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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Mind Your Tweets: The CIA Social Networking Surveillance System

from : http://secure.wikileaks.org

October 24, 2009

By Tom Burghardt (Global Research)[1]

That social networking sites and applications such as Facebook, Twitter and their competitors can facilitate communication and information sharing amongst diverse groups and individuals is by now a cliché.

It should come as no surprise then, that the secret state and the capitalist grifters whom they serve, have zeroed-in on the explosive growth of these technologies. One can be certain however, securocrats aren't tweeting their restaurant preferences or finalizing plans for after work drinks.

No, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic are busy as proverbial bees building a "total information" surveillance system, one that will, so they hope, provide police and security agencies with what they euphemistically call "actionable intelligence."

Build the Perfect Panopticon, Win Fabulous Prizes!

In this context, the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published a remarkable document October 4 by the INDECT Consortium, the Intelligence Information System Supporting Observation, Searching and Detection for Security of Citizens in Urban Environment.

Hardly a catchy acronym, but simply put INDECT is working to put a human face on the billions of emails, text messages, tweets and blog posts that transit cyberspace every day; perhaps your face.

According to Wikileaks, INDECT's "Work package 4" is designed "to comb web blogs, chat sites, news reports, and social-networking sites in order to build up automatic dossiers on individuals, organizations and their relationships." Ponder that phrase again: "automatic dossiers."

This isn't the first time that European academics have applied their "knowledge skill sets" to keep the public "safe"--from a meaningful exercise of free speech and the right to assemble, that is.

Last year The Guardian reported that Bath University researchers' Cityware project covertly tracked "tens of thousands of Britons" through the installation of Bluetooth scanners that capture "radio signals transmitted from devices such as mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras, and using the data to follow unwitting targets without their permission."

One privacy advocate, Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, told The Guardian: "This technology could well become the CCTV of the mobile industry. It would not take much adjustment to make this system a ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure over which we have no control."

Which of course, is precisely the point.

As researchers scramble for a windfall of cash from governments eager to fund these dubious projects, European police and security agencies aren't far behind their FBI and NSA colleagues in the spy game.

The online privacy advocates, Quintessenz, published a series of leaked documents in 2008 that described the network monitoring and data mining suites designed by Nokia Siemens, Ericsson and Verint.

The Nokia Siemens Intelligence Platform dubbed "intelligence in a box," integrate tasks generally done by separate security teams and pools the data from sources such as telephone or mobile calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions, insurance records and the like. Call it data mining on steroids.

Ironically enough however, Siemens, the giant German electronics firm was caught up in a global bribery scandal that cost the company some $1.6 billion in fines. Last year, The New York Times described "a web of secret bank accounts and shadowy consultants," and a culture of "entrenched corruption ... at a sprawling, sophisticated corporation that externally embraced the nostrums of a transparent global marketplace built on legitimate transactions."

According to the Times, "at Siemens, bribery was just a line item." Which just goes to show, powering the secret state means never having to say you're sorry!

Social Network Spying, a Growth Industry Fueled by Capitalist Grifters

The trend by security agencies and their corporate partners to spy on their citizens has accelerated greatly in the West since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This multi-billion industry in general, has been a boon for the largest American and European defense corporations. Among the top ten companies listed by Washington Technology in their annual ranking of the "Top 100" prime government contractors, all ten--from Lockheed Martin to Booz Allen Hamilton--earned a combined total of $68 billion in 2008 from defense and related homeland security work for the secret state.

And like Siemens, all ten corporations figure prominently on the Project on Government Oversight's Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD), which tracks "contract fraud, environmental, ethics, and labor violations." Talk about a rigged game!

Designing everything from nuclear missile components to eavesdropping equipment for various government agencies in the United States and abroad, including some of the most repressive regimes on the planet, these firms have moved into manufacturing the hardware and related computer software for social networking surveillance in a big way.

Wired revealed in April that the FBI is routinely monitoring cell phone calls and internet activity during criminal and counterterrorism investigations. The publication posted a series of internal documents that described the Wi-Fi and computer hacking capabilities of the Bureau's Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU).

New Scientist reported back in 2006 that the National Security Agency "is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks."

And just this week in an exclusive report published by the British high-tech publication, The Register, it was revealed that "the government has outsourced parts of its biggest ever mass surveillance project to the disaster-prone IT services giant formerly known as EDS."

That work is being conducted under the auspices of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British state's equivalent of America's National Security Agency.

Investigative journalist Chris Williams disclosed that the American computer giant HP, which purchased EDS for some $13.9 billion last year, is "designing and installing the massive computing resources that will be needed to analyse details of who contacts whom, when where and how."

Work at GCHQ in Cheltenham is being carried out under "a secret project called Mastering the Internet." In May, a Home Office document surfaced that "ostensibly sought views on whether ISPs should be forced to gather terabytes of data from their networks on the government's behalf."

The Register reported earlier this year that telecommunications behemoth Detica and U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin were providing GCHQ with data mining software "which searches bulk data, such as communications records, for patterns ... to identify suspects." (For further details see: Antifascist Calling, "Spying in the UK: GCHQ Awards Lockheed Martin £200m Contract, Promises to 'Master the Internet'," May 7, 2009)

It seems however, that INDECT researchers like their GCHQ/NSA kissin' cousins in Britain and the United States, are burrowing ever-deeper into the nuts-and-bolts of electronic social networking and may be on the verge of an Orwellian surveillance "breakthrough."

As New Scientist sagely predicted, the secret state most certainly plans to "harness advances in internet technology--specifically the forthcoming 'semantic web' championed by the web standards organisation W3C--to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals."

Profiling Internet Dissent

Pretty alarming, but the devil as they say is in the details and INDECT's release of their "Work package 4" file makes for a very interesting read. And with a title, "XML Data Corpus: Report on methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat," rest assured one must plow through much in the way of geeky gibberish and tech-speak to get to the heartless heart of the matter.

INDECT itself is a rather interesting amalgamation of spooks, cops and academics.

According to their web site, INDECT partners include: the University of Science and Technology, AGH, Poland; Gdansk University of Technology; InnoTech DATA GmbH & Co., Germany; IP Grenoble (Ensimag), France; MSWiA, the General Headquarters of Police, attached to the Ministry of the Interior, Poland; Moviquity, Spain; Products and Systems of Information Technology, PSI, Germany; the Police Service of Northern Ireland, PSNI, United Kingdom (hardly slouches when it comes to stitching-up Republicans and other leftist agitators!); Poznan University of Technology; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria; University of Wuppertal, Germany; University of York, Great Britain; Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia; X-Art Pro Division G.m.b.H, Austria; and finally, the Fachhochschule Technikum, also in Austria.

I don't know about you, but I find it rather ironic that the European Union, ostensible guardians of democracy and human rights, have turned for assistance in their surveillance projects to police and spy outfits from the former Soviet bloc, who after all know a thing or two when it comes to monitoring their citizens.

Right up front, York University's Suresh Manadhar, Ionnis Klapaftis and Shailesh Pandey, the principle authors of the INDECT report, make their intentions clear.

Since "security" as the authors argue, "is becoming a weak point of energy and communications infrastructures, commercial stores, conference centers, airports and sites with high person traffic in general," they aver that "access control and rapid response to potential dangers are properties that every security system for such environments should have."

Does INDECT propose building a just and prosperous global society, thus lessening the potential that terrorist killers or other miscreants will exploit a "target rich environment" that may prove deadly for innocent workers who, after all, were the principle victims of the 2004 and 2007 terrorist outrages in Madrid and London? Hardly.

As with their colleagues across the pond, INDECT is hunting for the ever-elusive technological quick-fix, a high-tech magic bullet. One, I might add, that will deliver neither safety nor security but rather, will constrict the democratic space where social justice movements flourish while furthering the reach of unaccountable security agencies.

The document "describes the first deliverable of the work package which gives an overview about the main methodology and description of the XML data corpus schema and describes the methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat, etc."

The first order of business "is the study and critical review of the annotation schemes employed so far for the development and evaluation of methods for entity resolution, co-reference resolution and entity attributes identification."

In other words, how do present technologic capabilities provide police, security agencies and capitalist grifters with the ability to identify who might be speaking to whom and for what purpose. INDECT proposes to introduce "a new annotation scheme that builds upon the strengths of the current-state-of-the-art," one that "should be extensible and modifiable to the requirements of the project."

Asserting that "an XML data corpus [can be] extracted from forums and social networks related to specific threats (e.g. hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.)," the authors claim they will provide "different entity types according to the requirements of the project. The grouping of all references to an entity together. The relationships between different entities" and finally, "the events in which entities participate."

Why stop there? Why not list the ubiquitous "other" areas of concern to INDECT's secret state partners? While "hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.," may be the ostensible purpose of their "entity attributes identification" project, surely INDECT is well aware that such schemes are just as easily applicable to local citizen groups, socialist and anarchist organizations, or to the innumerable environmental, human rights or consumer campaigners who challenge the dominant free market paradigm of their corporate sponsors.

The authors however, couldn't be bothered by the sinister applications that may be spawned by their research; indeed, they seem quite proud of it.

"The main achievements of this work" they aver, "allows the identification of several types of entities, groups the same references into one class, while at the same time allows the identification of relationships and events."

Indeed, the "inclusion of a multi-layered ontology ensures the consistency of the annotation" and will facilitate in the (near) future, "the use of inference mechanisms such as transitivity to allow the development of search engines that go beyond simple keyword search."

Quite an accomplishment! An enterprising security service or capitalist marketing specialist need only sift through veritable mountains of data available from commercial databases, or mobile calls, tweets, blog posts and internet searches to instantaneously identity "key agitators," to borrow the FBI's very 20th century description of political dissidents; individuals who could be detained or "neutralized" should sterner methods be required.

Indeed, a surveillance scheme such as the one INDECT is building could greatly facilitate--and simplify--the already formidable U.S. "Main Core" database that "reportedly collects and stores--without warrants or court orders--the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security," as investigative journalists Tim Shorrock and Christopher Ketchum revealed in two disturbing reports last year.

The scale of "datasets/annotation schemes" exploited by INDECT is truly breathtaking and include: "Automatic Content Extraction" gleaned from "a variety of sources, such as news, broadcast conversations" that identify "relations between entities, and the events in which these participate."

We next discover what is euphemistically called the "Knowledge Base Population (KBP)," an annotation scheme that "focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE), Location (LOC), Facility (FAC), Geographical/Social/Political (GPE), Vehicle (VEH) and Weapon (WEA)."

How is this accomplished? Why through an exploitation of open source materials of course!

INDECT researchers readily aver that "a snapshot of Wikipedia infoboxes is used as the original knowledge source. The document collection consists of newswire articles on the order of 1 million. The reference knowledge base includes hundreds of thousands of entities based on articles from an October 2008 dump of English Wikipedia. The annotation scheme in KBP focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE)."

For what purpose? Mum's the word as far as INDECT is concerned.

Nothing escapes this panoptic eye. Even popular culture and leisure activities fall under the glare of security agencies and their academic partners in the latest iteration of this truly monstrous privacy-killing scheme. Using the movie rental firm Netflix as a model, INDECT cites the firm's "100 million ratings from 480 thousand randomly-chosen, anonymous Netflix customers" as "well-suited" to the INDECT surveillance model.

In conclusion, EU surveillance architects propose a "new annotation & knowledge representation scheme" that "is extensible," one that "allows the addition of new entities, relations, and events, while at the same time avoids duplication and ensures integrity."

Deploying an ontological methodology that exploits currently available data from open source, driftnet surveillance of news, broadcasts, blog entries and search results, and linkages obtained through a perusal of mobile phone records, credit card purchases, medical records, travel itineraries, etc., INDECT claims that in the near future their research will allow "a search engine to go beyond simple keyword queries by exploiting the semantic information and relations within the ontology."

And once the scheme is perfected, "the use of expressive logics ... becomes an enabler for detecting entity relations on the web." Or transform it into an "always-on" spy you carry in your pocket or whenever you switch on your computer.

This is how our minders propose to keep us "safe."

CIA Gets In on the Fun

Not to be outdone, the CIA has entered the lucrative market of social networking surveillance in a big way.

In an exclusive published by Wired, we learn that the CIA's investment arm, In-Q-Tel, "want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates--even check out your book reviews on Amazon."

Investigative journalist Noah Shachtman reveals that In-Q-Tel "is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using "open source intelligence"--information that's publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day." Wired reported:

• Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what's being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. (Noah Shachtman, Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm that Monitors Blogs, Tweets," Wired, October 19, 2009)

Although In-Q-Tel spokesperson Donald Tighe told Wired that it wants Visible to monitor foreign social media and give American spooks an "early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally," Shachtman points out that "such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters."

According to Wired, the firm already keeps tabs on 2.0 web sites "for Dell, AT&T and Verizon." And as an added attraction, "Visible is tracking animal-right activists' online campaigns" against meat processing giant Hormel.

Shachtman reports that "Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field." And why wouldn't they, considering that the heimat security and even spookier black world of the U.S. "intelligence community," is a veritable cash-cow for enterprising corporations eager to do the state's bidding.

In 2008 Wired reports, Visible "teamed-up" with the Washington, DC-based consulting firm "Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others."

According to a blurb on the firm's web site they are in hot-pursuit of "social media engagement specialists" with Defense Department experience and "a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian." Wired reports that Concepts & Strategies "is also looking for an 'information system security engineer' who already has a 'Top Secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph' security clearance."

In such an environment, nothing escapes the secret state's lens. Shachtman reveals that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) "maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites."

In 2007, the Center's director, Doug Naquin, "told an audience of intelligence professionals" that "'we're looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence.... We have groups looking at what they call 'citizens media': people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there's social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs'."

But as Steven Aftergood, who maintains the Secrecy News web site for the Federation of American Scientists told Wired, "even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically 'open source'."

But as we have seen across the decades, from COINTELPRO to Operation CHAOS, and from Pentagon media manipulation during the run-up to the Iraq war through driftnet warrantless wiretapping of Americans' electronic communications, the secret state is a law unto itself, a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that thrives on duplicity, fear and cold, hard cash.

As published in Global Research. Thanks to Tom Burghardt and Global Research for covering this material. Copyright remains with the aforementioned.

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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Ex-IBM Employee reveals TV Abandoned Analog Band to Make Room for RFID Chips

from : dprogram.net

Posted by sakerfa on July 12, 2009

According to a former 31-year IBM employee, the highly-publicized, mandatory switch from analog to digital television is mainly being done to free up analog frequencies and make room for scanners used to read implantable RFID microchips and track people and products throughout the world.

So while the American people, especially those in Texas and other busy border states, have been inundated lately with news reports advising them to hurry and get their expensive passports, “enhanced driver’s licenses,” passport cards and other “chipped” or otherwise trackable identification devices that they are being forced to own, this digital television/RFID connection has been hidden, according to Patrick Redmond.

Redmond, a Canadian, held a variety of jobs at IBM before retiring, including working in the company’s Toronto lab from 1992 to 2007, then in sales support. He has given talks, written a book and produced a DVD on the aggressive, growing use of passive, semi-passive and active RFID chips (Radio Frequency Identification Devices) implanted in new clothing, in items such as Gillette Fusion blades, and in countless other products that become one’s personal belongings. These RFID chips, many of which are as small, or smaller, than the tip of a sharp pencil, also are embedded in all new U.S. passports, some medical cards, a growing number of credit and debit cards and so on. More than two billion of them were sold in 2007.

Whether active, semi-passive or passive, these “transponder chips,” as they’re sometimes called, can be accessed or activated with “readers” that can pick up the unique signal given off by each chip and glean information from it on the identity and whereabouts of the product or person, depending on design and circumstances, as Redmond explained in a little-publicized lecture in Canada last year. AFP just obtained a DVD of his talk.

Noted “Spychips” expert, author and radio host Katherine Albrecht told AMERICAN FREE PRESS that while she’s not totally sure whether there is a rock-solid RFID-DTV link, “The purpose of the switch [to digital] was to free up bandwidth. It’s a pretty wide band, so freeing that up creates a huge swath of frequencies.”

As is generally known, the active chips have an internal power source and antenna; these particular chips emit a constant signal. “This allows the tag to send signals back to the reader, so if I have a RFID chip on me and it has a battery, I can just send a signal to a reader wherever it is,” Redmond stated in the recent lecture, given to the Catholic patriot group known as the Pilgrims of Saint Michael, which also is known for advocating social credit, a dramatic monetary reform plan to end the practice of national governments bringing money into existence by borrowing it, with interest, from private central banks. The group’s publication The Michael Journal advocates having national governments create their own money interest-free. It also covers the RFID issue.

“The increased use of RFID chips is going to require the increased use of the UBF [UHF] spectrum,” Redmond said, hitting on his essential point that TV is going digital for a much different reason than the average person assumes, “They are going to stop using the [UHF] and VHF frequencies in 2009. Everything is going to go digital (in the U.S.). Canada is going to do the same thing.”

Explaining the unsettling crux of the matter, he continued: “The reason they are doing this is that the [UHF-VHF] analog frequencies are being used for the chips. They do not want to overload the chips with television signals, so the chips’ signals are going to be taking those [analog] frequencies. They plan to sell the frequencies to private companies and other groups who will use them to monitor the chips.”

Albrecht responded to that quote only by saying that it sounds plausible, since she knows some chips will indeed operate in the UHF-VHF ranges.

“Well over a million pets have been chipped,” Redmond said, adding that all 31,000 police officers in London have in some manner been chipped as well, much to the consternation of some who want that morning donut without being tracked. London also can link a RFID chip in a public transportation pass with the customer’s name. “Where is John Smith? Oh, he is on subway car 32,” Redmond said.

He added that chips for following automobile drivers – while the concept is being fought by several states in the U.S. which do not want nationalized, trackable driver’s licenses (Real ID ) – is apparently a slam dunk in Canada, where license plates have quietly been chipped. Such identification tags can contain work history, education, religion, ethnicity, reproductive history and much more.

Farm animals are increasingly being chipped; furthermore, “Some 800 hospitals in the U.S. are now chipping their patients; you can turn it down, but it’s available,” he said, adding: “Four hospitals in Puerto Rico have put them in the arms of Alzheimer’s patients, and it only costs about $200 per person.”

VeriChip, a major chip maker (the devices sometimes also are called Spychips) describes its product on its website: “About twice the length of a grain of rice, the device is typically implanted above the triceps area of an individual’s right arm. Once scanned at the proper frequency, the VeriChip responds with a unique 16 digit number which could be then linked with information about the user held on a database for identity verification, medical records access and other uses. The insertion procedure is performed under local anesthetic in a physician’s office and once inserted, is invisible to the naked eye. As an implanted device used for identification by a third party, it has generated controversy and debate.”

The circles will keep widening, Redmond predicts. Chipping children “to be able to protect them,” Redmond said, “is being promoted in the media.” After that, he believes it will come to: chip the military, chip welfare cheats, chip criminals, chip workers who are goofing off, chip pensioners – and then chip everyone else under whatever rationale is cited by government and highly-protected corporations that stand to make billions of dollars from this technology. Meanwhile, the concept is marketed by a corporate media that, far from being a watchdog of the surveillance state, is part of it, much like the media give free publicity to human vaccination programs without critical analysis on possible dangers and side effects of the vaccines.

“That’s the first time I have heard of it,” a Federal Communications Commission official claimed, when AFP asked him about the RFID-DTV issue on June 2. Preferring anonymity, he added: “I am not at all aware of that being a cause (of going to DTV).”

“Nigel Gilbert of the Royal Academy of Engineering said that by 2011 you should be able to go on Google and find out where someone is at anytime from chips on clothing, in cars, in cellphones and inside many people themselves,” Redmond also said.

To read Redmond’s full lecture, go to this online link:

Full Lecture – Click Here

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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Six Jewish Companies Own 96% of the World’s Media

from : pakalert (blog) (pakistan)

The power of lies, deceptions and disinformation as Americans pay the price of collective stupidity.

“You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can’t criticize Israel…”

Facts of Jewish Media Control

Electronic News & Entertainment Media

The largest media conglomerate today is Walt Disney Company, whose chairman and CEO, Michael Eisner, is a Jew. The Disney Empire, headed by a man described by one media analyst as a “control freak”, includes several television production companies (Walt Disney Television, Touchstone Television, Buena Vista Television), its own cable network with 14 million subscribers, and two video production companies. As for feature films, the Walt Disney Picture Group, headed by Joe Roth (also a Jew), includes Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, and Caravan Pictures. Disney also owns Miramax Films, run by the Weinstein brothers. When the Disney Company was run by the Gentile Disney family prior to its takeover by Eisner in 1984, it epitomized wholesome, family entertainment. While it still holds the rights to Snow White, under Eisner, the company has expanded into the production of graphic sex and violence. In addition, it has 225 affiliated stations in the United States and is part owner of several European TV companies. ABC’s cable subsidiary, ESPN, is headed by president and CEO Steven Bornstein, a Jew. This corporation also has a controlling share of Lifetime Television and the Arts & Entertainment Network cable companies. ABC Radio Network owns eleven AM and ten FM stations, again in major cities such as New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and has over 3,400 affiliates. Although primarily a telecommunications company, Capital Cities/ABC earned over $1 billion in publishing in 1994. It owns seven daily newspapers, Fairchild Publications, Chilton Publications, and the Diversified Publishing Group. Time Warner, Inc, is the second of the international media leviathans. The chairman of the board and CEO, Gerald Levin, is a Jew. Time Warner’s subsidiary HBO is the country’s largest pay-TV cable network. Warner Music is by far the world’s largest record company, with 50 labels, the biggest of which is Warner Brothers Records, headed by Danny Goldberg. Stuart Hersch is president of Warnervision, Warner Music’s video production unit. Goldberg and Hersch are Jews. Warner Music was an early promoter of “gangsta rap.” Through its involvement with Interscope Records, it helped popularize a genre whose graphic lyrics explicitly urge Blacks to commit acts of violence against Whites. In addition to cable and music, Time Warner is heavily involved in the production of feature films (Warner Brothers Studio) and publishing. Time Warner’s publishing division (editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine, a Jew) is the largest magazine publisher in the country (Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune). When Ted Turner, a Gentile, made a bid to buy CBS in 1985, there was panic in media boardrooms across the nation. Turner made a fortune in advertising and then had built a successful cable-TV news network, CNN. Although Turner employed a number of Jews in key executive positions in CNN and had never taken public positions contrary to Jewish interests, he is a man with a large ego and a strong personality and was regarded by Chairman William Paley (real name Palinsky, a Jew) and the other Jews at CBS as uncontrollable: a loose cannon who might at some time in the future turn against them. Furthermore, Jewish newsman Daniel Schorr, who had worked for Turner, publicly charged that his former boss held a personal dislike for Jews. To block Turner’s bid, CBS executives invited billionaire Jewish theater, hotel, insurance, and cigarette magnate Laurence Tisch to launch a “friendly” takeover of the company, and from 1986 till 1995 Tisch was the chairman and CEO of CBS, removing any threat of non-Jewish influence there. Subsequent efforts by Turner to acquire a major network have been obstructed by Levin’s Time Warner, which owns nearly 20 percent of CBS stock and has veto power over major deals. Viacom, Inc, headed by Sumner Redstone (born Murray Rothstein), a Jew, is the third largest megamedia corporation in the country, with revenues of over $10 billion a year. Viacom, which produces and distributes TV programs for the three largest networks, owns 12 television stations and 12 radio stations. It produces feature films through Paramount Pictures, headed by Jewess Sherry Lansing. Its publishing division includes Prentice Hall, Simon & Schuster, and Pocket Books. It distributes videos through over 4,000 Blockbuster stores. Viacom’s chief claim to fame, however, is as the world’s largest provider of cable programming, through its Showtime, MTV, Nickelodeon, and other networks. Since 1989, MTV and Nickelodeon have acquired larger and larger shares of the younger television audience. With the top three, and by far the largest, media companies in the hand of Jews, it is difficult to believe that such an overwhelming degree of control came about without a deliberate, concerted effort on their part. What about the other big media companies? Number four on the list is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox Television and 20th Century Fox Films. Murdoch is a Gentile, but Peter Chermin, who heads Murdoch’s film studio and also oversees his TV production, is a Jew. Number five is the Japanese Sony Corporation, whose U.S. subsidiary, Sony Corporation of America, is run by Michael Schulhof, a Jew. Alan Levine, another Jew, heads the Sony Pictures division. Most of the television and movie production companies that are not owned by the largest corporations are also controlled by Jews. For example, New World Entertainment, proclaimed by one media analyst as “the premiere independent TV program producer in the United States,” is owned by Ronald Perelman, a Jew. The best known of the smaller media companies, Dreamworks SKG, is a strictly kosher affair. Dream Works was formed in 1994 amid great media hype by recording industry mogul David Geffen, former Disney Pictures chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, and film director Steven Spielberg, all three of whom are Jews. The company produces movies, animated films, television programs, and recorded music. Two other large production companies, MCA and Universal Pictures, are both owned by Seagram Company, Ltd. The president and CEO of Seagram, the liquor giant, is Edgar Bronfman Jr., who is also president of the World Jewish Congress. It is well known that Jews have controlled the production and distribution of films since the inception of the movie industry in the early decades of the 20th century. This is still the case today. Films produced by just the five largest motion picture companies mentioned above-Disney, Warner Brothers, Sony, Paramount (Viacom), and Universal (Seagram)-accounted for 74 per cent of the total box-office receipts for the first eight months of 1995. The big three in television network broadcasting used to be ABC, CBS, and NBC. With the consolidation of the media empires, these three are no longer independent entities. While they were independent, however, each was controlled by a Jew since its inception: ABC by Leonard Goldenson, CBS first by William Paley and then by Lawrence Tisch, and NBC first by David Sarnoff and then by his son Robert. Over periods of several decades, these networks were staffed from top to bottom with Jews, and the essential Jewishness of network television did not change when the networks were absorbed by other corporations. The Jewish presence in television news remains particularly strong. As noted, ABC is part of Eisner’s Disney Company, and the executive producers of ABC’s news programs are all Jews: Victor Neufeld (20-20), Bob Reichbloom (Good Morning America), and Rick Kaplan (World News Tonight). CBS was recently purchased by Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Nevertheless, the man appointed by Lawrence Tisch, Eric Ober, remains president of CBS News, and Ober is a Jew. At NBC, now owned by General Electric, NBC News president Andrew Lack is a Jew, as are executive producers Jeff Zucker (Today), Jeff Gralnick (NBC Nightly News), and Neal Shapiro (Dateline). The Print Media After television news, daily newspapers are the most influential information medium in America. Sixty million of them are sold (and presumably read) each day. These millions are divided among some 1,500 different publications. One might conclude that the sheer number of different newspapers across America would provide a safeguard against Jewish control and distortion. However, this is not the case. There is less independence, less competition, and much less representation of our interests than a casual observer would think. The days when most cities and even towns had several independently owned newspapers published by local people with close ties to the community are gone. Today, most “local” newspapers are owned by a rather small number of large companies controlled by executives who live and work hundreds or ever thousands of miles away. The fact is that only about 25 per cent of the country’s 1,500 papers are independently owned; the rest belong to multi-newspaper chains. Only a handful are large enough to maintain independent reporting staffs outside their own communities; the rest depend on these few for all of their national and international news. The Newhouse empire of Jewish brothers Samuel and Donald Newhouse provides an example of more than the lack of real competition among America’s daily newspapers: it also illustrates the insatiable appetite Jews have shown for all the organs of opinion control on which they could fasten their grip. The Newhouses own 26 daily newspapers, including several large and important ones, such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Newark Star-Ledger, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune; the nation’s largest trade book publishing conglomerate, Random House, with all its subsidiaries; Newhouse Broadcasting, consisting of 12 television broadcasting stations and 87 cable-TV systems, including some of the country’s largest cable networks; the Sunday supplement Parade, with a circulation of more than 22 million copies per week; some two dozen major magazines, including the New Yorker, Vogue, Madmoiselle, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Bride’s, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Self, House & Garden, and all the other magazines of the wholly owned Conde Nast group. This Jewish media empire was founded by the late Samuel Newhouse, an immigrant from Russia. The gobbling up of so many newspapers by the Newhouse family was in large degree made possible by the fact that newspapers are not supported by their subscribers, but by their advertisers. It is advertising revenue–not the small change collected from a newspaper’s readers–that largely pays the editor’s salary and yields the owner’s profit. Whenever the large advertisers in a city choose to favor one newspaper over another with their business, the favored newspaper will flourish while its competitor dies. Since the beginning of the 20th century, when Jewish mercantile power in America became a dominant economic force, there has been a steady rise in the number of American newspapers in Jewish hands, accompanied by a steady decline in the number of competing Gentile newspapers–primarily as a result of selective advertising policies by Jewish merchants. Furthermore, even those newspapers still under Gentile ownership and management are so thoroughly dependent upon Jewish advertising revenue that their editorial and news reporting policies are largely constrained by Jewish likes and dislikes. It holds true in the newspaper business as elsewhere that he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Three Jewish Newspapers

The suppression of competition and the establishment of local monopolies on the dissemination of news and opinion have characterized the rise of Jewish control over America’s newspapers. The resulting ability of the Jews to use the press as an unopposed instrument of Jewish policy could hardly be better illustrated than by the examples of the nation’s three most prestigious and influential newspapers: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. These three, dominating America’s financial and political capitals, are the newspapers which set the trends and the guidelines for nearly all the others. They are the ones which decide what is news and what isn’t, at the national and international levels. They originate the news; the others merely copy it, and all three newspapers are in Jewish hands. The New York Times was founded in 1851 by two Gentiles, Henry Raymond and George Jones. After their deaths, it was purchased in 1896 from Jones’s estate by a wealthy Jewish publisher, Adolph Ochs. His great-grandson, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., is the paper’s current publisher and CEO. The executive editor is Max Frankel, and the managing editor is Joseph Lelyveld. Both of the latter are also Jews. The Sulzberger family also owns, through the New York Times Co., 33 other newspapers, including the Boston Globe; twelve magazines, including McCall’s and Family Circle with circulations of more than 5 million each; seven radio and TV broadcasting stations; a cable-TV system; and three book publishing companies. The New York Times News Service transmits news stories, features, and photographs from the New York Times by wire to 506 other newspapers, news agencies, and magazines. Of similar national importance is the Washington Post, which, by establishing its “leaks” throughout government agencies in Washington, has an inside track on news involving the Federal government. The Washington Post, like the New York Times, had a non-Jewish origin. It was established in 1877 by Stilson Hutchins, purchased from him in 1905 by John McLean, and later inherited by Edward McLean. In June 1933, however, at the height of the Great Depression, the newspaper was forced into bankruptcy. It was purchased at a bankruptcy auction by Eugene Meyer, a Jewish financier. The Washington Post is now run by Katherine Meyer Graham, Eugene Meyer’s daughter. She is the principal stockholder and the board chairman of the Washington Post Co. In 1979, she appointed her son Donald publisher of the paper. He now also holds the posts of president and CEO of the Washington Post Co. The Washington Post Co. has a number of other media holdings in newspapers, television, and magazines, most notably the nation’s number-two weekly newsmagazine, Newsweek. The Wall Street Journal, which sells 1.8 million copies each weekday, is the nation’s largest-circulation daily newspaper. It is owned by Dow Jones & Company, Inc., a New York corporation which also publishes 24 other daily newspapers and the weekly financial tabloid Barron’s, among other things. The chairman and CEO of Dow Jones is Peter Kann, who is a Jew. Kann also holds the posts of chairman and publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Most of New York’s other major newspapers are in no better hands than the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The New York Daily News is owned by Jewish real-estate developer Mortimer B. Zuckerman. The Village Voice is the personal property of Leonard Stern, the billionaire Jewish owner of the Hartz Mountain pet supply firm.

Other Mass Media

The story is pretty much the same for other media as it is for television, radio, and newspapers. Consider, for example, newsmagazines. There are only three of any note published in the United States: Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. Time, with a weekly circulation of 4.1 million, is published by a susidiary of Time Warner Communications. The CEO of Time Warner Communications, as mentioned above, is Gerald Levin, a Jew. Newsweek, as mentioned above, is published by the Washington Post Company, under the Jewess Katherine Meyer Graham. Its weekly circulation is 3.2 million. U.S. News & World Report, with a weekly circulation of 2.3 million, is owned and published by Mortimer Zuckerman, a Jew. Zuckerman also owns the Atlantic Monthly and New York’s tabloid newspaper, the Daily News, which is the sixth-largest paper in the country. Among the giant book-publishing conglomerates, the situation is also Jewish. Three of the six largest book publishers in the U.S., according to Publisher’s Weekly, are owned or controlled by Jews. The three are first-place Random House (with its many subsidiaries, including Crown Publishing Group), third-place Simon & Schuster, and sixth-place Time Warner Trade Group (including Warner Books and Little, Brown). Another publisher of special significance is Western Publishing. Although it ranks only 13th in size among all U.S. publishers, it ranks first among publishers of children’s books, with more than 50 percent of the market. Its chairman and CEO is Richard Snyder, a Jew, who just replaced Richard Bernstein, also a Jew.

The Effect of Jewish Control of the Media

These are the facts of Jewish media control in America. Anyone willing to spend several hours in a large library can verify their accuracy. I hope that these facts are disturbing to you, to say the least. Should any minority be allowed to wield such awesome power? Certainly, not and allowing a people with beliefs such as expressed in the Talmud, to determine what we get to read or watch in effect gives this small minority the power to mold our minds to suit their own Talmudic interests, interests which as we have demonstrated are diametrically opposed to the interests of our people. By permitting the Jews to control our news and entertainment media, we are doing more than merely giving them a decisive influence on our political system and virtual control of our government; we also are giving them control of the minds and souls of our children, whose attitudes and ideas are shaped more by Jewish television and Jewish films than by their parents, their schools, or any other influence.

Additional Research:

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