal weapons became better known to the public in the 1990s, Garwin reported there were already developed and highly classified "large programs" in "psychological warfare, information warfare, and nonlethal weapons with strategic potential."
Garwin co-authored the subsequent 2004 Council on Foreign Relations report, Nonlethal Weapons and Capabilities which described the ongoing interservice conflicts, the problem of redundancy, a burdensome secrecy system and the lack of accountability for weapons.
Garwin's views are more critical of nonlethal weapons and more informative than most but are representative of the government position on mind control weapons. Garwin kindly replied to email questions in January, 2005 and said he has evaluated electromagnetic weapons for the Defense Department several times but "there are always 'compartments' to which even people with high-level security clearances do not have access." Garwin concluded, "...In my analyses of the effect of radiowaves on people, I have never found any significant effect other than heating of the tissues. ...So I don't think there is much in the threat of electromagnetic signals to control or disorient people by the effect on the human brain."
The Debate So Far
The debate today focuses on how advanced mind control weapons are. Ronson, Arkin, and Garwin agree that because of national security, not even the government experts with high-level security know what is classified with certainty. But most government experts and scientists still say it is unlikely there are advanced mind control weapons today. The government's bully pulpit, with government control of all mind control weapons and research information including cover stories, has created an extremely one sided debate.
For years, the mind control nut case and conspiracy theory appeared to be a common sense explanation for people who claimed the government was targeting them with frequencies and new technologies. While some are mentally ill, some claims are not. As in the national security experiments which took place in conjunction with the development of the atomic bomb, radiation experiment victims were labeled "the crazies" by the Department of Energy officials, according to the The August 31, 1997, New York Times Magazine article, Atomic Guinea Pigs.
In 1993, U.S. Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary declassified government documents proving illegal government human radiation experiments and yet no one was punished for conducting the illegal human experiments.
Fair or not, the unanimous position of the press and public today is that mind control is a conspiracy theory so why investigate further? The stigma and biases of mental illness and conspiracy label hide the serious issues underneath. For example, after the scandal of human radiation experiments, proposed changes in human experimentation rules were never implemented.
As a democracy, do we want to allow another scandal of illegal national security human experiments?
What has been muted for years by the conspiracy theory label is the growing circumstantial evidence of government mind control weapons. Below, Ronson, Arkin, and Garwin's comments add depth and credibility to an issue with great significance for the public if not now, in the future. But first, background information is necessary for any meaningful understanding of the issue.
The Government's Position: Government mind control cover stories; mind control is science fiction, Russian mind control weapons do not work, mind control is nonsense and a conspiracy theory by nut cases.
Steve Aftergood, a highly regarded secrecy expert, explains excessive government cover stories. In the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist article entitled, The Soft-Kill Fallacy, September/October, 1994, he wrote;
The government secrecy system as a whole is among the most poisonous legacies of the Cold War. ...the Cold war secrecy system also mandates active deception. ...A security manual for special access programs [SAPs] authorizes contractors to employ "cover stories" to disguise their activities. The only condition is that "cover stories must be believable." Even the government is starting to recognize that official cover and deception programs are getting out of hand and need to be curtailed.
The prevailing official government comments on mind control weapons are that they don't work, are science fiction or a conspiracy theory claim by nut cases. Below is a typical response;
Defense News, December 17-23 2001, Israel Fields Means to Suppress Palestinian Violence by Louise Doswald-Beck;
...In a December 9 interview marking the close of his four-year term at the helm of Israel's formidable defense research and development sector, Ben-Israel, [Major General Isaac Ben-Israel] said his directorate explored different scientific and phenomenological fields-including mind control- in attempts to contain and deter terrorist activity. "We invested in this for a few years...but we determined that it was not effective," Ben-Israel said of mind control methods, many of which were developed by military and security agencies of the former Soviet Union.
Everyone can agree that if government mind control was an effective weapon, officials would never admit it. Since the break up of the Soviet Union, information on Russian mind control became available although as in the U.S., no government documents or proof of mind control weapons other than circumstantial evidence were ever publicly confirmed.
The Scientist's Position: Advanced mind control is still science fiction
Most scientists accept the prediction of a matter of years or decades before scientists will understand how the brain works. In the October, 2004 Discover Magazine article entitled, Mind Control by John Horgan, Defense Advanced Research Projects [DARPA] scientist John Chapin stated, "The neural code [is] right up there with two other great scientific mysteries: the origin of the universe and of life on earth. The neural code is arguably the most consequential of the three. ...the neural code may be the hardest to solve." Horgan interviewed several eminent neuroscientists and most agreed advanced mind control was not a concern now because it would take decades to develop. There was no agreement on any one theory for decoding the brain.
Most scientists agree that advanced mind control weapons would be scientifically possible and practically inevitable as a result of solving the mysteries of the brain. Gregg Herken, Smithsonian curator, is representative of the numerous comments about the ultimate power and impact of future government mind control weapons. Herken reviewed a book about the supersecret U.S. NRO or National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence directorate for satellites. In the Boston Globe, April 6, 2003, book review of Secret Empire by Philip Taubman [Washington Post editor], Herken wrote;
...Despite the faults and failures that Taubman cites, it is difficult to imagine how the United States will become less reliant upon its eyes-and ears-in-the-sky. Instead, The NRO's wizards in Chantilly, VA., are no doubt looking forward to the day when they will have the ultimate in technical collection capability: a satellite that can see into the mind of the likes of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.
Most experts agree that no advanced mind control weapon is possible based on the current level of scientific capabilities. Most people dismiss mind control claims for this reason. The scientific capability to read a person's thoughts, implant thoughts, control memories, actions or dreams is not available in the open neuroscience literature.
The Victim's Position: Advanced mind control weapons are developed and highly classified but the government will never tell you
Most people are unaware that the debate on predictions and suppositions begins and immediately disappears into the black hole of classified neuroscience and mind control research. This fact is rarely reported in mainstream press.
Here is a brief counterargument which challenges the current public perception of neuroscience research. Of course, neither the government nor the victims can win this point without further declassified government documents or scientific proof.
First, the government does not publicize the fact that the military has large classified programs for neuroweapons and that many neuroscientists are conducting classified research. See http://www.mindjustice.org/2005update.htm for further citations. And for many reasons, most neuroscientists dislike discussing mind control seriously, making it extremely difficult for the public to get reliable information on this issue.
The Victim's Position: Most neuroscientists shun discussions of advanced mind control, resulting in unreliable and hard to find mind control research information for the public
Here is one example. In an interview, Dr. Kovacs, assistant professor at the Stanford University Center for Integrated Systems explained how the National Institutes Of Health (NIH) refused to discuss their neural implant research. As reported by Larry Lange, Electronic Engineering Times, February 10, 1997, Treading fine line between man and machine, researchers pursue silicon prostheses -- Chip implants: weird science with a noble purpose;
...NIH is mum
While Kovacs discussed the NIH's work openly, that federal agency isn't talking. EE Times was refused an interview with Terry Hambrecht, longtime head of the Neural Prosthesis program at the NIH, and a request for in-depth background material on NIH's work with neural implants was denied ... Much of the work taking place at the NIH, Stanford and elsewhere is built on research done in the 1950s, notably that of Yale physiologist Jose Delgado, who implanted electrodes in animal brains and attached them to a " stimoceiver" under the skull. This device transmitted radio signals through the electrodes in a technique called electronic stimulation of the brain, or ESB, and culminated in a now-legendary photograph, in the early 1960s, of Delgado controlling a live bull with an electronic monitor.
It's understandable, in a way, why NIH prefers not to broadcast its work on implants. Often, press reports about research of this nature set off an uproar-sometimes enough to intimidate researchers, rouse irate Congressmen, spark "Frankenstein" editorials and jeopardize funding.
Mad scientists? ... Stanford's Kovacs agrees: "Real scientists have not done a good job of explaining this complicated work to the lay population," he said, especially the research in brain implants, which may strike the general public as a little too close to The Manchurian Candidate.
What happens when scientists publicly discuss mind control? Law professor Alan W. Scheflin co-authored the 1978 book, The Mind Manipulators. On page 344, Scheflin wrote about Dr. Delgado, the Yale physiologist mentioned above;
Shortly after publishing his [Delgado's] proposals to make brain research a national priority, he lost his funding from the National Institutes of Health. He places the blame on the fear that ESB "could introduce the nightmare of mass control of man, overriding and overpowering individual self-determination." At the same time, Delgado came under considerable criticism at Yale and left the United States to become chairman of the medical school at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
Scheflin reported on page 339; "Much of Delgado's research support has come from the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Air Force. According to a report sponsored by the Air Force, interest in ESB by U.S. military authorities dates back at least to the Korean War, when it was seen as a potential threat to prisoners of war."
As the EE Times article and Scheflin's quote illustrate, most people don't realize mind control is an extremely controversial issue and many neuroscientists are involved in military and classified research. As a result, neuroscientists don't want to talk about mind control and the public is unable to determine how advanced mind control research really is.
The Victim's Position: A rare find; a prominent physicist's scientific theory for advanced mind control
The publication of mind control theories by scientists is rare, as reported in the EE Times article. The renown physicist Freeman Dyson, who has conducted classified research, described a general mind control scientific theory for decades into the future. Dyson commented; "After the organization of the central nervous system has been explored and understood, the way will be open to develop and use the technology of electromagnetic brain signals." Quote from International Herald Tribune, April 25, 1997, Book Review, Imagined Worlds, by Rudy Rucker.
Dyson described his mind control theory in 1997 book, Imagined Worlds;
...The chief barrier to progress in neurophysiology is the lack of observational tools. To understand in depth what is going on in the brain, we need tools that can fit inside or between the neurons and transmit reports of neural events to receivers outside. ...observing instruments...with rapid response, high band-width and high spacial resolution... There is no law of physics that declares that such an observational tool to be impossible.
We know that high-frequency electromagnetic signals can be propagated through brain tissue for distances of the order of centimeters. We know that microscopic generators and receivers of electromagnetic radiation are possible.
We know that modern digital data-handling technology is capable of recording and analyzing the signals emerging from millions of tiny transmitters simultaneously. All that is lacking in order to transform these possibilities into an effective observational tool is the neurological equivalent of integrated-circuit technology. We need a technology that allows us to build and deploy large arrays of small transmitters inside a living brain, just as integrated-circuit technology allows us to build large arrays of small transistors on a chip of silicon.
...Radioneurology is in principle only an extension of the existing technology of magnetic resonance imaging, which also used radio-frequency magnetic fields to observe neural structures. A rough estimate based on the available band-width indicates that a million transmitters could be monitored through each patch of brain surface with size equal to the radio wave-length.
Dyson's theory seems to contradict Garwin's statement, "...In my analyses of the effect of radiowaves on people, I have never found any significant effect other than heating of the tissues. ...So I don't think there is much in the threat of electromagnetic signals to control or disorient people by the effect on the human brain." Deciphering what expert is right about the sparce and complex mind control information available to the public will be a challenge.
Victim's Position: Supersecret CIA mind control research continues
One of the most influential U.S. scientists, Dr. Edwin Land, known for his highly successful but classified work on satellite cameras also conducted 1960s and 1970s CIA mind control research. Dr. Land was a presidential science advisor who served on many national security related boards and committees.
The CIA's infamous mind control programs and experiments were revealed in 1970s congressional hearings. Classified mind control research took place in over eighty institutions, such as UCLA, MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. A 1979 Washington Post article reported that classified mind control research continued under the direction of Dr. Land. Book Disputes CIA Chief on Mind-Control Efforts: Work went on Into 1970s, Author Says, January 29, 1979, Washington Post.
Despite assurances last year from Central Intelligence Director Stansfield Turner that the CIA's mind-control program was phased out over a decade ago, the intelligence agency has come up with new documents indicating that the work went on into the 1970s, according to a new book. John Marks, the author of the book, said the CIA mind-control researchers did apparently drop their much publicized MK-ULTRA drug-testing program. But they replaced it, according to Marks, with another supersecret behavioral-control project under the agency's Office of Research and Development.
The ORD program used a cover organization set up in the 1960s outside Boston headed by Dr. Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, who acted as a "figurehead," said Marks in his book. The project investigated such research as genetic engineering, development of new strains of bacteria, and mind control. The book identifies the Massachusetts proprietary organization headed by Land as the Scientific Engineering Institute. The CIA-funded institute was originally set up as a radar and technical research company in the 1950s and shifted over to mind-control experiments in the 1960s with the exception of a few scattered programs. According to Marks, however, the ORD program was a full-scale one and just as secret as the earlier MK-ULTRA project. ...
Clearly, the government position based on national security concerns is that mind control should remain one of the deepest secrets of the nation. This critical fact is not explored or mentioned in the Discover Magazine article or mainstream press. The public must sort through the mind control debate with unreliable information and without critical facts.
Victim's Position: The U.S. government is capable of widescale, long-term, inhumane treatment by trusted officials; compare to the Catholic church sex abuse scandal and the tobacco industry denial of addiction to tobacco and tobacco-related deaths.
This has been another convincing argument to most people for dismissing claims of advanced mind control. Since the 1960s, victims have consistently reported a pattern of symptoms including remote targeting and mind control weapons capable of reading thoughts, implanting thoughts, seeing through the victim's eyes, turning pain on and off like a faucet in any part of the body, manipulating dreams, memories and more.
On its face, it is hard to believe that the U.S. government could do such a cruel, horrific crime as mind control targeting on so many victims for so long and keep it secret. But two recent analogies clearly illustrate it is possible, even likely.
The 2002 scandal involving Catholic church priests sexually molesting young boys is analogous to mind control experiments and is a compelling case of how terrible acts can be kept secret for years by a great and trusted organization. Many top Catholic officials kept the sexual molestations secret for years. See December 31, 2002, Los Angeles Times, Molestation scandal Wrenched Church Hierarchy and Faithful.
The sexual molestations took place for decades, on a large scale and were called "the greatest scandal in the history of the American Catholic Church." The molestations were not known by the public because the policy of the Catholic church was to ignore the problem. Surrounded by the denials of Catholic officials, the charges were unbelievable, horrific and extremely difficult to prove. Finally, widespread media coverage forced the very reluctant church in Rome to address the scandal.
The disclosure of the tobacco industry's decades-long knowledge of the health risks of smoking and its addictive nature is also analogous to mind control experiments. Officials at the highest levels condoned and contributed to the tobacco deaths of smokers while at the same time, making billions of dollars for over half a century. In 1994, top officials lied under oath to Congress stating they didn't believe cigarettes were addictive or caused cancer. Tobacco company documents contradicted their testimony.
In the information age, inhumane, even horrific acts and the complicity of the many silent bystanders does occur. Mind control experiments could happen today.
These are the main points including rarely reported facts which represent the victim's position generally, on the government mind control debate. The victim's position does not include the government documents or solid evidence that most everyone requires before they are able to believe advanced mind control exists but is enough to warrant further investigation.
Deeper Issues Underlying the Government Mind Control Debate
Whether victim allegations are believable or not, mind control weapons are worth discussing further.
The main concern is the lack of the right to debate new weapons of mass destruction because they are classified until deployed. The atomic bomb was public information almost from the start. Nuclear protesters and the general public could express their views on the atomic bomb. International arms control treaties are in place.
Mind control and electromagnetic weapons have been heavily classified for over forty years and never publicly used. The classified electromagnetic weapons are completely lacking in any evaluation by human rights groups for international treaty compliance and lack any public input or scrutiny.
While scientists don't agree on whether advanced mind control weapons have been developed, no one disputes that advanced mind control weapons are likely to remain secret with little if any accountability to the public.
Below, Ronson, Arkin, and Garwin examine national security and mind control weapons for an informative and relevant debate.
Detailed Comments by Jon Ronson: A Repeating Pattern of New Classified Weapons and Dismissed Allegations
Jon Ronson presents a fresh look at mind control weapons in an entertaining yet disturbing nonfiction account. Here are excerpts from the New York Times review of Ronson's book, followed by excerpts from his book and Ronson's Cspan book talk in April, 2005. Finally, excerpts of a 1991 Guardian news article excerpts are included for comparison.
Excerpts from the New York Times, April 7, 2005, True Tales Odd Enough to Stop a Farm Animal's Heart;
At the start of the twisted treasure hunt that is The Men Who Stare at Goats, the journalist Jon Ronson appears to be looking for furtive, paranoid quacks who play mind games. He seems to have hit the mother lode.
...And Mr. Ronson addresses the more sinister aspect of out-of-the-box military thinking.
The Men Who Stare at Goats turns into a book that connects dots. It sees a common thread in the use of screamingly bad music to assault Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega in Panama and the use of similar tactics in the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. In these accounts, Mr. Ronson writes as much about schemes that were only contemplated as about the ones that actually made the cut.
For instance, he describes the effort to deploy a Moscow scientist who had previously sent subliminal messages to Red Army troops ("Do not get drunk before battle") in the Branch Davidian standoff. This scientist didn't work out because he was unwilling to transmit words spoken by Charlton Heston as a bogus voice of God.
Mr. Ronson, a filmmaker and journalist whose earlier book, Them: Adventures With Extremists, was also outstandingly artful and chilling, eventually follows his trail of bread crumbs to the realms that really matter. He finds a prologue in MK-ULTRA, the real C.I.A. "Manchurian Candidate" research of the 1950's, which involved the disastrous use of LSD as a potential truth serum.
He follows this line of thinking through and beyond the fruitcake innovations of the 1970's, concluding that Colonel Channon's theories "could be used to shatter people rather than heal them." "Those are the ideas that live on in the War on Terror," he adds.
Inevitably, this account extends to the tactics of American guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. And somehow Mr. Ronson is able to keep his book both light and nightmarish. ...
Excerpt From Ronson's Book, page 53
Colonel Alexander has been a special advisor to the Pentagon, the CIA, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and NATO. He is also one of Al Gore's oldest friends. He is not completely retired from the military. A week after I met him, he flew to Afghanistan for four months to act as a "special advisor." When I asked him who he was advising and on what, he wouldn't tell me."
On page 200, Ronson wrote; "Colonel Alexander has spent a lifetime in the world of plausible deniability and I think he's got to the stage where he just trots these things out." Page 201 continues with a question to Colonel Alexander about frequencies and psycho-correction devices and Alexander replies, "This is not something that has been brought up or addressed, and we have covered the waterfront of nonlethal technologies," he said. "We are not warping people's brains or monitoring people or da da da da da. It's just nonsense."
Ronson interviewed Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch regarding the loud music like Barney the purple dinosaur song used on prisoners of war in Iraq, page 144-5;
"I have small kids. I can understand being driven crazy by the Barney theme song. ...And I wonder what else is going on in those shipping containers while the music is being played! Perhaps the prisoners are being kicked around. Perhaps they're naked with a bag on their head. Perhaps they're chained and hanging upside down" But the journalists rarely, if ever included those possibilities in their stories. ...He [Kenneth Roth] didn't know what was going on. That, he said was the problem.
Excerpts of Cspan Video Clip of Ronson
April 14, 2005, Politics and Prose book store in Washington DC. Available from Cspan, Book TV at www.booktv.org. Videotape # 186334, about $36.00 See five minute video clip here:
...But what you see is all these nonlethal technologies. You see all these kind of nutty ideologies. All battling for supremacy like a kind of casserole of ideas-outside the church of Waco. And from the former detainees from Guantanamo Bay that I've interviewed it seems exactly the same things are going on there. I said to a man called Jamal al-Harith how do you feel, you know how did you feel at Guantanamo Bay and he said "I felt like a laboratory rat." And he said, "I felt they were trying stuff out on me."
And we know that the history of the army- in this room is Eric Olson whose father was victim to two of these think-tanky ideas- one known as MK-ULTRA, [with LSD used on unsuspecting victims] ...and another think-tanky program called Artichoke, [involving the injection of heroin]...
...And one example is with Barney the purple dinosaur. When it was announced a year ago that they were rounding up prisoners of war in Iraq and blasting them with Barney the purple dinosaur, it was treated as a funny story, because, by all the major news networks in America, you know... the torture wasn't that bad. ...It was disseminated as funny because who wants to replace a funny story with, as Eric [Olson] once said to me, with one that's not fun.
...I was given seven photographs of a detainee who had just been given the Barney treatment as they called it. It was 48 hours of Barney with flashing strobe lights inside a shipping container in the desert heat. I mean this was the funny story of the war. [Ronson reads from his book] OK, So this is the description with the photograph of the man who had just been given the Barney Treatment... But I can say this. In the last photograph he is screaming so hard it almost looks as if he is laughing.
...The current chief of staff of the Army is a man called General Pete Shoemaker. ...He's well known to have an interest in these paranormal esoteric military pursuits. ...So now is the time when I know that these ideas go to the very top [levels of the military].
...One of the things you spoke of, the one that I have knowledge of is the frequencies. You can follow a trail of patents like footprints in the snow and the patents sometimes vanish into the world of military classification. And there's many patents bought up by a man called Dr. Oliver Lowry. ... So we know that these patents have been bought up by the military. ...And the detainees of Guantanamo to whom I've spoken speak of being blasted with frequencies, put inside music, high and low frequencies, masked with music.
...I think there's no doubt they're experimenting with this stuff. To add to that controversial suggestion. I think there's a good chance that even though they're trying this stuff out, it's not necessarily true that it works. Alot of this stuff doesn't work. This may or may not work. I don't know.
Ronson explained "how history seemed to show that whenever there is a time of a great American crisis- the War on Terror, the trauma of Vietnam and its aftermath, the Cold War-its military intelligence is drawn to the idea of thought control." He explained Colonel John Alexander's ideas that over millennia, prisoners caught in a war that never ends were killed or put into slavery, which is not possible today. To Alexander the alternative is to change their minds. Do we want the Defense Department to be able to implement similar ideas without public input? Ronson's book offers proof that this may be happening.
A Brief Comparison of the Gulf War and Iraqi War
The 1991 Guardian article is included here to show that the events in Ronson's book are not new, but part of the continuing development of highly classified weapons that target the brain and nervous system and the repeating pattern of dismissing victim allegations as nut cases.
The London Guardian, February 2, 1991, War in the desert (Electronic Weapons)
Field of nightmares - Magnetic energy you can neither smell, nor see sounds like the basis for the ultimate weapon.
Simon North looks at the electronic armoury being developed that can disorientate, stun or kill, and leaves no hiding place. Is it sufficiently advanced to be used in the Gulf?
... Or will the Gulf War prompt the first use of anti-personnel electronic weapons? Their development, both in the US and the USSR, has been shrouded in secrecy.
Tyler [Captain Paul Tyler of the US Navy] proposed the EM systems could be used to "produce mild to severe physiological disruption or perceptual distortion or disorientation."
...The story now moves to England. In the spring of 1985, shortly after Cruise missiles had been deployed, the women protesters at Greenham Common began to notice unusual physical effects. The symptoms included headache, earache, nosebleed, nausea, vertigo, fatigue, changes in menstrual cycle, and emotional symptoms such as depression, confusion, and paranoia. The woman found that the acute symptoms occurred at particular times and specific locations around the camp.
These symptoms correspond to microwave poisoning, about which at the time the women knew nothing. One of the women, Kim Besley, connected the symptoms with the unpleasant effects of radar she had come across during the war. Over the years Besley and other women have documented the Greenham effects, and made contact with experts in the field, including Robert Becker.
Becker has written: "I have not examined any of these people, all I have done is determine their exposure, sequence of events and symptoms from telephone conversations or letters ...(These)people certainly fit well inside the electromagnetic field exposure syndrome as far as I have been able to characterize it."
He has told the Guardian that in his view there is a distinct possibility that anti-personnel devices may have been used against the Greenham Common protesters. "This is a more probable explanation than the alternative that these were hysterical responses."
There is little doubt that crowd control devices using Radio Frequency Radiation do exist. The development of such devices would complement Sonic and Infra-red weapons, which are well known, and were advertised in the British Defence Equipment Catalogue until 1983.
...In 1984 the Ministry of Defence ordered that all advertisements and references to "frequency weapons" be cut from the Defence Catalogue.
...One thing is certain, the war in the Middle East will accelerate the development of a new kind of weapon the world could do without.
The 1991 Guardian article described highly classified electromagnetic weapons in Russia and the U.S. Nuclear protesters claimed they were targeted with new weapons and for the most part, were dismissed as hysterical nut cases. The pattern of victim's claims of weapons targeting being dismissed and not investigated further is repeating in the Iraqi war, as reported in Ronson's book. In addition, Ronson discussed classified patents and claims of targeting with advanced frequency weapons which directly targeted the mind.
Detailed Comments by William M. Arkin: A vastly changing government secrecy system without public input. What happens to democracy?
William Arkin's 2005 book Code Names is a succinct and impressive account of the post 9-11 system of U.S. government secrecy. The New York Review of Books, May 26th, 2005 stated; "Arkin believes that the classification system has developed a momentum of its own, uncoupled from the legitimate demands of operational secrecy, and become a life support system for policies and activities-like the invasion of Iraq-which would not hold up under the light of public or congressional scrutiny."
Seymour Hersh, the well-known investigative reporter wrote; "William Arkin makes amateurs of all of us who think we know something about America's constantly expanding hidden world. Code Names is quite simply a stunning array of secrets and super-secrets that Arkin has put together in a way that makes it easy for any citizen to comprehend...."
In the mid 1990s, as a student majoring in government at California State University, Sacramento, I networked with William Arkin, then a Human Rights Watch Arms Project analyst. I sent Arkin several Russian newspaper articles on mind control and the proposed Russian legislation to ban Russian mind control weapons which became available as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Arkin reviewed the information and advised me to find government documents or solid scientific evidence before a group such as Human Rights Watch could take on the issue of mind control weapons and illegal government experiments.
Arkin's book excerpts and Democracy Now interview excerpts below provide a reliable explanation for how mind control weapons would be classified
Page 13;
As I have learned in compiling this directory, most genuine secrets ironically remain secret. Enormous segments of the activities of the military and Intelligence Community remain safely under wraps and represent an even more staggeringly complex secret world.
Page 14;
Yet Abu Ghraib is like every other national security surprise: We cannot know who the players are or what they are up to until after disaster strikes." [Arkin lists disasters including] "...domestic spying operations, illegal weapons developments, and human experimentation."
Arkin's book corroborates the 1991 Guardian article and Ronson's book. Page 13;
...Beyond the ridiculous, though, there is a rapidly growing army of secret "special mission units" that are beyond scrutiny and increasingly a law unto themselves. SAPs, moreover, include a fair share of weapons and capabilities that are secret only because they might be perceived as repugnant (high-powered microwaves or blinding lasers), illegal (domestic programs that obscure the lines restricting what the military and Intelligence Community can do inside the United States), or downright dangerous (capabilities being developed to go beyond nuclear weapons in cyber-warfare and directed-energy weaponry to nullify enemy weapons- perfectly logical on the one hand, but potentially destabilizing if Russia or some other nuclear power ever perceived that they were part of a "first strike" program).
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now 2005 Interview William Arkin
Thursday, January 27th, 2005. More information available at codenames.org. Complete interview at democracynow.org.
...We speak with military analyst, William Arkin, author of the new book Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World. ...I began by asking him why he published the book.
WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, I'm in a position as a journalist and a military expert to collect a lot of this information. I guess it has been a passion of mine to follow the secret and not-so-secret meanderings of the military over the years.
It seemed to me that there was an incredible explosion of secrecy after 9/11, and I guess I just felt compelled to do what it is that I was asking the government to do, which is to put it out there. I felt like if I had hoarded that information or kept it for my own use, then I would be no better than what I'm criticizing the government for doing.
And I also believe that, you know, there are secrets and there are secrets, and merely because the government stamps something classified or claims that it is secret doesn't make it so. And I wanted to challenge the trivial secrecy because it seemed to me that was also the area where we got into the most trouble.
Scandal follows secrecy like night follows day. And to me, I felt compelled, both as a citizen and then as an expert, to put as much out there as I could, so that people would be able to understand better the kind of world that we are building after 9/11.
...
WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, I have been doing this for a long time. I think one of the first jobs I had was working for a little non-profit in Washington, DC called the Center for Defense Information. This was in the early 1980's. And I was -- I worked on an article relating to where all the nuclear weapons were in Germany, US nuclear weapons. And I pieced it together by looking at telephone books and various military manuals. And I promptly was fired from my job. You know, big deal. In a way, I can't work somewhere that's not going to support the notion of openness.
As I say in the introduction to the book, you either believe in democracy or you don't. You believe in openness or you don't. There's no way I'm going to convince you of it if you don't believe in it.
So I have been doing this now for almost 30 years. I wrote a book in the 1980's that revealed where all the nuclear weapons were around the world. The Reagan administration was not very happy about it and came down on me pretty hard. And --
AMY GOODMAN: How?
WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, they threatened to throw me in jail. And it took many months of negotiations with the Reagan administration to convince them that I had not used any access to classified information in order to compile that book. That was the key that they would have used as the excuse to put me in jail. So it took many, many months to do that. It was quite a hairy time.
...
AMY GOODMAN: William Arkin, let's step back for a minute to the Pentagon's so-called "black budget." How much of it is secret? How much of it is there congressional overview?
WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, you know, when you look at a guide book of 3,000-plus code names, 600 of which have never been in the public domain before, which means they're not in the budget, they're not in newspaper articles, they've never been published, you know, one of the things that you got to conclude from that is: How can anybody in Congress monitor and oversee all of this activity? I mean, I've spent years on this and have a very tentative grasp upon all of these secrets.
So, I know that there is a statutory requirement for the Pentagon to report the existence of special access programs to the Congress on an annual basis. But most people would be surprised to know that that's done in the form of, literally, a report.
A list of names gets sent forward with a one or two-line description of what the program is, and there are literally a half dozen people within the entire U.S. Congress who have a high enough clearance to read that report.
So, when you're talking about hundreds of programs, and then you're talking about layers of different types of special access programs, I think we can all agree they don't get very effective oversight.
So, you have the double problem of the compartmentalization itself used as a way of avoiding oversight within the Defense Department and within the government.
Lawyers or others don't have access to all these programs; and then you have Congress which is only sort of perfunctorily made aware of the existence of these programs as well.
So, I would conclude, as we've watched again and again and again during the Abu Ghraib scandal or during the whole debate over the handling of prisoners in Guantanamo, that Congress is not effectively monitoring what's going on.
They have a tentative grasp upon the totality of U.S. military and intelligence activities around the world and one of the devices that's used to ensure that the Congress isn't able to monitor it is this alphabet soup of code names which is basically employed to keep it secret.
Arkin described the significant changes of a vast and Byzantine cold war government secrecy system in the post 9/11 world of secrecy. At a minimum, what is lacking today, are public commentaries and discussions on mind control weapons and their characteristics and dangers which go beyond the atomic bomb.
Arkin's book raises the likelihood of developing mind control weapons completely lacking in accountability and oversight. Arkin predicted future scandals as a result of this out-of-control massive secrecy system, including illegal weapons development and human experiments.
Detailed Comments by Richard L. Garwin: The Government Position on Mind Control Weapons
In January 2005, Richard L. Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus and co-author of the highly influential Council on Foreign Relations 1999 and 2004 nonlethal weapons reports kindly answered Email questions on the history of electromagnetic weapons and the possibility of mind control. For further information on this history, see www.mindjustice.org/2005update.htm#8. The CFR reports are available on the CFR website at http://www.cfr.org.
While Garwin is more forthcoming than most government officials, his email answer reflects the long-standing government position.
April 2005, Monday, January 24, 2005 12:13 PM Subject: 01/24/05 letter R.L. Garwin to C. Welsh.
...I have evaluated electromagnetic signals for the Defense Department a number of times. Nevertheless, there are always "compartments" to which even people with high-level security clearances do not have access. The "beam weapons" of the 1986 Gorbachev era included lasers, particle beams, and the others. In fact, people are quite durable against electromagnetic impulses.
It is true that the United States is fielding for test and evaluation in Iraq, some millimeter-wave weapons that are intended to provoke intense pain and aversion. The proponents claim that these weapons are harmless, despite the pain, and that the mm-wave source does not damage the eyes, either. I have not seen adequate data on this to make a judgment of my own.
Regarding the "Moscow signal," I certainly do not believe that at the level of that signal, there was any effect at all on people. It is very likely to have been a signal for gathering intelligence from the U.S. Embassy.
While it is true that very intense microwave pulses provided by close-in antenna can produce audible sounds directly in the brain, the Moscow signal was very far from the intensity required to produce such effects. In my analyses of the effect of radiowaves on people, I have never found any significant effect other than heating of the tissues.
...So I don't think there is much in the threat of electromagnetic signals to control or disorient people by the effect on the human brain. Indeed, such stories might serve as a cover for things that we are doing or for information that we don't want to acknowledge having about the other side.
...It is not something that keeps me up at night.
Again, the answer to the question of whether the public will ever find out about mind control weapons from government sources is plainly no.
Conclusions: An Informed Debate and Caveats
The books of Naylor, Ronson, and Arkin elevate government mind control from a conspiracy theory label to a serious debate of concern to all. Clarifying the government mind control debate, Naylor and Ronson warn of mind control weapons while Arkin explained the significance of the consequential changes of the post 9/11 government secrecy system- changes which threaten democracy. Garwin, representative of the government's position on mind control, made comments consistent with national security and conditionally denied the existence of advanced mind control weapons, allowing for highly classified programs unavailable even to Garwin for evaluation.
Government mind control is here to stay and is safely under wraps in a post 9/11 world of government secrecy. This seems to explain the extreme difficulty in finding unclassified information, let alone reliable information on the topic of advanced mind control research and national security.
The 2004 Discover Magazine reports neuroscientists believe there is no worry of advanced mind control because the research will take decades. But this ignores the government national security position that mind control weapons are one of the deepest secrets of the nation. Are the neuroscientists who commented for the article conducting classified research? Would the eminent neuroscientists who make the "advanced mind control is decades away" predictions inform the public of successful mind control research?
The physicist Freeman Dyson described one scientifically feasible mind control theory, although decades away which contradicted Garwin's government position on electromagnetic mind control weapons. Dr. Land, whose supersecret mind control work was funded by the U.S. is indicative of successful mind control weapons. No doubt, only further declassified government documents or solid evidence will resolve the debate.
For now, the victim's position provides a circumstantial case and challenges the "no advanced mind control weapons" never-varying government position. The pattern of claims of the same cluster of symptoms by the growing number of victims worldwide since the 1960s would seem to be a more reliable indication of how advanced government mind control weapons are.
Russia and the U.S. have classified mind control programs and are officially denying any advanced mind control weapons work. Experts agree mind control is the ultimate weapon and like the atomic bomb, all countries want to develop the weapons if they can.
Arkin wrote of the persisting evidence of national security's authoritative unrestricted position in the U.S. government today, a power that has trumped all U.S. laws. Arkin also warned, " [There are] ...capabilities being developed to go beyond nuclear weapons in cyber-warfare and directed-energy weaponry to nullify enemy weapons- perfectly logical on the one hand, but potentially destabilizing if Russia or some other nuclear power ever perceived that they were part of a "first strike" program." This national security argument and others will effectively keep mind control weapons classified.
Little meaningful public debate on advanced mind control weapons can take place in the current secrecy system. The public will be the last to find out about advanced mind control weapons, at least officially and yet have so much at stake.
The recurrence of illegal secret human experiments and weapons targeting provide harsh lessons for the victims. Declassified government documents were required to expose past national security human experiment scandals. Clearly, victims of current mind control experiments will have to work towards obtaining government documents and evidence of their claims before the government will address the issue seriously. Given the information presented here, it would seem an almost impossible task for victims to obtain the necessary government documents to prove their claims.
National security human experimentation law has remained the same in large part because national security interests are a powerful force in preventing Congress from passing laws on human subjects of experimentation for national security and also on the president, whose executive orders determine the rules for national security experimentation.
The public can now join the real debate underneath the conspiracy label, although it will not be easy. Conspiracy labels are only dismissed with solid evidence. But now an informed debate can provide the possibility for change. A very special thanks to Naylor, Ronson, Arkin, and Garwin for their books, report and comments. The courage of Ronson, Arkin, and especially Naylor on a personal level, to take the unpopular position against society's most powerful forces is a substantial contribution to the common good and public interests.
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