Cries From the Past: Torture's Ugly Echoes

from : http://www.truthout.org

Sunday 23 May 2010

by: H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Jeffrey Kaye, t r u t h o u t | Report

(Illustration: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t)

In a superb op-ed, written by Leonard S. Rubenstein and Stephen N. Xenakis, published recently in the New York Times (Doctors Without Morals, March 1, 2010, p. A23), the issue of holding physicians and psychologists accountable for their ethical breaches in participating in the conduct of torture is expertly raised, along with a well-needed call for investigations into such violations and violators. Rubenstein and Xenakis wrote: "[Despite overwhelming evidence] no agency - not the Pentagon, the CIA, state licensing boards or professional medical societies - has initiated any action to investigate, much less discipline, these individuals. They have ignored the gross and appalling violations by medical personnel. This is an unconscionable disservice to the thousands of ethical doctors and psychologists in the country's service. It is not too late to begin investigations. They should start now."

Rubenstein and Xenakis are absolutely correct in their call for action now, as they are in their accounting of what has gone on historically the past ten years with torture at Guantanamo and elsewhere. However, their op-ed says nothing about the decades preceding the terrible events of 9-11. An examination of these well-hidden, past torture activities might serve well in shedding light on the causes for reluctance and inaction in holding torturers and their professional cohorts responsible.

Operation Dormouse

Contemporary torture's earliest, deepest and most influential roots are found in the CIA's Artichoke Project. Indeed, it is Project Artichoke that encapsulates the CIA's real traveling road show of horrors and atrocities, not MK/ULTRA which, although responsible for its own acts of mindless cruelty, pales in comparison.

That MK/ULTRA received, and continues to receive, the lion's share of the media's attention and public outrage over CIA mind control programs was a deliberately planned outcome on the part of the Agency. This outcome was the central objective of a never before revealed covert operation launched in 1975 and informally code-named Dormouse.

Dormouse, operated out of the CIA's Security Research branch, had its genesis in the 1975 Rockefeller Commission report and in the subsequent Congressional hearings into CIA illegal activities chaired by Senators Frank Church and Teddy Kennedy. Following the initial revelation of Frank Olson's alleged "suicide" by the Rockefeller Commission, a number of high-level meetings occurred between President Gerald Ford's White House and CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston.

Houston, who had served the Agency as its doyen general counsel for over 25 years, secretly huddled on at least two occasions in June 1975 with Ford's chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his chief assistant, Richard Cheney. Houston impressed upon both men that any prolonged and intense media scrutiny of Project Artichoke would lead to opening a Pandora's box of legal, institutional, international and public relations problems that could destroy the CIA.

Houston explained that the Agency's MK/ULTRA program was far less problematic for the CIA because it had been a research-based program that initiated 153 contracts to colleges, universities and research institutions nationwide. These contractors, all stalwart and prestigious institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and Tulane Universities, could serve as viable buffers to any harsh outside attacks.

Houston stressed that deliberate exposure of the MK/ULTRA program by essentially offering it to the press would serve to placate the brewing feeding frenzy over so-called mind control projects, and would divert any investigative attempts into the multi-faceted Artichoke Project.

Houston additionally explained to Rumsfeld and Cheney that, along with the release of MK/ULTRA details to the media, the names of a few former CIA employees, such as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, would also be released to the press. Incredibly, when the subject of possible federal prosecutions of CIA officials for capital crimes and felonies, such as murder and drug trafficking, came up in their discussion, Houston informed Rumsfeld and Cheney that there was little cause for concern.

Explained the Agency's General Counsel, since early 1954, following the death of Army biochemist Frank Olson, a secret agreement between the CIA and the U.S. Department of Justice had been put in place whereby the violation of "criminal statutes" by CIA personnel would not result in Department of Justice prosecutions, if "highly classified and complex covert operations" were threatened with exposure. The agreement had been struck between Houston and Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers in February 1954, not long after Frank Olson's death, and still remained solidly in place.

Lastly, and worth noting here, was a brief adjunct discussion between Houston, Rumsfeld, and Cheney regarding related concerns about records on former Nazi scientists who had been secretly imported into the United States in the early Fifties by the State Department and Army, as part of Project Paperclip. These German scientists performed highly-classified research at the Army's Fort Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, some of which involved field operations in Europe.

Without doubt, as the extant record clearly reveals, the CIA's Dormouse Operation, as expressed by Houston, was remarkably effective. Information released on the Agency's MK/ULTRA program more than sated the media's curiosity for mind control details, and even a few random Artichoke Program citations in a couple released documents failed to draw any concerted examination by anyone in the press. For example: documents revealing that Dr. Frank Olson had been part of the CIA's ongoing "Artichoke Conference" were near completely overlooked. Within a few short months, Artichoke was widely believed by the media and public to be but a small, innocuous project that had been replaced by the MK/ULTRA behemoth. Still today, numerous publications state that Artichoke was absorbed and replaced by MK/ULTRA, when actually Artichoke operated independently for nearly 17 years beyond the dawn of MK/ULTRA.

What Was Project Artichoke?

The CIA initiated Project Artichoke in August 1951 at the direction of CIA director Walter Bedell Smith and the Agency's Scientific Intelligence Director, Dr. H. Marshall Chadwell. The code name "Artichoke" was selected with sardonic humor from the street appendage given to New York City gangster Ciro Terranova, who was referred to as "the Artichoke King."

Following a brief period of bureaucratic infighting over which CIA department would have jurisdiction over Artichoke, it was decided that the project would be overseen by the Agency's Security Research Staff, headed by Paul F. Gaynor, a former Army Brigadier General, who had extensive experience in wartime interrogations.

Gaynor was notorious among CIA officials for having his staff maintain a systematic file on every homosexual, and suspected homosexual, among the ranks of Federal employees, as well as those who worked and served on Washington's Capitol Hill. Gaynor's secret listing eventually grew to include the names of employees and elected officials at State government levels, and the siblings and relatives of those on Capitol Hill.

In early January 1953, State Department employee John C. Montgomery, who handled considerable classified material, hanged himself in his Georgetown townhouse after learning of his addition to Gaynor's list. In 1954, U.S. Senator Lester C. Hunt (D-WY) killed himself in his senate office after he was threatened by Republicans, using information provided by Gaynor's staff, to publicly expose his son's homosexuality. By the early 1960s, according to one former Agency employee, "It was pretty much routine to consult Gaynor's 'fag file' when conducting background or clearance checks on individuals."

Gaynor's veiled and more despicable activities also extended to racist matters, a fixation he seemed to share with many of the CIA's early leaders, as well as with some of the Pentagon's early ranking officials. According to one former CIA official, Gaynor was once informally cautioned by Allen Dulles concerning his overt support of former Congressman Hamilton Fish III, a strident Nazi sympathizer, and for associating, along with fellow CIA official Morse Allen, with John B. Trevor Jr., an ardent racist, anti-Semite, pro-Nazi, who called for amnesty for Nazi war criminals. Before the CIA was formed, Gaynor was also associated with Trevor's father, John B. Trevor Sr., a Harvard-educated attorney who worked with Army intelligence and who once strongly advocated arming a group of citizens with 6,000 rifles and machine guns to put down an anticipated Jewish uprising in Manhattan that only took shape in Trevor's twisted mind.

In 1997, former CIA Technical Services chief, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who had been born into a Jewish family, said, "Throughout the 1950s, and for some time beyond, the Agency was less than a welcoming place for Jews and racial minorities. Those who were actually ever hired or involved in operations learned rather quickly to keep their heads down when certain matters were discussed or rallied round."

Here it should be emphasized that inevitably lurking within, near, and around all of the CIA's early mind-control experiments was a strong element of racism that generally manifested itself through the Agency's principle objective of establishing control over the perceived "weaker" and "less intelligent" segments of society. That the CIA's initial mind control activities show a close kinship with many prominent characters within the racist and anti-immigration eugenics movement is no coincidence. Thus comprised was the central leadership of the CIA's Project Artichoke.

Here it is important to note that the Artichoke Project originated from the CIA's short-lived Project Bluebird, which operated for about two years, 1949 through summer 1951, and concentrated its efforts on former American POWs returned from the Korean War. These servicemen were placed in several Army hospitals, including Valley Forge Hospital, Pennsylvania and the Walter Reed facility in Washington, D.C. There the former POWs were subjected to various behavioral modification programs, including the use of experimental drugs, special interrogation methods, all for what the CIA deemed "offensive objectives." Joining the CIA in Project Bluebird was the Army, Navy, and Air Force (the FBI declined to participate in the project).

Reads one April 1951 Bluebird Project report: "The Navy's research efforts in regards to Bluebird objectives had actually begun in 1947 at Bethesda Naval Hospital. There, according to the Navy's Bluebird designees, J.H. Alberti and Lt. Cmdr. Hardenburg, extensive experiments had been conducted using both drugs and medical aids (polygraph machines, surgical means, hypnotism). Besides Bethesda hospital, the Office of Naval Research conducted a project in partnership with the University of Indiana which in essence [was] a search for valid indications of deception other than the mechanical indicators now being used."

CIA interest in exotic and abusive methods of detecting deception continues to the present day. In July 2003, the CIA, the Rand Corporation and the American Psychological Association conducted a series of workshops on detecting deception. One of these workshops considered the use of truth drugs ("pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior") and the use of sensory overloads. The workshop asked its classified participants, "How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?"

Perhaps one of the best examples of this was the treatment of "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla, who by the time he entered a U.S. courtroom had suffered tremendously, and irreversibly, from the abuses of deliberately induced sensory and systems overload.

In early summer of 1951, just weeks before Bluebird was renamed Artichoke, officials within the CIA's Security Office - working in tandem with cleared scientists from Camp Detrick's Special Operations Division, who in turn worked closely with a select group of scientists from a number of other Army installations, including Edgewood Arsenal - began a series of ultra-secret experiments with LSD, mescaline, peyote, and a synthesized substance, sometimes nicknamed "Smasher," which combined an "LSD-like drug with pharmaceutical amphetamines and other enhancers."

This substance was used in a number of highly classified field experiments, at least four of which were conducted outside the United States. While details of these experiments are sketchy, former Fort Detrick biochemists report, "None of the field experiments produced the type of results desired," and as a result, "ranking Army Chemical Corps officials elected to focus LSD and other drug experiments on more narrowly defined groups, as well as individuals." Chief among the field experiments that failed in the "desired results" category were the horrifying events that took place in Pont St. Esprit, France in 1951. There in a small, peaceful village one early summer morning nearly 700 people went stark raving mad with 4 people killing themselves. (This incident is detailed in my book, "A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments") This experimental focus remained in place when Project Artichoke was initiated.

At its inception, the Artichoke Project needed a steady supply of experimental subjects. Wrote CIA Security Research chief Paul Gaynor in a never before revealed February 1953 memo: "It is imperative that we move forward more aggressively on identifying and securing a reliable, ready group, or groups, of human research subjects for ongoing Artichoke experimentation. There can be no delays in this extremely important work."

Other CIA reports reveal that the CIA's Security Research Staff was not sitting idly by while awaiting the securing of ready groups of human subjects. Teams of Agency officials and contract physicians were traveling frequently to locations in Europe where, in the isolation of CIA safe houses, enhanced interrogations and behavior modification experiments were being conducted on various defectors, double-agents, and kidnapped foreign agents.

Reads a November 1956 Artichoke report that could have easily been written today at Guantanamo, Cuba: "The team physician administered a suppository containing a small amount of heroin to the subject so as to increase subject's pain threshold." The physician referred to in this report, a well-known Washington, D.C. psychologist, made over 90 Artichoke-related trips abroad.

In September 1953, Artichoke Project director Morse Allen, a former Naval intelligence officer and State Department employee, hand-carried a two-page memorandum to Paul Gaynor. The memo bears the subject: "Artichoke Research Program." It reads in part: "[T]here are some four thousand (4,000) American military men who are serving court martial sentences in the federal prisons at the present time. These men are scattered through the federal institutions according to their age - some being at reformatories, others at prisons. It is administratively possible that the sentences of these men can be reduced by direction of the Adjutant General's office. Therefore, if these men should be wanted for work on a dangerous research project, it might be possible to motivate their interest by promising that recommendations would be made to the Adjutant General's office to have their sentences appropriately reduced if they co-operated in the experimentation. Also many offenses of military men were committed in circumstances which might tend to lessen the feeling of guilt on the part of the individual and such cases might reveal interesting information."

Allen next suggested that federal prisons "that have hospital setups with doctors on the permanent staff" be used for experiments. Wrote Allen, "Such things as the size of the institution and current population would have to be considered but it is a fact that the federal prisons are not overcrowded as is the case with many state prisons, thus it would be much easier to obtain working space in a federal institution." Artichoke teams secretly working in the prisons could be passed off as "coming from nearby universities or research institutions," explained Allen. About a week later, Allen amended his September memo to include "federal hospitals and institutions under the control of the [U.S.] Public Health Service."

Wrote Allen, "There are a large number of USPHS-controlled facilities that can be used for experiments, these in addition to the facilities recommended in the earlier memorandum bearing the same subject."

Gaynor promptly approved Allen's recommendations, ordering their immediate implementation. Within a few weeks, progress reports concerning the conduct of experiments at three federal prisons, as well as a reformatory in Bordentown, New Jersey, were submitted to Gaynor. Experiments were also conducted at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., a Veterans Administration hospital in Detroit, Michigan, and at the Federal Narcotics Farm in Lexington, Kentucky. Experiments at the Narcotics Farm, somewhat romanticized in some current publications, were specifically targeted at African-American inmates, who were considered by the program's director to be inferior to white inmates at the facility.

When the newly created U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) was created just weeks later with Nelson A. Rockefeller as Under-Secretary, the CIA found it remarkably easy to gain HEW's approval for use of Federal medical facilities as fronts for covert drug and interrogation experiments using unwitting human subjects. Inevitably, nearly all those unwitting experimental subjects chosen for HEW-sponsored projects were African-Americans and persons from immigrant groups and what one Agency document referred to as the "lower classes."

A central Artichoke objective, according to one CIA document, centered on: "The problem exists of ascertaining whether effective and practical techniques exist, or could be developed, which could be utilized to render an individual subservient to an imposed will or control, thereby posing a potential threat to National Security." [Italics added]

The same document explained that the Agency also wanted to put the same techniques to their own effective uses in the field offensively. Reads the document: "We need to also explore the 'subtle' means of making an individual say or do things he would normally not consider through the use of covertly administered drugs, 'Black Psychiatry'*, hypnosis, and brain damaging processes. Dr. Chadwell feels these processes may be tried but they are 'elaborate, impractical and unnecessary.'"[Italics added. Dr. Chadwell was H. Marshall Chadwell, the CIA's director of Scientific Intelligence.]

A subsequent April 1954 Artichoke Conference meeting, attended by Frank Olson's Fort Detrick superior, Col. Vincent Ruwet, explored the real nitty-gritty of Artichoke experimentation. Noted a CIA report on the meeting, "It was also recognized [by conference participants] that if Morse Allen and his group could produce bodies and if certain very rough, primitive, and ultimate tests could be carried out then a more accurate prediction could be made in connection with the ultimate goal of the group which is the running of selected foreign nationals back into Europe for specific work for this Agency."

CIA Security Research chief Paul Gaynor, attending the same Artichoke Conference meeting, reminded the gathered Agency and Fort Detrick officials, "All individuals can be broken under mental and physical assaults and by such techniques as denying sleep, exhaustion, persuasion, starvation, pain, humiliation, and sickness."

Added Gaynor, "The capacity to endure assaults of all kinds varies in individuals. We need to teach the Artichoke techniques to medical officers in the field... we also need to combine these techniques with the work carried on at Edgewood Arsenal and at Camp Dietrich [sic] ...and the special use of ergots, as well as Lysergic Acid. Experiments with new ideas, for example the hypo-spray instrument (owned by the E.R. Squibb Company) using criminals and the criminally insane, have been very successful."

An italicized and revealing note at the end of the Artichoke meeting report reads: "Morse Allen and Paul Gaynor emphasized the fact that this type of work must not be overwhelmed and overburdened in a maze of statistics, technical reports and learned academic experimentation since previous experiences along these lines clearly indicate that when this appears the end results are almost always negative." Reportedly, much of these very same statements and thinking are contained in a number of the training manuals used today by CIA and Army interrogators.

Project Artichoke Operational Overseas

Beginning in January 1954, following a series of experimental field assignments, the CIA began to systematically dispatch special assignment Artichoke Teams from the U.S. to locations throughout Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines. Team assignments were given by special "EYES ONLY" cables with each assigned a tracking number. By 1961 the numbers had reached as high as 257 specific assignments. Nearly all of these assignments would fall under today's definition of "enhanced interrogations."

Through a number of Project Artichoke documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, we are able to obtain glimpses into those activities and techniques employed by the dispatched teams, which appear to have been at least a dozen in number.

A February 6, 1954 team report, delivered to CIA headquarters by "Diplomatic Courier," provides partial insight into one seemingly unique Artichoke field assignment in Europe. The report states: "These two subjects [foreign agents] are disposal problems, one because of his lack of ability to carry out a mission and the other because he cannot get along with the chief agent of the project. Both have extensive information concerning (other) assets and thus are security risks wherever they are disposed of. Anything that can be done in the Artichoke field to lessen the security risk will be helpful since the men must be disposed of even at maximum security risk. The urgency of consideration of this case is due to the fact that one of the men is already somewhat stir crazy and has tried to escape twice."

Another field report reads: "Subject was given a sedative suppository to increase his resistance to pain, this in order to intensify his ordeal midway through the planned session." Another reads in part: "This A [Artichoke] session involved four subjects all of whom present serious disposal problems after results are produced."

Domestic Artichoke Operations

In February 1954, with over 65 Artichoke Team visits to sites in Europe and the Far East having already occurred, Paul Gaynor decided to open a new Artichoke Project front. This front would be located within America's borders despite the fact that many people in the nation's capital believed that the CIA's founding charter forbade the organization from conducting domestic operations. In numerous ways, this new front gave initial shape and direction for the CIA's still-to-come "rendition" activities that we witness today.

Gaynor outlined this in a memo sent to the Agency's Technical Services Division, explaining that Artichoke officials were about to embark on creating "a mechanism within the United States which will be a ways and means of contacting alien citizens in the United States" whereby they could be "branded as alien threats and removed from the United States as 'undesirable aliens.'" The objective of establishing this mechanism was to facilitate "legal entree" for the contacted aliens so that they might, following careful "screening and testing," conduct covert missions in targeted foreign countries.

Gaynor's memo continued, stating the best technique for "contacting these people" was through the use of "sympathetic fake left-wing organizations" secretly established by the CIA. Remarkably, the memo went on stating the best process established by Artichoke officials for identifying those aliens to use involved "selection, screening, indoctrination and ultimately hypnosis." However, states the memo, "the sixty-four dollar question is can individuals be commanded under hypnosis to do things they would not otherwise do because of morals, training, ethics, etc."

Earlier, in March 1952, Security Research officials along with CIA Scientific Intelligence Branch researchers had made a concerted decision to pursue hypnotism toward the principle objective that, "Two hundred trained [CIA] operators, trained in the United States, could develop [and command] a unique, dangerous army of hypnotically controlled agents" who would carry out any instructions they were given without reservations. Several years later, CIA officials would describe the abilities of this "unique, dangerous army" as "mildly hair-raising."

Artichoke Evolves into Assassination Project

Perhaps it was inevitable that Project Artichoke would eventually develop an "executive action" or assassination component. The CIA had been seriously contemplating such a capacity since its founding. In 1952, one Artichoke official wrote: "Let's get into the technology of assassination, figure most effective ways to kill - like Empress Agrippina - do you want your people to be able to get out of the room? Do you want it traced?"

Other hard evidence of the CIA's leanings toward assassination as a feature of policy and operations is yet another memorandum by the Agency's Security Office and Artichoke official Morse Allen. Wrote Allen about Martin Luther King in 1965: "It is [redacted]'s belief that somehow or other Martin Luther King must be removed from the leadership of the Negro movement, and his removal must come from within and not from without. [Redacted] feels that somehow in the Negro movement, at the top, there must be a Negro leader who is 'clean' who could step into the vacuum and chaos if Martin Luther King were exposed or assassinated."

Rewriting History and Creating Disinformation

In recent years there has been a concerted effort on the part of some groups and writers to deliberately disown and downplay the horrors of Project Artichoke. Perhaps the finest recent example of this is an article written by Charles S. Viar of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Intelligence Studies, a private group. Viar's article entitled PANDORA'S BOX: MKULTRA and the Weaponization of the Human Psyche is posted on the center's web site.

Viar, who claims to have been a student of James Jesus Angleton in 1986 and 1987, and an expert on intelligence affairs, erroneously claims in his article that the Artichoke Project and its techniques had been "developed and successfully refined by the Soviets, Nazi, and Western intelligence services between 1920 and 1973." This rewriting of history appears as nothing short of an amazing effort to distort the truth; as is well established by the CIA's own records, the term Artichoke was never applied to any program or techniques prior to 1952, when the Agency first employed the project codename.

Viar also appears to buy into and promote the cover story invented by Cheney and Rumsfeld in 1975 that Project Artichoke was, in 1953, replaced by MK/ULTRA. Additionally, he buys into the "unwitting" dosing of Frank Olson as "part of an MKULTRA experiment," this despite that Olson was a member of the CIA's Artichoke Conference and never worked with MK/ULTRA projects. Viar then remarkably writes, "There is no evidence that either the CIA or the US military operationalized Artichoke," a statement that is shattered to pieces by the numerous Artichoke operational reports and records filed by both the CIA and army from 1954 through to at least 1970. If this is not enough, Viar then states that it was "the Soviets" who "shared Artichoke with their Arab allies," and then equates Project Artichoke to "suicide bombers" and "Al Qaeda." Lastly, Viar also writes that the CIA's delving into parapsychology matters is near completely overlooked by historians, despite the ample writings and exposure of the Agency's MK/ULTRA subprojects, which extensively dealt with ESP and other parapsychology matters.

Project Artichoke Today

With today's media reports concerning the CIA and Department of Defense black sites cropping up all over the world map, and with horrifying reports concerning alleged "suicides" at US-operated compounds holding "enemy combatants" that make Frank Olson's suicide-turned-murder case look like a stroll through atrocity park, readers should be ever mindful that the roots of the CIA's secret mind control and enhanced interrogation programs are firmly planted in the soil of Project Artichoke.

Over the past months, new secret black sites prisons have been discovered at Guantanamo Naval Base and at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan. The Guantanamo site has been linked to the deaths of three prisoners in 2006, while Bagram secret prison, said to be run by the Defense Intelligence Agency, has been the subject of investigations by the New York Times, Washington Post, and BBC, exposing widespread use of beatings, isolation, sleep deprivation, and other techniques derived from Appendix M of the 2006 Army Field Manual. This portion of the manual outlines abusive forms of interrogation reserved only for captives that supposedly don't warrant prisoner-of-war status.

Interest in the use of drugs and mind control techniques in military research and operations persists to the present day. A November 2006 instruction from the Secretary of the Navy (3900.39D) informs that the Undersecretary for the Navy would heretofore be the "Approval Authority for research involving: (a) Severe or unusual intrusions, either physical or psychological, on human subjects (such as consciousness-altering drugs or mind-control techniques)."**

A public presentation of the new policy at the Defense Department Training Day in Washington, D.C. on November 14, 2006, only 16 days after the new policy was released, deleted the parenthetical remarks on drugs and "mind control," but left intact the instruction two paragraphs later that the Undersecretary also be responsible for research of, "Potentially or inherently controversial topics (such as those likely to attract significant media coverage or that might invite challenge by interest groups.)"

Like a modern day Ministry of Truth, U.S. government agencies and their partners are busy trying to erase the evidence of their crimes, whether from sixty years ago, or six. Most recently, the American Psychological Association (APA) has changed the web pages that describe their 2003 workshop conducted with the CIA and the Rand Corporation on deception. One webpage has dropped the link to another page that described the workshops investigation of sensory overload and truth drugs. The descriptive page on workshops has been scrubbed entirely, and is only available through the use of web archives sites. Worth noting is that throughout the 1950s and 1960s the APA worked quite closely with both the CIA and Army on mind control projects, many of which completely crossed ethical lines, as well as the APA's Code of Ethics, into areas described by many observers as sheer madness.

Attempts to prevent judicial review of the rendition and torture programs are moreover an official position of President Obama's administration. On May 12, the administration filed a brief to the Supreme Court about whether to hear an appeal from Maher Arar in his lawsuit against former Attorney General Ashcroft and other Bush administration figures. Arar was kidnapped from New York's JFK Airport and rendered secretly to Syria, where he was tortured for almost a year. His suit was dismissed by a federal circuit appeals court. Now, President Obama's Acting Solicitor General, Neal Katyal, has pronounced the administration's position that further deliberations on Mr. Arar's suit are "unwarranted." The former Solicitor General, Elena Kagan, who was involved in U.S. decision-making on the case, is now a nominee for the Supreme Court.

Finally, the release last year of the CIA's 2004 Inspector General report on the "enhanced interrogation" program revealed an operation that with its use of doctors as control agents, its reliance on methods of psychological and physiological torture, and the experimental nature of the program, led Physicians for Human Rights to release a white paper that concluded that "possible human experimentation" was taking place, and emphasized the urgent need for a thorough investigation.

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*According to one former CIA official: "'Black Psychiatry' refers to psychiatric methods used by trained and licensed physicians on subjects. These methods may not be in the best interest of the subject's mental well-being and health." The same official remarked, "There was no shortage of or problems recruiting psychologists in the 1950s and 1960s who would willfully, and sometimes enthusiastically, practice 'Black Psychiatry.'" The various methods of 'Black Psychiatry' were provided in a training setting in the 1950s through to at least the 1970s at the CIA's Butler Health Center facility in Rhode Island, where many physicians, including Dr. Robert Hyde, worked for the Agency. The Butler Center also served as the CIA's central site for exposing its own officials and agents to the effects of LSD and other drugs.

** Recent reports concerning the CIA and Army have both organizations experimenting on a selected basis with a new mind altering drug whose effects are described as "incredibly mind altering yet at the same time allowing subjects to adhere to a sufficient sense of sanity thus allowing better opportunity for truth inducing techniques..." The drug, described by one former intelligence official as "ETX," is said to last for "about 48-hours."

H.P. Albarelli Jr. is the author of "A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments." He has written numerous newspaper and magazine articles on biological warfare and intelligence affairs. He can be contacted through his Web site: www.albarelli.net.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California, writes regularly on torture and other subjects for Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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The “New” Iraq

from :

JNOUBIYEH | 12:15 PM

By Ghali Hassan
Countercurrents.org

Seven years after the illegal invasion of Iraq by the Anglo-American fascist armies, it is clear today that the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Iraqi nation was premeditated and unprovoked act of naked aggression aimed at expanding U.S.-Israel Zionist power. These barbaric crimes ‘should never be forgotten and never be forgiven’.

“By violating international laws and conventions in 2003 in order to attack a defenceless nation for no reason [other than serving Israel’s Zionist-fascist ideology], George W. Bush [and Tony Blair were] reclaiming those most primal instincts that had led the Mongol barbarians Hulagu and Turko-Tamerlane to destroy Baghdad in 1258 and 1401 respectively. And by going back to the law of the jungle, Bush [and Blair] did not just destroy Baghdad and the whole of Iraq, but [they] also instigated a treacherous plan against the precious legal and institutional heritage that mankind has been laboriously building since the Treaty of Westphalia of October 24, 1648, generally considered the founding document of the nation-state and the first attempt at outlawing the right of might”, writes Tunisian journalist Hmida Ben Romdhane (La Presse de Tunisie, April 11, 2010). Unlike the destruction of Baghdad by the barbarian Mongols, the destruction of the Iraqi society by the West’s most recent militarised religio-fascist alliance of George Bush and Tony Blair is an act of terrorism that will live in infamy.

Unprovoked Aggression

There is no doubt that the barbaric attack on Baghdad in March 2003 will remain one of the most violent acts of terrorism in history of mankind. According to U.S. officials, “Shock and Awe” was aimed at terrorising the entire Iraqi population and intimidating Iraq’s neighbours, particularly Syria and Iran. After 13 years of genocidal sanctions, that deprived Iraqi children and the population as a whole of essential medical supplies and nutrition, Iraqis are virtually defenceless in the face of overwhelming violence.

It is estimated that the 13-year long U.S.-Britain imposed sanctions – coated with the United Nations despicable colour – caused the death of more than 2 million innocent Iraqi civilians, including the death of more than 600,000 infants under the age of 5 years. The sanctions were accurately described as the real weapons of mass destruction (WMD). According to John Mueller and Karl Mueller, the brutal and inhumane sanctions against the Iraqi people have caused far more deaths over time than the combined use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in the two world wars (Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999).

Unsatisfied by the enormous atrocity and resilience of the Iraqi people and their government, the U.S. and Britain concocted a pretext (WMD and link to terrorism) to justify an illegal act of aggression to occupy Iraq. After the pretext was exposed as a lie, the U.S. and U.S. accomplices concocted new pretext to justify the illegal aggression, the West “moral responsibility” and concern for the welfare of the Iraqi people. The so-called “Responsibility to Protect” or R2P – not applicable to the Palestinians – was the same concept used by the German Nazis to justify Nazi terror. The difference was that the Nazis were allegedly “protecting ethnic Germans” in Poland and Russia.

Not since the Fascist army of Adolf Hitler invaded and occupied parts of Europe has the world witnessed such barbaric violence and destruction as that being perpetrated by the Anglo-American fascist armies. For most Iraqis today, living under U.S. military Occupation is no less brutal than Poles or Russians were living under the brutal Nazi occupation that most Westerners considered barbaric.

Prior to the invasion, Iraq was subjected to a massive and vicious propaganda campaign. The country was portrayed as a pariah state by mainstream-Zionist media and their despicable journalists distorting facts and promoting aggression. Iraq’s late president Saddam Hussein was demonised and used as a moral compass to justify Anglo-American aggression and war crimes.

Western opportunists and America’s apologists who pretended to be “against” the Anglo-American aggression and hide behind the “No War for Oil” Zionist deception have long fallen in line. The so-called “liberal class” and “progressives” have often described the murderous Occupation as a “failure” and “incompetence”, praised the U.S.-staged fraudulent elections and attacked the legitimate Iraqi Resistance as “violent insurgency” and “bigoted Sunnis”. Their criticism of the Occupation and U.S. imperialism has always been an intellectual cowardice. If the U.S. failed to impose its Zionist-imperialist agenda on Iraq, credit must go to the Iraqi Resistance. It shatters the myth of invincibility of the ‘world only superpower’.

From time to time the “liberal class” and “progressives” criticise Barack Obama’s policies and calling him ‘worse than Bush’, as if Obama has the power to make changes to U.S. criminal policies. The motive is to manipulate the public and deflect attention away from the anti-Muslim Zionist ruling class that control the centres of power and finance in America. We all know that Obama has no real power to make changes. He is just another product, a tool, of the Zionist ruling class. Indeed, the Obama Administration is the most Zionist administration in U.S. history.

After seven years of hibernation, the “liberal class” and “progressives”, including Israel’s apologists are back to show their loyalty (backflipping), attacking Iran and condemning Iran’s alleged “rigged” elections. It is important to remember that Iran doesn’t pose threat to any nation, but Israel with its fascist ideology and an arsenal of nuclear weapon posed a threat not only to entire region but to the world. The same Zionist propaganda that led to the aggression against Iraq is being recycled.

The Zionists’ (the architects of the war) murderous strategy in Iraq was to destroy the fabric of the Iraqi society, and turn Iraq into a colonial dictatorship subservient to U.S.-Israel Zionist power. There was no “failure” or “incompetence” on the part of the U.S. government, as suggested by the loyal “opposition”. The destruction of Iraq was planned at least two years before the aggression in 2003. It was driven by the neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologues (in lay terms, Zion-fascists) with strong ties to Israel’s fascist regime. “They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a U.S. war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-U.S. puppet regime”, writes American sociologist James Petras.

As a result of the illegal invasion and seven years of murderous Occupation, an estimated 1.5 million defenceless Iraqi civilians, mostly women, children and young men, have been murdered, with the majority by the invading Anglo-American armies. It is the most premeditated and barbaric mass murder of innocent civilians in the history of human civilisation. The “new” Iraq is a nation of orphans and widows.

Furthermore, many American official and international organisation have quietly acknowledged that the destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage was deliberate and premeditated. It was designed to remove Iraq’s history as the birthplace of civilisation. Even Adolf Hitler never thought of committing such heinous crimes during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Priceless cultural artefacts may have been stolen by Nazi officials but never destroyed. In Iraq, Museums and galleries holding the history of world civilisation were trashed and looted. Libraries were ransacked and books were burned in masses. It was all performed under the watchful eyes of the invading armies. As James Petras noted: “[T]he destruction of the scientific, academic, cultural and legal foundations of an independent state means increasing reliance on the Western (and Chinese) multinational corporations and their technical infrastructure – facilitating imperial economic penetration and exploitation”.

In the “new” Iraq, Iraqis are living in a climate of fear and terror today. From the outset, the Occupation fomented violence in order to destroy the Iraqi society. Before the invasion, Iraqis lived side-by-side in every city and town regardless of ethno-religious backgrounds. They intermarriage and live in a cultural and mosaic society. To encourage anarchy and insecurity, the occupying army disbanded the Iraqi Army, police and security forces and replaced them with Kurdish warlords, political gangsters, imported death squads, and religious militias. “The ‘war of all against all’ served the interests of the U.S. Occupation forces”, writes James Petras. From the outset of the Occupation, the U.S. sought to control Iraq through violence and the colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ by handing out political positions to expatriates along strictly ethno-religious lines. The so-called “political process” was designed to achieve this division of Iraq.

By propping up corrupt criminals, religious fundamentalists and terrorists who were parachuted into Iraq by the invading armies, the American and to a lesser extent the British governments were able to hide behind a facade of corrupt expatriate stooges and blaming them for the Occupation-generated violence and crimes. Corruption is one of the most effective colonial tools, brought into Iraq to deflect attention away from the Occupation. Transparency International has ranked (the ‘new’) Iraq as the fourth most-corrupt nation in the world in its annual survey. Indeed, the creation of a corrupt and illegitimate puppet government inside the Occupation Headquarter (known as the ‘Green Zone’) aimed at transforming Iraq into a “failed state” that needs Western interference and “help”.

Expatriate stooges were appointed and encouraged to compete against each other for the title of Iraq’s “strongman”. The more violent and corrupt the “strongman” the more accepted by the U.S. administration. Hundreds of young men are disappearing every month (if not every week) into “secret” prisons, where they are routinely tortured, raped, humiliated and many of them later murdered. Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) were the first to blame the puppet government for crimes committed under the radar screen of the occupying forces while they remain silent when Iraqis are tortured, raped and massacred by U.S.-British invading armies. Both, AI and HRW reports on Iraq were consciously prepared to exonerate the occupying armies and depict Iraq as a “sovereign” nation marred by violence and violation of human right law.

Violence will continue to engulf Iraq’s major cities; just enough to justify the ongoing murderous Occupation, serves U.S.-Israel Zionist interests and diverts public attention away from the Occupation. Furthermore, to enforce colonial divisions and facilitate the liquidation of anti-Occupation Resistance leaders, the U.S. occupying army used Nazi-like methods to separate populations along ethno-religious lines by erecting walls around neighbourhoods in Baghdad and other cities. For example, the Capital Baghdad with its marked ghettoes and perpetual violence is a mirror image of Warsaw under Nazi occupation under wretched living conditions.

Deterioration of Living Conditions

Since 2003, living conditions in Iraq continue to deteriorate. Once a middle-class nation, Iraq has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution. In the “new” Iraq, nearly half the population live in extreme poverty. A report by the British charity organisation, Oxfam, shows that 43 percent of Iraqis lives in absolute poverty and some 8 to 10 million Iraqis need emergency aid. The country is still under the genocidal sanctions. The official unemployment rate is more than 50 percent of the Iraqi active population. The illegitimate puppet government’s own statistics revealed that 45 percent of Iraqis live in absolute poverty lacking the necessities to survive. Nearly 62 percent (15.8 million) of Iraqis ‘completely depend’ on the food rationing system to survive from month to month. The system was created by President Saddam Hussein to confront the genocidal sanctions and avert mass starvation. Despite the reduction in the number of food and non-food items by the illegitimate puppet government, many Iraqis still depend on the system to survive.

After seven years of murderous Occupation and deteriorating living conditions, Iraq is suffering the worst refugee crisis in history. “Iraq would be the world’s second-worst crisis, as the report points out, second only to Afghanistan, and ahead of Sudan. So the strain on Iraq’s neighbours, particularly Jordan and Syria, and to a lesser extent on Lebanon is immense”, said Jessica Mathews, President of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a U.S. propaganda think-tank known for its pro-Israel Zionist bias. At least 2.7 million Iraqis are internally displaced (by violence) and living in conditions of extreme poverty, enduring constant attacks and eviction from temporary shelters. An estimated 3 million able Iraqis have fled Iraq into exile in neighbouring countries. Only a small number of Iraqi refugees were allowed into those Western nations who pretend to have “liberated” Iraq. The majority of Iraqi refugees have found a safe haven in Syria and Jordan. Most of Iraqi refugees are in ‘legal limbo’, unable to work and with no hope of returning to their country. The primary causes for Iraqi refugees’ flight are violence, lack of access to water, sanitation, electricity, health care and education.

Targeting Iraq’s Education

Iraq’s education, once the best in the region, has been the target of the Occupation. Iraq’s education has been dismantled by the invading armies and their collaborators. The Iraqi curriculum has been changed to distort history and depicts the U.S. and Israel as democratic and civilised societies by covering up their war crimes, flagrant violations of international law human rights, violent ideology, corruption, growing inequalities, gross injustices and racist policies at home and abroad. It is estimated that only 30 percent of the 3.5 million students were attending schools. The majority of the dropouts are female. According to a report by UNESCO, school attendance prior to the Anglo-American aggression was nearly 100 percent. The crisis is exacerbated by the increase number of orphaned children. There are at least 5 million Iraqi orphans, many of them live on the streets.

Iraqi universities and colleges have been besieged by U.S.-created extremists and criminals. Tens of thousands of prominent Iraqis, including academics, doctors, teachers and political personalities have been murdered in cold blood in a U.S-Israel orchestrated assassination campaign dubbed “DeBa’athification”. Many had to leave Iraq for safety reasons, which contributed to brain drain.

The planned campaign was designed not only to kill Iraq as a nation by destroying Iraq’s human resources and independence, but also removing the base of the Iraqi Resistance to the Occupation. Professional Iraqis who survived the murderous campaign have left the country, leaving an education system in a state of collapse. Students are being graduated in masse without the necessary professional knowledge, especially those who work in the health care services. “There is really a huge difference between now and the times of Saddam Hussein, when medical graduates left college with competence to treat any patient”, said Professor Fua’ad Abdel-Razak of Baghdad university (IRIN, 16 May, 2007). Before the invasion, education and healthcare with modern health facilities were universal.

Deterioration of Iraq’s Healthcare

Iraq’s healthcare system has deteriorated at an alarming rate with a devastating impact on the health of the Iraqi people. The deterioration of the healthcare services has seen a marked increase in mortality. According to UNICEF, under the Occupation, Iraqi children are now dying faster than before invasion. One in four children under five years of age is chronically malnourished. One in eight Iraqi children die before the age of five, and millions of Iraqi children are affected by post traumatic disorder. “Healthcare in Iraq since 2003 is worse than during the sanctions. At that time we had little equipment and medicine, but in the last three years we have lost almost all the specialists”, said Dr Majeed al-Naomi in a Baghdad clinic. It is estimated that at least, 25 percent of Iraq's 18,000 physicians had left the country since the invasion in 2003 which is devastating the healthcare system.

Furthermore, Thousands of tons of white phosphorous shells, ‘depleted’ uranium (DU), napalm, cluster bombs, and neutron bombs were dropped on Iraqi population centres, including Baghdad Basrah and Fallujah. The Anglo-American armies used more than 1700 tons of DU during the 2003 invasion on top of more than 320 tons of DU used in 1991 attacks on Iraq. In the natural environment, these weapons-grade particles have extremely long half-lives and there is strong evidence of their detrimental effects on the health of the Iraqi people.

Iraqi officials are reporting incidences of cancer, deformed babies and other health problems have risen sharply since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Many suspect the causes are contamination from weapons used in years of Anglo-American criminal wars and unchecked pollution. In Fallujah, Iraqi children are suffering from brain damage, deformity and cancer. An Iraqi doctor said that the rate of deformity and cancer among children in Fallujah is extremely high when compared with the rate of cancer ad deformity of that in 2003. A spike in the number of births of stillborn, deformed and paralyzed babies there has alarmed doctors. Fallujah was the target of two massive assaults by the U.S. military. In Basra, Doctor Jawad al-Ali said: “We have seen new kinds of cancer that were not recorded in Iraq before the 2003 war, types of fibrous (soft tissue) cancer and bone cancer. These refer clearly to radiation as a cause.” In Basra, Leukaemia cases were up by 600 percent since 1990.

Access to clean water remains inadequate in many parts of the Iraq. According to the World Bank survey, 87.5 percent of the population have no adequate water supply, and 20 percent proper sewage disposal. In many parts of Iraq, including Baghdad and Basra, the water, soil and air are contaminated with radio-active particles caused by DU shells without adequate healthcare services the situation is rapidly worsening for the most vulnerable Iraqis, including women and children.

The Status of women

According to UNICEF, before the Anglo-American invasion, “Rarely do women in the Arab world enjoy as much power and support as they do in Iraq”. After seven years of U.S. Occupation, the status of Iraqi women has deteriorated beyond belief. The U.S.-imposed constitution has stripped Iraqi women of all the civil and basic rights that they enjoyed before the invasion and condemning them to statutory second-class citizens. Unemployment among Iraqi women is nearly 80 percent. A report by the Organisation for Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) released on the fourth anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion stated that: “women of Iraq have gradually lost most of their 20th century gains and privileges in the last 4 years of occupation”. You would think European Islamophobes who pretend to support Muslim women “liberation” in Europe would be concerned about Iraqi women’ rights under Occupation. Instead, they are engaged in a fascist campaign of anti-Muslim hatred to justify Western war on Muslims.

According to Professor Maha Sabria of Al-Nahrain University in Baghdad, "The status of women here is linked to the general situation. The violation of women's rights was part of the violation of the rights of all Iraqis. [...] At the same time women do not have freedom of movement because of the deteriorated security conditions and because of abductions of women and children by criminal gangs”. (Inter Press Service, 12 March 2010).

Furthermore, as a result of the U.S. Occupation and its violence, there are 2.5 million widows in Iraq, the highest in the world. According to the United Nations, in 2006, 90 to 100 women were widowed each day by the Occupation and its collaborators. Many of these widows do not know what happened to their spouses and most of them receive no assistance from the puppet government.

Throughout Iraq, women are living in fear of their lives and dignity. Kidnapping and rape are the common crimes under the Occupation. Over 10,000 women have suffered detention at the hands of U.S. forces and their Iraqi collaborators. The majority of detainees remain without charges. They are tortured and abused on regular basis. (See my: Iraq: A cluster of torture prisons, Online Journal, March 08, 2006). The situation for Iraqi women reflects the country’s situation under U.S. military Occupation.

Elections and Colonial Dictatorship

The recent U.S.-staged illegitimate elections were conducted in an atmosphere of terror and execution perpetrated by the Occupation forces and their collaborators. The final outcome of fraudulent elections was ensured. Like the 2005 elections, the 2010 elections were widely regarded, both in Iraq and outside Iraq, as rigged and fraudulent elections. The elections designed to legitimise the Occupation and validate a corrupt U.S.-imposed colonial dictatorship led by U.S. stooges. With a puppet government in place, the U.S. can claim that Iraq is sovereign and that U.S. Occupation of Iraq is legitimate (See my: Iraq's Fraudulent Elections, New Matilda, January 19, 2005; Iraq: A Colonial Dictatorship, Global Research, April 29, 2005).

Unlike Iran recent free elections that have been condemned as “rigged” by the Zionist media and Western opportunists, Iraq’s fraudulent elections – under murderous foreign military Occupation – were promoted and praised as “democratic”. While Iyad Allawi, the U.S.-created thug claimed “victory”, prolonged post-elections’ wrangling is the norm. He has called for the privatisation of Iraq's industries and Iraq’s oil and gas resources. Before he was parachuted into Iraq, Allawi was a Western-paid terrorist based in Europe. He still is a paid terrorist. In Iraq, Allawi and his associates were involved in terrorism, including the bombing buses used by schoolchildren. Whatever, there is no evidence that a puppet government will demand an end to the Occupation. Meanwhile, Nori al-Maliki, the Iranian quisling has not giving-up his chance to continue serving U.S. and Iran interests from his office in the ‘Green Zone’.

Meanwhile, Obama’s “commitment” to troops’ withdrawal by the end of 2011 is flawed. It is a propaganda designed to manipulate the public and promote the perception that Iraq is a free and sovereign nation. The Occupation continues, but it is “invisible occupation”, as Priya Satia of Stanford University rightly called it. “In reality, most of the ‘withdrawing’ forces are merely relocating to forward operating bases where they appear to be hunkering down for a long entr’acte [pause] offstage in expensive, built-to-last [military bases]” (Financial Times, July 01, 2009). “But Iraqis are too shrewd to fall for invisible occupation again: indeed they never fall for it the first time ... in 1932”, added Satia. Moreover, the so-called “Status of Forces Agreement” between the U.S. military and the puppet government is a fraud, because it was never ratified by the Iraqi people. It is a deal between an occupier and a puppet government.

American military bases are being built (against the wishes of the Iraqi people) to enforce a permanent colonial occupation and to serve U.S.-Israel Zionist interests. Since 1991, “the U.S. has not just been building bases to wage wars, but has been waging wars to leave behind the bases. The effect has been to create a new U.S. military sphere of influence wedged in the strategic region between the E.U., Russia and China. The Pentagon has not been building these sprawling, permanent bases just to hand them to client governments”, writes Professor Zoltan Grossman of Evergreen State College. There are nearly 300 U.S. military bases in Iraq; many of them are the size of small towns. American advisors (at least 1,400 CIA agents) will remain stationed in the largest embassy in the world in the centre of Baghdad as a symbol of U.S. imperialism. In addition, there are at least 100,000 mercenaries (‘private war contractors’) fanning violence throughout Iraq.

Finally, the impacts of the murderous Occupation on the lives of the Iraqi people are reflected in numerous Western polls that revealed a significant majority of Iraqis despise the presence of U.S. troops and mercenaries and want an end to the murderous Occupation. Hence, without armed resistance, it is unlikely the U.S. will end its illegal colonial Occupation of Iraq. The legitimate Iraqi Resistance to the Occupation will continue until Iraq is liberated.

The premeditated and deliberate destruction of Iraq in pursuit of U.S.-Israel Zionist expansion constitutes a war of aggression that resulted in genocide. The ultimate responsibility of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Anglo-American fascist armies in Iraq rests with those who deliberately planned and executed an act of unprovoked aggression. George Bush, Tony Blair and their accomplices are guilty of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Their crimes are reminiscent of the crimes committed by Nazi leaders. In civilised societies they would be hanged for their crimes.

The Iraqi people have the right to live in a sovereign nation free of repression, torture and terrorism; to enjoy justice and respect for human rights, and prosperity. The only condition to build a new Iraq for all Iraqis, proud of its history and Arab identity, is the liberation of the Iraqi people from U.S. colonial Occupation.

Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website..