Mind control experimentation at Camp No, Guantanamo

MIND CONTROL EXPERIMENTATION AT CAMP NO, GUANTANAMO

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

January 15, 2015

 

                Today’s democracynow.org broadcast contains an interview with the authors of a book and accompanying report that is, in effect, an inquest into the deaths of three prisoners at Guantanamo in 2007 (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/15/did_gitmo_suicides_cover_up_murder ).  The prisoners died at an off-the-books place the guards called Camp No, as in “No, it doesn’t exist,” where psychosis-inducing drugs, charted as anti-malarial drugs, were used.  The Navy’s position that the 3 went through an elaborate to hang themselves in their dispersed cells is an obvious fabrication.

                This report is reminiscent of OSS/CIA-sponsored mind-control experiments and employment, whose latest officially acknowledged program, MK-Ultra, was ostensibly shut down in the early seventies (for an entrée into this history and its aftermath, see for instance https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/eas-studies/torture-based-mind-control-as-a-global-phenomenon/ ).  Josef Mengele, the experimenter from Auschwitz, was among those brought to the US by the CIA to conduct experiments on controlling and creating memories, of creating the very kind of programming that survivors, including many from Canada and the US who presented their stories to my classes for fifteen years, taught me.  Some of them, like deJoly LaBrier, had been military brats.  Others, like Carol Rutz, were noticed in intergenerational sadistic rituals to compartmentalize experience, to split into alters, into parts, into multiple personalities, into dissociated identities—the phenomenon is known by many names, and became experimental subjects in memory destruction and creation, in a phrase, mind control.  No torture or other inducement could force anyone to recall, let alone, a compartmentalized memory, until someone knew the “trigger” to call that identity out.  No one could torture or otherwise get to the “secrets” that that identity carried.  It was deJoly and Carol’s lot, among others, to have been born to fathers who were intergenerational carriers, rituals that included cannibalistic sacrifice, snuff films, and sex, drugs and human trafficking, and political blackmail and control.  First by their fathers, then by people they came to understand were CIA, later NSA linked, they were “chosen” because among their siblings, they had demonstrated their ability to live their “day” lives oblivious to the “night” horrors in which they were forced to participate.  Some were trained to carry information, many to traffic in sex either to gather information, or to compromise people, or in cases like Kathleen Sullivan’s, to be a “Manchurian Candidate,” a secretly controlled, secret agent.  So when I heard this morning about Camp No, I thought, it hasn’t ended.  It has its roots in the forms of homicide I came to know so well, from so many sources, of the abundance of ritual homicide and depth of what in the military came to be knowns as PsyOps, psychological operations, as was reported at the military facility at the Presidio commanded by Col. Michael Aquino.

                It feels long ago that it became my reality—that the great bulk of personal violence, including extremes of personal violence at all ages, has nothing to do with policing.  I have known two “cult cops” who have suddenly, mysteriously died mid-career (one before he could return to my class).  In custody disputes over individual sexual assault, let alone in who gets blamed for ritual murders (as in the notorious case of the “Memphis Three,” in secular life let alone in military life and government-sponsored attempts, law enforcement is no answer to the problem.  It only encourages distortiofn of that reality, as the Navy has attempted to do with deaths at Camp No.

                As survivors like deJoly, Carol and Kathleen, and many others who as children have been sexually assaulted by someone they know, have found strength and safety enough to recover their “secret” memories, it is common to go through a period of self-blame for having been party to such violence and degradation.  Their stories of survival and healing, together with the experience of others who helped me teach who were moving out of (and in some cases back into) homicidal cults, led me to suppose that the greatest path for breaking through the violence is to make it safe for people who continue participation in this game of mind control find acceptance and safety among us privileged not to have known their worlds of terror existed all around ourselves.  Cult programming includes self-destruction in case secrets start to surface, let alone the threat of being killed or “disciplined” for trying to break free.  In the short term, the example and fellowship among survivors (which I experienced at conferences, notably at SMART (organized by survivor Neil Brick; his site, www.ritualabuse.us , is the most reference site on ritual abuse and mind control I know of), draws more survivors out.  Happily, intergenerational lines of ritual abuse disintegrate (often, sadly, because survivors kill themselves or become institutionalized).  In the long run, the more widely others become willing to believe that those emerging from suppressed memories of extreme, organized violence, are true refugees rather than delusional, the more I would expect the cults and Camp Noes of this world to dissolve as best humanity can manage. The moral I draw: Peacemaking becomes preferable to enforcement especially in the most extreme forms of organized violence.

                I have come to believe that those who seek how to make peace in the face of violence believe the world to be much more violent than would be warmakers, including those of us who seek how to fight crime (if only we can name it), allow themselves to imagine.  What applies to the violence of organized mind control applies to police relations with black and brown communities.  For all the discussion of police use of excessive force, I myself haven’t discussed the problem of delayed response time, or no response at all, to complaints from residents, notably including medical emergencies, and calls to break-ins, violence, and threats.  It has been well cited in the past, and surely hasn’t disappeared just because it isn’t being widely reported.  And the harassment, the humiliation, the fear, the pointless arrests (like Eric Garner’s, never mind that he was killed in the process), the anger that motivates such wide protest, doesn’t figure in police statistics.  In sum, not only is law enforcement largely beside the point of extreme personal violence (which doesn’t show up in victim surveys either), it is a distraction from the problem that separates and alienates the police from those they are sent to serve.  That problem is huge.  It feeds race, class and age distortions in whom we punish for crime.  It substitutes use of personal force for personal attention.

                How do police and those they police get “to know one another in many respects” (Nils Christie, Limits to Pain)?  Peacemaking is abundant with techniques (as in circle processes) and initiatives (as from community religious centers) for getting warring sides together.  Formal monitoring, regulation, discipline and prosecution, let alone getting arrest and fine numbers up in NYC, harden police/community separation and profiling.  Informally, NYPD officers and community members may already be well acquainted.  In the terms used by Jerome Skolnick in Justice Without Trial, while the “broken windows” model may have pressed police to become both watchmen and law enforcers, much policing there is also done by officers committed, broadly as first responders, to public service.  As matters stand, the (im)balance of forces between the two styles of NYPD policing remains unaddressed, left to follow its own course.

                We are stuck equating order with identifying and bringing offenders to justice.  That focus leaves the underlying violence, represented by Camp No and the war of terror on terror of which it is a part, and by excessive police force and aggression in black and brown communities, socially ignored, not even named and recognized…and so the institutionalized, organized violence continues unaddressed.  It involves “people like us” for all we can see, if we will let ourselves acknowledge just how “normal” violence and those who engage in it really are, that our personal violence is so pervasive, our personal involvement in it so extensive, that we are reduced to treating violence in others as we would be treated by those we have offended or hurt and their allies.  It entails making peace with parties to violence rather than separating and distinguishing ourselves and our profiles from theirs.  Peacemaking is the only practical remedy for institutionalized, organized violence.  The peacemaking paradigm that frames my understanding of violence transformation is grounded in the reality that the personal violence we condemn pales beside the extent and severity of the personal violence whose existence we are inclined to deny.  Love and peace, hal