False Memory Syndrome Foundation

[Magda Hassan]

PAIDIKA INTERVIEW:
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD AND RALPH UNDERWAGER Part I

Paedophiles can boldly and courageously affirm what they choose. They can say that what they want is to find the best way to love. . . . Paedophiles can make the assertion that the pursuit of intimacy and love is what they choose. With boldness they can say, "I believe this is in fact part of God's will. --Dr. Ralph Underwager in this interview with Paidika,
a European pro-pedophile publication. Dr. Ralph Underwager earned his masters of Divinity from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, and has been, since 1974, Director of the Institute for Psychological Therapies in Northfield, Minnesota. Besides being a staff psychologist in a clinic, Dr. Underwager has also been a pastor at Lutheran churches in Iowa and Minnesota. He is a member of the National Council for Children's Rights, the American Psychological Association, the Lutheran Academy for Scholarship, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, among others.
Hollida Wakefield received her M.A., from the University of Maryland, where she also completed the course work for her Ph.D. She has worked as an elementary school teacher, a college psychology instructor, and since 1976 as a staff psychologist at the Institute of Psychological Therapies. Her memberships include the National Council for Children's Rights, the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, and the American College of Forensic Psychology. She and Dr. Underwager are married.
Ms. Wakefield and Dr. Underwager are the publishers of the journal, "Issues in Child Abuse Accusations." They co-edited the volumes: "Accusations of Child Sexual Abuse" and "The Real World of Child Interrogations." They have written numerous articles on the interrogation of children, the role of the psychologist in assessing child abuse cases, the evaluation of child witnesses, and the manipulation of the child abuse system. They regularly appear as expert witnesses and give training sessions to jurists, psychologists, and laymen.
This interview was conducted in Amsterdam in June 1991 by "Paidika," Editor-in-Chief, Joseph Geraci. PAIDIKA: Could you describe your views on paedophilia, from your prospective as psychologists in the U. S.?

HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: Our main idea about paedophilia is that it's learned behavior. We don't think it's inborn, genetic, or hormonal. Like homosexuality, we believe it's learned at a young age and that the person has the subjective reality that they've always been this way.
There's an absence of anything in the research to show that paedophilia is anything other than learned. Such things as sexual orientation are an interaction. There may well be more of a propensity among some people to be affected by learning of various types. At the American Psychological Association's 1989 annual conference, we went to a presentation on homosexuality. The research was reviewed and the bottom line was that nothing biological had been established.
RALPH UNDERWAGER: We've been heavily involved in dealing with issues of child sexual abuse for a number of years. We've also been involved for a number of years in providing therapy for a variety of sexual dysfunctions, dysphorias, and paraphilias.
To our knowledge, there has not been any convincing research that suggests there is a hormonal component, a hormonal involvement to sexual orientation. There's also nothing we know of that suggests there's a genetic component. As psychologists, we're more persuaded that behavior patterns are learned, rather than influenced by genes. We're also aware that the Minnesota twins studies are demonstrating a significant genetic component to some behavior, though I don't think they have come up with any data about paedophilia.
PAIDIKA: Is heterosexuality for you also learned behavior?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: Yes.
RALPH UNDERWAGER: Yes.
PAIDIKA: What do you mean when you say sexual orientation is learned behavior; where do you go from there?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: It means that a person has more freedom. There is an element of choice for someone not happy with whatever their sexual life is. They can learn to improve it. If it's a sexual dysfunction, somebody who's a premature ejaculator or impotent for example, they can learn something different. If a homosexual did not want to be homosexual, really wanted to be a heterosexual, there would be techniques that would have a decent chance of allowing that person to change. I'm not saying the person should want to change. I'm only saying that there is an element of choice. A person can determine their own sexual direction, and there are many behavioral techniques available that would allow the person to change.
RALPH UNDERWAGER: The theory of learned behavior permits individuals to take personal responsibility for their own behavior. We find it difficult when people try to place the responsibility for their behavior on something else. In the great American game, the blame is placed on bad parents who make bad kids. Explanations for homosexuality and paedophilia center on some kind of parental influence: mothers who are castrating, dominant, controlling, and hostile; fathers who are weak, and insipid. To say that my sexual responses at some level are learned is also to say that I am responsible for them.
Paedophiles can boldly and courageously affirm what they choose. They can say that what they want is to find the best way to love.
PAIDIKA: Is choosing paedophilia for you a responsible choice for the individuals?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: Certainly it is responsible. What I have been struck by as I have come to know more about and understand people who choose paedophilia is that they let themselves be too much defined by other people. That is usually an essentially negative definition. Paedophiles spend a lot of time and energy defending their choice. I don't think that a paedophile needs to do that. Paedophiles can boldly and courageously affirm what they choose. They can say that what they want is to find the best way to love. I am also a theologian and as a theologian, I believe it is God's will that there be closeness and intimacy, unity of the flesh, between people. A paedophile can say: "This closeness is possible for me within the choices that I've made."
Paedophiles are too defensive. They go around saying, "You people out there are saying that what I choose is bad, that it's no good. You're putting me in prison, you're doing all these terrible things to me. I have to define my love as being in some way or other illicit." What I think is that paedophiles can make the assertion that the pursuit of intimacy and love is what they choose. With boldness, they can say, "I believe this is in fact part of God's will." They have the right to make these statements for themselves as personal choices. Now whether or not they can persuade other people they are right is another matter (laughs).
Positive and Negative Views of Paedophilia
PAIDIKA: You've said that paedophiles speaks negatively about themselves; they are defensive; they act negatively. Paedophiles are a disparate group, like any human group, so what kind of individuals are you talking about, and with whom are you having contact?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: Well, they are paedophiles I have come to know, to talk with as patients while providing treatment. But my contacts have not been limited to the therapeutic setting. I've also met others in a general context, here in the Netherlands, and in the U. S., and I've read some of the literature.
Let me give you another example. The paedophile literature keeps talking about relationships. Every time I hear the word "relationship" I wince. It's a peculiarly bloodless, essentially Latin word that may have a lot of intellectual or cognitive content, but has little emotion. I think it would be much more honest to use the good old Anglo-Saxon four letter word "love," more honest for paedophiles to say, "I want to love somebody." Not, "I want a relationship." I mean, what the hell's a relationship?
Paedophiles can make the assertion that the pursuit of intimacy and love is what they choose. With boldness they can say, "I believe this is in fact part of God's will.
PAIDIKA: You say that paedophiles should affirm the fact that they believe that paedophilia is a part of "God's will." Are you also saying that for the paedophile to make this claim about "God's will, is also to state what God's will is?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: (laughing) Of course, I'm not privy to God's will. I do believe it is God's will that we have freedom. I believe that God's will is that we have absolute freedom. No conditions, no contingencies. When the blessed apostle Paul says, "All things are lawful for me," he says it not once but four times. "All things are lawful for me." He also adds that not everything works.
PAIDIKA: Hollida, I can see you want to say something. Do you have a different point of view from Ralph's?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: I'd add one qualification to what Ralph has just said about there being no conditions or contingencies to the freedom given us by God. I would add, you have to take the consequences of this freedom. That said, well, I guess I do feel differently about some things. For example, I find it difficult too envision how a paedophile relationship can have the potential of being the type of close, intimate, constantly developing relationship that would be possible in more traditional relationships, whether in heterosexual marriages, or a committed adult homosexual relationship. Speaking only about men and boys at least, what I have seen is that once the young man gets to be a certain age, the paedophile is no longer interested in the young man sexually. These relationships start at around the age of eleven or twelve, and then by sixteen, seventeen, the paedophile is ready for a new one. The old relationship is, if not thrust aside, at least radically changed. It's hard for me to see that is a deep, meaningful relationship, even if I'm using the word Ralph doesn't like. It doesn't have the same bad connotations for me.
I'm no expert on the way these relationships develop or on what happens to them when the boy turns seventeen, eighteen or twenty. I can't imagine it just stays the same. It poses certain questions for me. Do paedophiles retain a close, intimate relationship with the boy, although the sex ends? Did they then add another boy while keeping the first boy, and then later repeat the pattern and add another and just keep adding new boys until they have a whole harem, ranging in age from let's say twelve to forty? Or perhaps the paedophile doesn't keep the first boy around. Perhaps he disappears out of his life altogether only to be replaced by the next? If that is the way it is, which seems from my observation to be the case, then I don't understand how there can ever be a close, intimate, constantly progressing and developing relationship. Perhaps it is possible. I'm not saying it is not possible, but it does strike me as being a limitation of these relationships.
There's also a second set of questions I have around a completely different matter. The problem, as I would state it, is that in the United States, paedophilia is viewed so negatively that I think the possibility of harming the young man would be very real. I don't know if a positive model is possible in the United States. The climate is such in the United States that it would be very, very difficult for a paedophile, even with the most idealistic of motives and aspirations, to make his relationship actually work in practice.
Even if the boy at some point viewed it as positive, after coming into contact with the way the society as a whole viewed it, the very real danger would be created of making the experience harmful. Relationships and societal attitudes are, of course, two completely different areas. In such a negative climate, I don't know if it would be possible for the relationship to be good for the parties involved when the entire society is so negative.
When I think about paedophiles, these are some of the theoretical difficulties I have with it. In practice, how these relationships turn out is a totally different issue. It might be that the relationships continue to grow but change in form and become positive. They might also develop negatively. As I said these are theoretical problems. For example, if the sex continued, we would have to call that male homosexuality, not paedophilia. If a relationship started when the individuals were respectively twenty-two and twelve, and they stayed together until they were forty-two and thirty-two, we would not define that any longer as a paedophile relationship.
RALPH UNDERWAGER: I think that Holly and I agree that sexuality is a smaller part set within a large whole of our humanity: our capacity for love, our ability to approach some form of unity with another person. Sexuality takes place within this larger context, but it is not exhaustive, nor necessary, nor sufficient as a cause unto itself. The necessary and sufficient cause of sexuality for us is the unity, the wholeness, the intimacy.
The history of human behavior surely demonstrates that sexual behavior can become a very volatile, explosive part of intimacy and closeness, such as in jealousy and possessiveness. There is, in other words, a potential for sexuality, even if it is a small part of the whole, to erupt into what can be pervasive, cataclysmic experiences. When the sex ends abruptly and the man has been saying to the boy, "I love you, I care for you. You and I are one in mind, body, spirit," and then suddenly says, "That's all fine, but we ain't gonna do it no more." What happens then?
PAIDIKA: Perhaps a loving friendship continues. I've certainly encountered relationships where it has. Aren't you saying that we should define relationships in terms of love?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: I was urging earlier that you make the loving image clearer to the outside world. What appears to the public is not the picture of a loving man but rather the picture of the dirty old man lurking in alleys, waiting for nice innocent young lads to come by, grabbing their genitalia and hustling them off and sort of casting them aside and waiting for the next one.
PAIDIKA: Perhaps the question is, should we only define paedophilia or paedophiles by the worst examples of individual behaviors?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: Well these terrible examples exist. We have to take them in. There are very negative aspects of paedophilia that we see from our experience in the United States. We saw a priest, for example, who started having sex with a child when the boy was nine. He told the child that he loved only him. But, in fact, at the same time, he was also involved with half a dozen other nine-and-ten-year-olds. He had had anal sex with the kid. And then he cast him aside at age fifteen. The boy was totally and hopelessly screwed up, his whole sexuality in confusion. Worse, the story leaked out, so the child was mercilessly teased at school, called a homosexual and gossiped about. There are children who have been abused, raped, and dropped on the side of the road.
I want to be clear though. Nobody has talked to us in the U. S. about their paedophilia who's engaged in an on-going relationship, just individuals who were ordered into therapy. You have to remember, if somebody in the United States talked to us and said, "You know, I'm a paedophile and I have a sexual relationship with this boy and it's good," we would have to call the police and turn him in. We would turn him in too, because we would be in jail if we didn't. So, when we say we've talked to people, we mean individuals sent to us for therapy.
The climate is such in the United States that the discussion would have to be carefully sanitized, completely abstract. There couldn't be any reference whatsoever to somebody who might be in an on-going relationship, because we would have to call the police and say, "That person has been sexual with minors," and if we didn't do that, we would lose our licenses as psychologists, face a fine of $5,000, and six months in jail.
PAIDIKA: There is research and some scientific opinion that demonstrates that more positive examples and personal experiences exist. Theo Sandfort's research, cross-cultural models, the writings of the German sexologist Bomemann. Shouldn't we be putting positive views into the picture in order to come to an understanding?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: We don't know about The Netherlands. Our impression is that it's somewhat easier here than at home.
But your point is that potentially there can be good, healthy, positive relationships between men and boys. It would be difficult to come up with sexual research for that in the United States because it would frankly be suppressed. When I did a review of the literature on boy victims of child sexual abuse, some of the studies show not just negative effects in some of the boys. The authors try to explain this away. Their rationale is that because they didn't find negative things in their study, does not mean there are none. They just haven't shown up yet! If anyone in the United States were to do a study that showed positive outcomes and then wrote it up as a scientific paper, they probably would not succeed in getting it published. It could only be published if they found a way to explain away any positive findings. They would have to make it look like they found something other than what they found. They would be entirely vilified.
PAIDIKA: Doesn't your book, Accusations of Child Sexual Abuse, suggest that all sexual relationships between adults and children in the United States are abusive relationships?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: No. I think we would claim that these sexual relationships, in the U. S., at least, could range from neutral to harmful. We don't envision or hypothesize that they could be positive, but at best neutral.

Part II Underwager/Wakefield Interview
THE AMERICAN SITUATION
PAIDIKA: You are speaking mostly about paedophiles in the U. S. What tack should they take given the societal attitudes? What solutions do you envision for their lives?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: The solution that I'm suggesting is that paedophiles become much more positive. They should directly attack the concept, the image, the picture of the paedophile as an evil, wicked, and reprehensible exploiter of children.
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: The United States is really pretty schizophrenic right now in its attitudes. On the one hand it glorifies sex in things like underwear advertisements, or James Bond movies. On the other hand it's very puritanical. You don't have good sex education in the schools, just these ridiculous prevention programs.
Let me give another example. Video recorders and video cameras are in right now. Couples are making their own pornographic movies. The comparison is on the one hand people running around making their own pornographic movies but on the other hand reacting hysterically to child sexuality issues. There was actually the case of a man who had had the nine-year-old son of a friend spend the night at his house. He kissed him on the neck, patted him on the rear, told him good-night, ad was later sentenced to two years in prison for these acts. They were labeled sexual abuse. The child later told his mother that it made him uncomfortable when the man kissed him on the cheek.
Given this schizophrenia and these hysterical attitudes about childhood sexuality, it's going to be difficult for paedophiles to appear more positive, to start saying they're not exploiters of children, that they love children, the sexual part included, even if it's a minor part. If they made such statements, they would be arrested.
What we see going on in the United States is the most vitriolic and virulent anti-sexuality I know of in our history. It may take people being arrested. Revolutionaries have always risked arrest.
RALPH UNDERWAGER: I was in the courtroom for the case that Holly just cited and I actually heard the prosecution say, "No man should ever be permitted to claim as an excuse that he was just being affectionate when a child says they were uncomfortable." I don't know; I don't think we can just label these attitudes "hysteria." Perhaps "madness" is better, or "pathology." What we see going on in the United States is the most vitriolic and virulent anti-sexuality I know of in our history. It may take people being arrested. Revolutionaries have always risked arrest.
PAIDIKA: In your book, you said that there was "a matter of national interest and a focus of federal interest in child abuse in 1974, but then in 1984, it seemed to suddenly shift and become more hysterical." What reasons do you see for the outbreak of a child abuse hysteria, or pathology, in the mid-80's America?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: I think that what we meant in that passage was that we had personally been observing a steady progression of awareness about actual child abuse up to around that period, 1984. We had routinely been dealing with sex offenders and cases of incest. Around the mid-80's, we began to see cases of false accusations to a degree we had not seen before. it was the rise of this incidence of false accusations that led us to use the term "hysteria."
RALPH UNDERWAGER: Child abuse around that time became more a matter of attention and discussion. There had been child abuse before but the earlier focus was on rehabilitation and treatment. In the early 80's, this focus shifted to prosecution. As more federal money became available, child protection teams and child molestation units were set up in every county in the United States. As this structure was put into place, the emphasis changed to prosecution. This is where it is now, and as a consequence, there is very little interest in treatment, rehabilitation, or healing. The emphasis is: punish the bastards, put them in jail, hang them up by their toes, or other appurtenances, get rid of them.
PAIDIKA: You seen to be saying that the shift to prosecution, and the sexual hysteria, are connected. Could you clarify how such a shift might make a country pathological about sex?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: I believe these shifts happen when the social contract in a given country or culture breaks down. What is happening in the United States is that the populace no longer has the sense that the country knows what it is about. During the Second World War, when I was about fourteen years old, it was a great time to live in America. We stood together. Everybody knew and understood what we were all about, what we were doing in the world. Beginning in the 60's and through the 70's into the 80's that confidence disappeared. We became fractionalized into smaller and smaller groups, each group fighting for its own to the point where we have now evolved a political system of special interest groups. There's no longer consensus politics in America.
The result of the breakdown of the social contract is that people do not have sufficient ego to handle or tolerate the ambiguity in their society. They don't have the inner resources. What they must do, then, is find something outside of themselves, something external, to give them shape and identity. Sex throughout history has played a specific role. It has allowed people both to define themselves and to locate an enemy. A sexual minority becomes a scapegoat. Whenever there has been social upheaval, whenever the social contract has disappeared, there has always been violent anti-sexuality outbursts.
The breakdown of the social contract and anti-sexuality outbursts are interconnected because there is in times of social instability, a need to say that someone else is evil, wicked. The blame for everything gets put on the so-called deviants, while the true American remains at home, pure, probably mortifying the flesh, crucifying the body, being a good citizen. The citizen becomes the knight riding off into the sunset victorious, leaving behind him a trail of battered and beaten people that they have judged bad. And the citizen feels justified.
In a society in turmoil, people can't tolerate anything that is different from whatever the myth of that society is. The society holds on to the myth, the belief. The myth is what they must believe. There's not enough strength in the society to deal with the facts.
PAIDIKA: Why is sex the focus of the hysteria in that situation, why not something else?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: Sex has always been the penultimate answer to the ultimate question, which is unity and wholeness. In theological terms, sex has been the way that human beings have tried to avoid dealing with the mystery of the Trinity, the mystery of Unity. Sex is penultimate. This is why the root cause of sexual dysfunction is always some form of genitalization of sexuality. Sexuality has become, in the dysfunction, limited to genital tissue. It is not unified.
PAIDIKA: Would you say that the sexual hysteria is a kind of mystical or religious dysfunction?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: Yes, I would.
PAIDIKA: Your scenario for the child sexuality hysteria is the breakdown of the social contract and a religious/mystical dysfunction. Do you recognize other causes than these?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: I would add radical feminism, which includes a pretty hefty dose of anti-males. I think in a very real way, these women may be jealous that males are able to love each other, be comrades, friends, be close, intimate, work cooperatively, function in groups. The point where men may say that maleness can include the intimacy and closeness of sex may make women jealous. This would hold true for male bonding, and paedophile sex too. The woman is jealous of the connection. She says, "Wait a minute, we're not going to let you do that!"
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: I would disagree with that one hundred percent. That women are jealous because men have close bonds with one another doesn't seem to me to make sense. The common wisdom, whether one agrees with it or not, is that a man is handicapped in a divorce more than a woman, because the woman has female friends she can talk to. Women are socialized for relationships more than men. For women to become close and intimate is easier than for a man. Men can't express feelings. These are the common beliefs. And, after all, some of the most hostile, enraged people about sexual abuse are males. Jim Peters of the National Center for the Prosecution of Child Abuse, for example.
I think the radical feminist opposition to paedophilia comes out of the general perception of men as aggressive and dominating. They use sex to dominate the weak. The weak would be women and children. That the opposition comes out of women's jealousy because men can have meaningful paedophile relationships, and they wish they could, I don't agree with it.
RALPH UNDERWAGER: Certainly some men aid and abet the hysteria. They are opportunists. They have opportunistic rage. What I am proposing is that there is an aspect to femaleness that is hardly ever discussed. I believe that women also are violent, cruel, and hostile. Possibly more so than men. The radical feminists only express that side of femaleness against paedophilia.
Among certain Indian tribes, the people who did the torture were the women. A sociologist in Milwaukee who studied the records of domestic violence found that women are much more violent in domestic disputes than men, and paedophilia can be thought to be a domestic matter. My argument is that the radical feminist position arises more from women's nature than from a politics. That has been overlooked.
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: Well, I wouldn't agree with this point of view at all. All statistics, history too, show that violent crimes are committed more by men than by women. Violence, cruelty, hostility have been much more male domains. THE QUESTIONING OF CHILDREN
PAIDIKA: The main purpose of your book, it seems to me, is to devise a method for determining the facts when there is an allegation of child abuse. This has sometimes put you in opposition to the official system. How much have your methods been adopted at this point, and how much are they being opposed?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: Our main effort has been to develop methods that avoid suggestive questioning, that lead the child on. It's becoming increasingly apparent that what we are proposing is the right way to go. what we have suggested, other people are also suggesting. There is a developing consensus that this is the way to do it.
Not many people any more are advocating suggestive or leading questioning. The problem is still that people who say they agree with us still go ahead and do leading questioning anyway. They don't know they're doing it. As you know, the main reason for the acquittals in the Mc Martin case is that the interviews were so terrible that the jurors said, "You can't tell what went on at all because the interviews are so suggestive."
Unfortunately, there are still very few people thinking about what happens to the child if the adults make a mistake. The worst result of bad questioning for the child is that if it is not abused, and is taught through suggestive interviews that she has been abused, that is extremely harmful. It runs the risk of making children psychotic.
Take the Mc Martin case. I think we can assume that nothing happened to them. But now these children who are fourteen, fifteen years old believe that they were subjected to horrible, bizarre, ritualistic abuse. That's now part of their reality. How are these teenagers going to turn out as adults?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: Holly and I can demonstrate two basic things. We were the first people to publicly say, "Let's be more cautious, there's a better way to do this, we should be doing it differently." We're finding now that there is a growing concensus joining us. We can be more accurate in making discriminations between real abuse and false abuse.
In August, 1990, when we were at the American Psychological Association convention, the majority of the programs were in the same direction that we have been talking about. There were two or three programs that were still saying, "Children must be believed at all cost, they can't talk about things they haven't experienced." The audiences at those symposia were violently critical of that approach. Four years ago that would never have happened. When you get to the people who are doing the actual taped interviews, though, it is another story.
We're urging caution because of the child, as Holly pointed out. What you do, when you require a child who has not been abused to engage in repeated statements about having been abused, is blur, if not destroy, the capacity of that child to distinguish between reality and unreality. When a child is reinforced by adults to repeat over and over accounts of having been abused, of having been violated in these strange, bizarre ways, children come to believe it. It becomes subjectively real. You end up with, say, a sixteen year old who was never abused but who now has a subjective experience of being abused. The person becomes convinced that all these terribly bizarre things happened. I was led into a tunnel; I was undressed; I was placed on an altar; I was drenched in sacrificial blood; I have observed people cutting the heart out of others and eating it." That is now subjectively real for that child. But, the person who's taught them to believe that is the one who actually abused them. They've distorted their reality. They've made them pathological.
PAIDIKA: Are you describing a distortion of reality that occurs because of ignorance or because of malice and evil?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: I think ignorance is a big part of it. These aren't evil, wicked people who are purposely setting out to make children believe they were abused when they weren't. They see themselves as child advocates, child savers. They're more or less convinced they're doing a good thing. Ignorance is a very large part of it.
We have no experimental verification of this, but our suspicion is that the front-line people are young and have no children of their own. They're not trained in child development. The social workers who do the initial interviews just don't know about what a normal child is like, how suggestible they are, how they behave.
Ignorance leads to a lot of things. ordinary exploratory sex play between children is often misunderstood. It is seen as indicative of a child sexual abuse, and can therefore result in false accusations. Say a parent walks in and a four year old has a three year old's clothes off and they're exploring. The parents becomes upset, angry. "Who taught you this? Where'd you learn how to do that?" If it's a divorce and custody case, they might say, "Did Daddy ever do this?"
You get bizarre things. For example, we consulted in a case of a three year old child who reported that a four year old had poked her in the genitals with a stick. This was in a pre-school. The social services were called, and the first thing they did was go to the four year old's house to see if the four year old was being sexually abused. Their reasoning was that if the four year old poked the three year old in the genitals, he must have been sexually abused, or where would he have learned to do this?
There was also the incident of a ten year old girl and a twelve year old brother who were discovered fooling around with each other. The girl was put in a sexual abuse victims treatment program and the boy was put in a perpetrator's program. Seriously, these things are happening. The underlying feeling is that if you see children being sexual, they must have learned it from some adult who abused them.
RALPH UNDERWAGER: I agree with Holly. Ignorance is a very large part of hysteria. Almost all the people we encounter who are involved in the system of dealing with child sexual abuse allegations, have no knowledge, no sophistication in developmental psychology. At most they have been given, one, maybe two, weekend workshops. You can't make an expert in a weekend. They form something called "multidisciplinary teams," which is one of the favorite ways that abuse is somehow supposed to be controlled. Multidisciplinary teams do not result in any increase in the effectiveness of the decision. What it results in is a pooling of mediocrity and ignorance. of course, the APA code of ethics maintains quite clearly that both ignorance and ineptitude are unethical (laughs).
The dilemma, the reality is that we do savage things to our children; we brutalize them. Children do require the protection of society, and the protection of the law.
We've had a certain concept for a number of years. Simply stated, it is that whenever two or more human beings get together and attempt to accomplish some joint task, one of the first things they do is to set up some rules. Now generally this works. You get the joint task accomplished. Rule-making is rewarded. As you add more than two people and you increase the resources and the complexity of whatever the joint tasks are, rule-making does permit more effective functioning, and that's how making laws get reinforced.
However, there is a finite number of laws in proportion to a given population that work effectively. Any law above this number results in an increment of ineffectiveness. Let's say the number of laws necessary in the U. S. is 13,246. Law number 13,247 would then be over the threshold. Each law you now add divides your society. People now begin to exploit. There is more and more opportunity for malice, evasion of responsibility and so on. The next effect is to begin to destroy that society. However, nobody realizes or understands it so they keep on making laws. You have now reached the point at which there is some form of revolution required to start the process all over again.
PAIDIKA: one of your goals in formulating questions for the child about possible abuse is to avoid distorting the child's reality. In your interrogation methods, do your questions presuppose for the children that they themselves see the sexual relationship as abuse?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: No, no. Not our methods.
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: No. What we would do is get the child to use free recall, to describe what took place. As scientists, our goal would be to get as much information from the child about what happened and what took place as possible. We would see it as somebody else's responsibility to interpret this, or see whether it's legal or illegal.
RALPH UNDERWAGER: We don't tell children things like, "Well, it's all the other person's fault, you were helpless, you were powerless, and you're not responsible." Some people are now saying that this is the best thing to tell children. If you tell them they were powerless, it gives the children more power. We don't do that.
PAEDOPHILIA AND SPIRITUALITY
PAIDIKA: We spoke at the beginning about paedophilia and spirituality. This is not an issue that is very often discussed. Given the opposition to and oppression of paedophilia in American society, how would you describe a spirituality for paedophiles?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: For me, the beginning of spiritual life is in knowing that God is gracious, knowing that it is God's purpose that we have a good life, knowing that it is God's purpose that we be free. The freedom that God intends for us to have is absolute. The only thing that can match absolute killing, and judgments that condemn us, such as St. Paul's, "You have sinned and come short of the glory of God," is the absolute, "You are free." You are free, that is, from all accusation, nothing, no one can accuse you.
The issue is never what is right or wrong. That's mistaken question. Paying attention to what is right and wrong is, I think, a penultimate goal because the issue is not right and wrong but good and evil. That's totally different. Right and wrong has to do with whether or not you hit the mark, whether a given behavior matches a certain standard. If it doesn't, then it's wrong.
Good and evil only pays attention to outcomes. You can never know the outcomes until you have already acted. Spirituality that attends to the issue of good and evil must always be courageous, bold, operating always with incomplete information. You never know, so you are continually making a responsible choice about which there's always risk. You can only know if something is good subsequent to having acted, and observing the outcome.
As with all human behavior, I would suggest that paedophiles can't say, "I have chosen; I choose; I will act in this fashion. I believe that the outcome will be good. I will pay the price for that act, whatever that price may be."
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: The price might be the difficulty of integrating oneself into one's society.
RALPH UNDERWAGER: Or, going to jail, certainly. As I said before, it may take people being arrested. In a sense, what is, well, I guess I can say this, what is offensive about what I know about paedophiles is their intention to be able to do what they choose without paying the price. "I want to be able to do this, but the society should let me do it without exacting any kind of price from me."
PAIDIKA: Is it reasonable for paedophiles to want and to work for the decriminalization of what they believe is right?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: It's not reasonable if the goal is "I want to do it, and I don't really care what other people tell me. I'm not going to engage in the attempt to communicate or to talk to people." It's like saying to somebody, "Accept me because after all, I'm really the same as you are." That's what tolerance is supposed to be, and that's why tolerance always falls short. It is never to me, acceptable.
I don't think it is honest to tolerate somebody only because they are saying, "At rock bottom, I'm really the same as you." or, conversely to say, I can tolerate you, I can accept you, because you are the same. I think it is much more honest and direct to say, "Yes, we're different. You're black, I'm white, you're smart, I'm not. I'm paedophile, you're heterosexual." Those are real differences, real differences. Paedophiles should point out how different they are, what the difference are.
PAIDIKA: Still isn't it a reasonable wish for paedophiles to want to see paedophile sex decriminalized? It may not be realistic right now in the U. S., but does that make it less legitimate a goal?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: oh yes, sure, sure. I mean Jesus said, "I really don't want to do this. I don't want to go up there onto Calvary." But when it came down to it, he said, "Well, okay, I'm going to walk the steps." As for decriminalization, the question is really if you're not there, how are you going to get there?
PAIDIKA: Any advice?
RALPH UNDERWAGER: Take the risk, the consequences of the risk, and make the claim: this is something good. Paedophiles need to become more positive and make the claim that paedophilia is an acceptable expression of God's will for love and unity among human beings. This is the only way the question is going to be answered, of whether or not it is possible. Does it happen? Can it be good? That's what we don't know yet, the ways in which paedophiles can conduct themselves in loving ways. That's what you need to talk about. You need to get involved in discourse, and to do so while acting. Matthew 11 talks about the wisdom of God, and the way in which God's wisdom, like ours, can only follow after.
Paedophiles need to become more positive and make the claim that paedophiles is an acceptable expression of God's will for love and unity among human beings.
I think the paedophile movement makes a mistake when it seeks to label the church as the instrument of repression, and in a sense, the enemy. I'm certainly aware of the accusation that it's the church that represses sexuality. I don't believe that's the case at all. I believe that the repression of sexuality begins with Greek thought. People who want to deal positively with human sexuality will do best to see the church as an ally, and to elicit from the church the positive responses about sexuality that are there.
PAIDIKA: You spoke about the need for paedophiles to engage in a discourse. What should that be?
HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD: We can't presume to tell them specific behaviors, but in terms of goals, certainly the goal is that the experience be positive, at the very least not negative, for their partner and partner's family. And nurturing. Even if it were a good relationship with the boy, if the boy was not harmed and perhaps even benefited, it it tore the family of the boy apart, that would be negative.
It would be nice if someone could get some kind of big research grant to do a longitudinal study of, let's say, a hundred twelve year old boys in relationships with loving paedophiles. Whoever was doing the study would have to follow that at five year intervals for twenty years. This is impossible in the U. S. right now. We're talking a long time in the future.--END



[URL="http://www.nudisthallofshame.info/Underwager4.html"]
[/URL]

[Magda Hassan]

A Brief Overview Of The Founding Members Of

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation

from MindControlForum Website

• F.M.S.F. EXECUTIVE DIRECTORS: Peter and Pamela Freyd (psychiatrists)
  The Freyds were publicly exposed by their own daughter – Jennifer Freyd (professor of psychology) of child abuse and rape.
  
• F.M.S.F. FOUNDER: Ralph Underwager (psychiatrist)
  The world’s foremost authority on false memory, but in the courtroom – is repeatedly exposed as a charlatan. He is a self confessed paedophile who quotes: It is "God’s Will" adults engage in sex with children.
  
• F.M.S.F. ORIGINAL BOARD MEMBERS: Martin Orn (psychiatrist)
  Senior CIA Mind Control Researcher: Experimenting in hypnotic programming, dissolving memory and other mind subduing techniques.
  
• F.M.S.F. BOARD MEMBER: Dr Harold Lief (psychiatrist)
  CIA Mind Control Researcher. Experimenting in behavioural modification and hypnotic programming.

REFERENCE FROM: The False Memory Hoax – Psychic Dictatorship in the USA By Alex Constantine

The CIA, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation & the Politics of Ritual Abuse

The Devil Denuded

The CIA, in fact, has several designates on the FMSF advisory board. They have in common backgrounds in mind control experimentation. Their very presence on the board, and their peculiar backgrounds, reveal some heavily obscured facts about ritual child abuse.

Martin T. Orne, a senior CIA researcher, is an original board members of the Foundation, and a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Experimental Psychiatry Lab in Philadelphia. In 1962 his forays into hypno-programming (the elicitation of "anti-social" behaviour, dissolving memory and other mind-subduing techniques) were financed by a CIA front at Cornell University. He was also funded by Boston’s Scientific Engineering Institute, another front, and a clearinghouse for the Agency’s investigation of the occult.

The CIA and Pentagon have formed a partnership in the creation of cults. To be sure, the Association of National Security Alumni, a public interest veterans group opposed to clandestine ops, considers it a "primary issue of concern" that the Department of Defense has a "perceived role in satanic cult activities, which qualify in and of themselves as very damaging exercises in mind control."

The smoothing over of the national security state’s cult connections is handled by academic "experts".

A forerunner of the Foundation is based in Buffalo, New York, the Committee for Scientific Examination of Religion, best known for the publication of Satanism in America: How the Devil Got More Than His Due, widely considered to be a legitimate study. The authors turn up their noses to ritual abuse, dismissing the hundreds of reports around the country as mass "hysteria". Cult researcher Carl Raschke reported in a March, 1991 article that he coincidentally met Hudson Frew, a Satanism in America co-author at a Berkeley bookstore.

"Frew was wearing a five-pointed star, or pentagram, the symbol of witchcraft and earth magic," Raschke says.

Shawn Carlson, a contributor to the book, is identified by the media as a "physicist". Yet he runs the Gaia Press in El Cerrito, California, a New Age publishing house with a and occult lore. Carlson is also a "scientific and technical consultant" to the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (a promoter of the "false memory" theory of ritual abuse and UFO abductions), publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer.

The FMS Foundation is no less eccentric. Within two years of its founding, it was clear that the Foundation leadership was far from disinterested on witchcraft

On the workings of childhood memory, and concealed a secret sexual and political agenda.

FMSF Founder Ralph Underwager (left), director of the Institute of Psychological Therapies in Minnesota, was forced to resign in 1993. Underwager (a former Lutheran pastor) and his wife Hollida Wakefield publish a journal, Issues in Child Abuse Allegations, written by and for child abuse "skeptics".

His departure from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was hastened by a remark in an interview, appearing in an Amsterdam journal for paedophiles, that it was "God’s Will" adults engage in sex with children.

(His wife Hollida remained on the Foundation’s board after he left). As it happens, holy dispensation for paedophiles is the exact credo of the Children of God cult. It was fitting, then, when Underwager filed an affidavit on behalf of cult members tried in France in 1992, insisting that the accused were positively "not guilty of abuse upon children". In the interview, he prevailed upon paedophiles everywhere to shed stigmatization as "wicked and reprehensible" users of children.

In keeping with the Foundation’s creative use of statistics, Dr Underwager widely considered, or group of British reporters in 1994 that "scientific evidence" proved that 60% of all women molested as children believed the experience was "good for them".

Dr Underwager invariably sides with the defense. His grandiloquent orations have graced courtrooms around the world, often by satellite. Defense lawyers for Woody Allen turned to him, he boasts, when Mia Farrow accused her estranged husband of molesting their seven year-old daughter. Underwager is a virtual icon to the Irish Catholic lobby in Dublin, which raised its hoary hackles against a child abuse prevention program in the Irish Republic. He was, until his advocacy of paedophila tarnished an otherwise glittering reputation, widely quoted in the press, dismissing ritual child abuse as a hysterical aberration.

He is the world’s foremost authority on false memory, but I the courtroom he is repeatedly exposed as a charlatan. In 1988, a trial court decision in New York State held that Dr Underwager was,

"not qualified to render opinion as to where or not (the victim) was sexually molested".

In 1990 his testimony on memory was ruled improper,

"in the absence of any evidence that the results of Underwager’s work had been accepted in the scientific community".

And in Minnesota a judge ruled that Underwager’s theories on,

"learned memory" were the same as "having an expert tell the jury that (the victim) was not telling the truth".

Peter and Pamela Freyd, executive directors of the Foundation, joined forces with Underwager in 1991, and their story is equally wretched. Jennifer Freyd, their daughter, a professor or psychology at the University of Oregon, openly leveled accusations of abuse against her parents at an August 1993 mental health conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

"My family of origin was troubled in many observable ways," she said. "I refer to the things that were never ‘forgotten’ and ‘recovered’, but to things that we all knew about".

She gave her father’s alcoholism as an example.

"During my childhood, my father sometimes discussed his own experiences of being sexually abused as an 11 year-old boy, and called himself a ‘kept boy’".

Peter Freyd graduated to male prostitution as an adolescent. At the age of 13, Jennifer Freyd composed a poem about her father’s nocturnal visits:

I am caught in a web
A web of deep, deep terror

she wrote. The diaries of her youth chronicle the,

"reactions and feelings (guilt, shame and terror) of a troubled girl and young woman. My parents oscillated between denying these symptoms and feelings….. to using knowledge of these same symptoms and feelings to discredit me".

"My father," she says, "told various people that I was brain damaged".

The accusation was unlikely. At the time, Jennifer Freyd was a graduate student on a National Science Foundation fellowship. She has taught at Cornell and received numerous research awards. The "brain damage" apologia did not wash. Her mother suggested that Jennifer’s memories were "confabulations" and faulted therapeutic intervention. Pamela Freyd turned to her own psychiatrist, Dr Harold Lief, currently and advisory board member of the Foundation, to diagnose Jennifer.

"He explained to me that he did not believe I was abused," Jennifer recalls. Dr Lief’s diagnosis was based on his belief that Peter Freyd’s fantasies were strictly "homoerotic". Of course, his daughter furrows a brow at the assumption that homoerotic fantasies or a heterosexual marriage exclude the possibility of child molestation. Lief’s skewed logic is a trademark of the Foundation.

He is a close colleague of the CIA’s Martin Orne. Dr Lief, a former major in the Army medical corps, joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1968, the peak of federally-funded behavioural modification experiments at Holmesburg Prison. Dr Orne consulted with him on several studies in hypnotic programming.

His academic writing reveals a peculiar range of professional interests, including "Orgasm in the Postoperative Transsexual" for Archives of Sexual Behaviour, and an exploration of the possibility of life after death for a journal on mental diseased edited by Foundation fellow Paul McHugh. Lief is a director of the Centre for Sexuality and Religion, past president of the Sex Information and Education Council.

And an original board member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Two others, Jon Baron from Penn U. and Ray Hyman (an executive editor of the aforementioned Sceptical Inquirer), a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, resigned from the board after Jennifer Freyd went public with her account of childhood abuse and the facetious attempts of her parents and their therapist to discredit her. They were replaced by David Dinges, co-director – with the ubiquitous Martin Orne – of the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.

"At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered ‘false’", Jennifer says, "and my alcoholic father’s memory is considered rational and sane". She does not, after all, remember impossible abuses: "I was at home a few hours after my second session with my therapist, a licensed clinical psychologist working within an established group in a large and respected medical clinic.

"During that second visit to my therapist’s office, I expressed great anxiety about the upcoming holiday visit with my parents. My therapist asked about half way into the session, whether I had ever been sexually abused. I was immediately thrown into a strange state. No one had ever asked me such a question. I responded, ‘no, but….’ I went home and within a few hours I was shaking uncontrollably, overwhelmed with intense and terrible flashbacks". Jennifer asks herself why her parents are believed. "In the end, is it precisely because I was abused that I am to be discredited despite my personal and professional success?"

Pamela Freyd published an open letter defending her husband in Ralph Underwager’s Issues in Child Abuse Accusations in 1991. It was reprinted in Confabulations, a book published a year later. Laced with lubricious sentiment, the book bemoans the "destruction of families" brought on by false child abuse accusations, and maligns "cult-like" support groups and feminists, or "lesbian cults". Executive director Freyd often refers to the feminist groups that have taken up the cause of child abuse survivors as "lesbians", after the bizarre Dr Underwager, who claims,

"these women may be jealous that males are able to love each other, be comrades, friends, be close, intimate".

Pamela Freyd’s account of the family history, Jennifer insists, is patently false. In an electronic message from her father, he openly acknowledges that in his version of the story "fictional elements were deliberately inserted".

"Fictional is rather an astounding choice of words," Jennifer observed at the Ann Arbor Conference. The article written by her parents contends that Jennifer was denied tenure at another university due to a lack of published research. "In fact," Jennifer counters, "I moved to the University of Oregon in 1987, just four years after receiving my Ph.D. to accept a tenured position as associate professor in the psychology department, one of the world’s best psychology departments…. My mother sent the Jane Doe article to my colleagues during my promotion year – that is, the year my case for promotion to full professor was being considered. I was absolutely mortified to learn of this violation of my privacy and this violation of the truth".

Manipulative tactics are another Foundation imprimatur. Lana Alexander, editor of a newsletter for survivors of child sexual abuse, observes that,

"many people view the false memory syndrome theory as a calculated defence strategy developed by perpetrators and the lawyers and expert witnesses who defend them".

A legitimizing barrage of stories in the press has shaped public opinion and warmed the clime for defence attorneys. The concept of false memory serves the same purpose as Holocaust denial. It shapes opinion. Unconscionable crimes are obstructed, the accused is endowed with the status of martyr, the victim is reviled.

The emphasis on image is obvious in "How Do We Know We are Not Representing Paedophiles", an article written for the February 29, 1992 FMS Foundation Newsletter, by Pamela Freyd. In it, she derides the suggestion that many members of the group could be molesters because,

"we are a good-looking bunch of people, greying hair, well dressed, healthy, smiling; just about every person who has attended is someone you would surely find interesting and want to count as a friend".

People forget things. Horrible things. Here at the Foundation someone had a repressed memory, or what would be called a repressed memory, that she had been sexually abused.

– Pamela Freyd, FMS Foundation Founder

[Magda Hassan]

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation

"The FMSF supports parents who say the accusations by their adult children of childhood sexual abuse are false. These parents are typically aged 50s, 60s and 70s. Their accusers are adults who, for one reason or another, have met unbearable emotional pain and insurmountable difficulties in adult relationships - at work, socially or at home - and have sought to relieve the burden of their memories."10

A punchy enough quote. But a brief review of the background and personalities involved with the Foundation is enough to suggest that instead, this writeup should read:
PEDOPHILES!

CIA AGENTS!

SHATTERED LIVES!
DRAMA!!!

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation was started in the United States in 1992, by parents whose children had come out about being sexually abused.
At least, that is the most neutral way to describe them. As will be explained here, they are an organization which acts to discredit survivors of child abuse, founded and staffed (as we will see here) largely by abusers.
On their website, they say their goals are:

• "to seek the reasons for the spread of FMS that is so devastating families,
  
• "to work for ways to prevent it,
  
• "to aid those who were affected by it and to bring their families into reconciliation."
  

It is crucial to understand, above all, that False Memory Syndrome, or "FMS," is not a communicable disease. It is not a valid syndrome at all, in fact. It is not recognized as such by any part of the medical community, and it does not qualify as a "syndrome" in the first place. It is a term made up by those accused of sexual abuse to shame and discredit survivors. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, in short, invented this condition and then devoted itself to stopping its imaginary spread and healing its victims.

How?

"Since 1995, I have become aware of the parallel between the intimidation and silencing in the microcosm of the abusive family and in the macrocosm of a society that is ill at ease in dealing with the abuse of children. During my childhood my father protected himself from being held accountable by threatening me into silence. I believe that published documents demonstrate how some members and supporters of false memory groups publish false statements that defame and intimidate victims of proven violence and their supporters. Such altered accounts are used to discredit others in court and in the press." - Jennifer Hoult16

Their website is heavy on their history and theories, but extremely light on their actual actions. All they will say is that "The FMS Foundation has played a role as a clearinghouse of information and as a catalyst for discussion and research about the specific claims that have formed the basis of the debate in the areas of memory, social influence and therapeutic practice."
One of the FMSF's main activities is the filing of amicus briefs -- that is, unsolicited opinions -- in court cases relating to child abuse.
Between 1995 and 1998, the FMSF filed thirteen such briefs in the United States, mainly to appellate courts and once to a Court of Appeals.
They have also attacked therapists around the country. One of their tactics seems to be to sue therapists who treat (in particular) survivors of ritual abuse, suing them for anything from trivial legal loopholes to alleged malpractice.
Primarily, however, they have acted as media boosters. From the beginning, the FMSF has pushed people to take their angry stories to the media, to talk shows as well as reporters. They have the benefit of a star-studded base of supporters: they have recruited many psychologists, lawyers, and goverment figures to their ranks. Their psychologists are often discredited, and their government connections are largely to the scarier parts of the CIA... but that just adds to the fun of it!
As Mike Stanton writes in the Columbia Journalism Review,

"A study published (in 1996) by a University of Michigan sociologist, Katherine Beckett, found a sharp shift in how four leading magazines -- Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and People -- treated sexual abuse. In 1991, more than 80 percent of the coverage was weighted toward stories of survivors, with recovered memory taken for granted and questionable therapy virtually ignored. By 1994, more than 80 percent of the coverage focused on false accusations, often involving supposedly false memory. Beckett credited the False Memory Syndrome Foundation with a major role in the change."8

Child Rights Watch puts it in a more damning nutshell:

"A legitimising barrage of stories in the press has shaped public opinion and warmed the clime for defence attorneys. The concept of false memory serves the same purpose as Holocaust denial. It shapes opinion. Unconscionable crimes are obstructed, the accused is endowed with the status of martyr, the victim is reviled."10

Their Research

One of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's main claims is that they simply promote the most recent scientific findings on memory. This is made easier for them by their Scientific Advisory Board, which has such stellar figures as... well, actually, everyone discussed below except the Loftus couple.
Oddly enough, the scientific research produced by these people, and still promoted by the FMSF, has been thoroughly discredited.
For example, Board member Elizabeth Loftus is possibly the most vocal, visible, and quoted member of their organization. She produced the ground-breaking study entitled "Lost In the Mall: Misrepresentations and misunderstandings," wherein she presented twenty-four adults with four possible childhood experiences.
The experiences were presented as short written anecdotes, and culled from the subjects' relatives. The false story in each case featured the subject getting lost in a shopping mall as a child. Loftus asked the relatives to provide similar stories about childhood shopping trips. The subjects were asked to write anything they remembered about each experience, or to write that they did not remember the experience.
According to her study, six thought they remembered at least part of the one that never happened. One to two weeks later, the subjects were interviewed again. This time they were told that one of the stories had been false, and asked to identify which one. Nineteen correctly chose the shopping mall story; five did not. It is not clear whether those five students were part of the previous group of six.
Researchers Lynn Crook and Martha Dean have written several articles critiquing (among other things) the ethical and methodological issues involved with Loftus' study.12 However, even if her study had been airtight, it has very little relevance to the question of whether repressed memories are false.
Why?
Because a repressed memory of something traumatic which is unlike anything the family thinks happened does not have a whole lot of similarity to six out of twenty-four adults thinking they remember all of several similar childhood stories.
That is, repressed memories are generally of scary, threatening experiences. They are very different from what we convinced ourselves our childhood looked like. Loftus' study, and every other study I have seen which supported her findings, focuses entirely on seeing if it is possible to convince people that something happened to them which is very much like other things that they, and the researchers, know happened.
By way of example, a 1995 study by K. Pezdek and C. Roe entitled "The effect of memory trace strength on suggestibility" found that three of twenty subjects falsely recalled getting lost in (again) a shopping mall, but none recalled getting a painful enema.
And in a review of "Memory, Trauma Treatment, and the Law," (1998) attorney Helen L. McGonigle describes how the authors undertook a detailed review of thirty studies of memory and child sexual abuse, and found that "while base rates varied, the average rate of full amnesia across all thirty studies was found to be approximately 29.6%." That means that these studies consistently found that almost thirty percent of subjects had completely repressed the memory of the abuse; that's not even counting the many people who remembered only part of what happened to them. The authors also found that "the gist of recovered memories is generally accurate although perhaps not the insignificant, peripheral details."14
Sidran Press, which publishes information on trauma, dissociation, and post-traumatic stress disorder, has a chart explaining what makes someone repress a memory:13
Factors in Continuous Memory versus Factors in Dissociation/Amnesia
Single traumatic event Multi-event (repetitive)
Natural or accidental cause Deliberate human cause
Adult victim Child victim
Validation and support Denial and secrecy
Like much information from Sidran Press, it is not true for everyone. But it is a good basic explanation of current findings in memory and trauma research.

So Who Are These People, Anyway?

The following does not represent their entire board or organization by any means; it's just a quick wander through their biggest names from the past ten years.
Peter and Pamela Freyd: Executive Directors, Co-Founders.
"I am the only one who speaks for the Foundation." (Pamela Freyd, in an interview with Treating Abuse Today)11
In many ways, the entire battle of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation comes off as a family feud carried out to bombastic extremes.
Executive directors Peter and Pamela Freyd, upon being confronted by their daughter Jennifer Freyd (professor of psychology) on child abuse and rape, came up with a strange response. First, they published the accusations publicly and anonymously in Underwager and Wakefield's journal (see below), including what Peter would later admit were lies about their child's sanity and about what happened; then the four of them started the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
Peter Freyd apparently told everyone that Jennifer was "brain damaged," and acknowledged to her later that in their public account of what happened, "fictional elements were deliberately inserted." For her part, Jennifer Freyd has commented that "My family of origin was troubled in many observable ways. I refer to the things that were never 'forgotten' and 'recovered,' but to things that we all knew about.... during my childhood, my father sometimes discussed his own experiences of being sexually abused as an 11 year-old boy, and called himself a 'kept boy.'"15
Jennifer's recovery of these memories took place without hypnosis or "recovered memory therapy." Nevertheless, the Foundation focuses on these two techniques and frequently claims that they are the cause of all recovered memories, and that all such memories are false. In fact, just as there is no such medical condition as "False Memory Syndrome," there is also no such therapy as "Recovered Memory Therapy."
During an interview in Treating Abuse Today, Pamela Freyd was repeatedly asked to define "False Memory Syndrome" and could not. The interviewer finally gave up and asked her how she could call it "False Memory Syndrome" without any evidence as to whether the memories were false. The only response she can give is, "People can ask just as clearly, how does one know they are not?" In fact, she did not even know what dissociation was, which begs the question: How can she try to speak on a national level about repressed memory without knowing what dissociation is or how it works?
She often attacks apparently-feminist organizations fighting child abuse by calling them "lesbians." It is not clear how this supports her argument. As for her own side: in a 1992 issue of the Foundation's newsletter, Pamela explained how they knew the group's members, and those it supports, were not child molesters.

"We are a good-looking bunch of people, greying hair, well dressed, healthy, smiling; just about every person who has attended is someone you would surely find interesting and want to count as a friend."

Well, that certainly clears that up. Thank God for Pamela Freyd! As for Peter....

"What I find ironic is that Pamela Freyd and her cohorts proved the FMSF's connection to the CIA by how quickly they gained solid support from a host of former CIA contractors, starting with Martin Orne. Pamela also failed to mention that her husband, Peter Freyd, was involved in human experimentation.... A minimum of 29% of the advisory board members (of the FMSF, as of June 2002) were employed by universities and hospitals that, according to CIA records, were involved in human experimentation. There are other members who have been employed in the past, and there probably are other involved facilities that we do not have records on." - Kathleen Sullivan18

Which brings us to another quality member of the FMSF.
Harold Lief: Psychiatrist, CIA Researcher, Original Board Member.
And, inexplicably, Pamela Freyd's psychiatrist. Some people might call that a conflict of interest. Apparently not Doctor Lief!
Lief is a former colleague of Martin Orne's (a now-deceased board member; see below), having consulted with him in his work on "hypnotic programming" from the late 1960s on. Orne was a psychiatrist financed by the CIA to work on "the elicitation of 'anti-social' behaviour, dissolving memory and other mind-subduing techniques."9
In fact, Harold Lief worked on many disturbing CIA projects. Dr. Colin Ross recounts one of his lesser connections:

"(Robert Heath) did brain electrode implant research for the CIA and he would put brain electrodes in human brains for non-therapeutic purposes, and he would pour in psilocybin, mescaline, LSD, and other chemicals to see what would go tingle-tingle in the electrodes. And I will tell you more about that. He's funded by the CIA and the military. In one of his papers, he thanks Harold Lief for referring in one of his brain electrode implant research subjects."

It does not say much about what Lief himself did (or does now), but it does provide an illustration of the kind of work to which Lief and Orne have both been devoted.
In other words, the two of them are world-class specialists on the subject of trauma and repressed memory. They have dedicated their lives to these subjects. There are, hopefully, very few people who know more about the way that the human mind responds to extreme, inhumane, systemic, carefully planned trauma than Lief and Orne.
Although Ewen Cameron does come to mind.
Elizabeth Loftus: Former Psychologist, Professor, Board Member.
Loftus is probably the most often-referenced member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. They consider her to be an incredibly innovative and powerful researcher, and call her a "Renaissance Woman" on their website.
Renaissance Woman she may be, but her ethics as well as her psychological research have been repeatedly called into question. The False Memory Syndrome Facts website has pointed out that

"Her misrepresentation of the facts in articles in Skeptical Inquirer and Psychology Today caused APA ethics complaints to be filed by Lynn Crook and Jennifer Hoult (plaintiffs who prevailed in civil cases in which Loftus testified). However, in a slick maneuver, Loftus resigned her APA membership before the complaints could be investigated."2

Run away, run away, and live to fight another day. Or, in Loftus' case, to violate ethical standards another day. In 1997, psychiatrist David Corwin published evidence of a genuine repressed and recovered memory in a journal called "Child Maltreatment." He did not name his client, calling her only "Jane Doe." Loftus hired a private investigator to figure out who Jane Doe really was and track her down. She then wrote her own article for the Skeptical Inquirer, challenging Corwin's findings; in her article, she included enough personal information that Jane Doe was easily identifiable. She also made presentations to professional organizations in which she discussed intimate details of Jane's life. Now Jane Doe is suing her, for libel as well as for using identifiable private information.
Meanwhile, Jane Doe had complained to the University of Washington (where Loftus worked) about the blatant violation of her privacy. The University investigated her work for almost two years, but ultimately decided that she had done nothing wrong. According to the Boston Globe:

"Still, the committee told her that she could no longer contact Jane Doe's mother, who had become a friend, without its permission. And that she should take an ethics class. "Rather than submit to such indignities, Loftus departed in the fall of 2002 for a $155,000-a-year job at the University of California at Irvine. 'It was horrible,' she recalls. 'I left all my friends and a house I had lived in for 29 years.'"22

One can only hope that the Globe writer was attempting to be sarcastic about this highly-paid tragedy.
Somewhat ironically, there was no need for Loftus to end up in such a storm of drama and misconduct. There have been many other studies done on corroborated recovered memories, usually using more than one person. In fact, there is an entire Recovered Memory Project at Brown University21, which at the time of this writing has a database of ninety-six corroborated recovered memories. (By 1998 it had forty-five cases, so while it may not have been up to ninety-six in 2002, it was still a big resource.)
The Project requires that all its cases:

"be identified with sufficient specificity to facilitate independent examination by others.... (and) be corroborated by at least one of the following sources: confession, guilty plea, or self-incriminatory statement; testimony from other victims (or from an eyewitness to the abuse), or corroborative documentary evidence that is vitally relevant to the charges at issue; (or) corroboration of significant circumstantial evidence."23

Imagine how many lucrative job offers Loftus could go through if she stalked each of them!
Martin T. Orne: Psychiatrist, CIA Researcher involved in Project Monarch/MKULTRA7, Board Member.
Orne was called by some the "shadow chairman" of this Foundation, and there is certainly something shadowy about him.
In "The Search for the Manchurian Candidate," John Marks states that (according to CIA documents) Orne contributed a chapter to a book on "The Manipulation of Human Behavior" which was funded by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a CIA front. And, worse still, that Orne was involved in MKULTRA Subproject 84, one of their most-publicized forays into nonconsensual torture and experiments in mind control.20
Furthermore, Orne spent many years at the University of Pennsylvania's Experimental Psychiatry Lab conducting human experiments to study the effects of over 16 biochemical warfare agents, the effectiveness of choking, blistering, and vomiting agents, toxins, poison gas, and various incapacitating chemicals. According to the newsmagazine Toward Freedom,

"During the same period, he also worked with the Cornell University-based Human Ecology Fund, sharing his findings with Dr. Ewen Cameron, who was then based at the McGill University Allen Institute in Montreal. At Human Ecology, electroshock, lobotomies, drugs, incapacitants, hypnosis, sleep deprivation, and radio control of the brain were all specialties of the house."19

He is, by all accounts, a fairly notorious abuser, albeit one condoned and paid by the state. Why so much more is publicly known about his behavior than Lief's is not clear to me; it may be partly because Lief is still alive. Regardless, they are both quite a credit to the organization.
Ralph Underwager: Former Pastor, Former Psychologist, Co-Founder.
"The solution that I'm suggesting is that paedophiles become much more positive. They should directly attack the concept, the image, the picture of the paedophile as an evil, wicked, and reprehensible exploiter of children."5
Underwager was once the director of the Institute of Psychological Therapies in Minnesota, but was forced to resign in 1993. He is married to Hollida Wakefield, and together they have written two books on this subject, been jointly interviewed in a Dutch pedophile magazine called Paidika, and published a journal for "child abuse skeptics" called "Issues in Child Abuse Allegations."
According to Child Rights Watch, FMSF founder Ralph Underwager told a group of British reporters in 1994 that "scientific evidence" proved that 60% of all women molested as children believed the experience was "good for them," and "in 1988, a trial court decision in New York State held that Dr. Underwager was 'not qualified to render opinion as to (whether) or not (the victim) was sexually molested.'"9
In fact, that is only the tip of the iceberg as far as Underwager's history with the courts goes.
Let's turn on the television, shall we?
Here's an interesting program... an Australian episode of 60 Minutes which first aired there in 1990, two years before the FMSF was founded.6

Dr. Anna Salter:
Well, he is someone who makes his living going around the country and testifying against children in child sexual abuse cases. He says the same thing in essentially every case. Which is....

Reporter (voiceover):
And Anna Salter knows what she's talking about. A Ph.D. from Harvard, and a Master's Degree in Early Childhood. She says young children can be believed.

Dr. Salter:
This is consistent with the literature. If you look at what is the best legal textbook in the country today on children as witnesses, "Child Witness: Theory and Practice", John Meyers says clearly children as young as three can comprehend the duty to tell the truth.

Reporter:
And this man is a highly respected legal scholar in America?

Dr. Salter:
I think he's fairly clearly the chief leading scholar on child sexual abuse in the country.

Reporter:
Six American states have given Dr. Salter a grant to check Underwager's methods in court. And what did she find?

Dr. Salter:
That he isn't accurate. That what he says in court does not necessarily fairly represent the literature.

Reporter:
He distorts the facts?

Dr. Salter:
Uh, frequently. Sometimes he quotes specific studies, and he's frequently wrong about what the studies say.

Reporter:
So we thought we'd get Dr. Salter to analyze the evidence Underwager gave under oath at the Mr. Bubbles hearing, where he testified his qualifications had never been questioned. But in an American case, the Swann case, this is what the courts said about Mr. Underwager.

Dr. Salter:
The court remains convinced the psychologist did not have the qualifications to testify as a doctor. The trial court ruled that the psychologist's proposed testimony was not proper because there was no indication that the results of the doctor's work had been accepted in the scientific community.

Reporter:
In the Mr. Bubbles case, he said his qualifications were never in question.... Now, the second incident, in the Mr. Bubbles case, was where Underwager said that 90 percent of accusations against child molesters are wrong. Now, is that backed up scientifically?

Dr. Salter:
No, that's gobbledegook. I don't know of any study that would support that.

(Scene switch)

Reporter:
This is Underwager's home base, Northfield, Minnesota. His so-called clinic is set on seventy acres of beautiful countryside. We arranged to meet him here to talk about his involvement in the Mr. Bubbles case. And, right on cue, Underwager presents his "evidence."

Underwager:
Uh, there is a major German study that was done, and reported, in 1983 -- a major finding -- is that, for children who have been abused, the impact of adult behaviors toward actually abused children is more traumatic, and does more harm to the children than the abuse itself.

Reporter:
Is that right?

Underwager:
Yes. German . . .

Reporter:
Uh, what report's this?

Underwager:
Uh, it's (M.C.) Baurmann , 1983, in German it's, uh, "SexualitaÄt, Gewalt und psychische Folgen". Wiesbaden: Bundeskriminalamt, Forschungsreihe 15. (Sexuality, Violence, and Psychological Consequences)

(Scene switch)

Reporter:
And what did Baurmann really say?

Dr. Salter:
Well, I'm afraid what he said was, of the reported sexual contacts, half of the sexual victims claimed the sexual act itself to be the main cause of injury; one-third, the behavior of the suspect; and one-tenth each, the behavior of relatives, friends, or the police. In other words, instead of saying that the majority of children were harmed by the system, they said that it was a very small minority. (Editorial note: Compare this to Wakefield's comments on pedophila, below. See a trend?)

(Scene switch)

Reporter:
Mr. Underwager, I have the Baurmann report in front of me.

Underwager:
Yes sir.

Reporter:
It's directly opposite to what you just said.

Underwager:
No, I don't believe it is at all. I'm saying, I didn't say that that's what happens in every case.

Reporter:
No, but you said the majority of cases.

Underwager:
No, I don't believe I did.

(Scene switch)

Reporter:
Over the past couple of years, courts across America have begun saying "No" to Underwager. That his "expert evidence" is unreliable. Two recent cases here in New York said just that. But even more damning was a case last year, the Hudy case (New York, May 1989).

Peters:
It was the court's observation that Dr. Underwager's testimony was based on inadequate research, and his preparation was inadequate, and therefore lacking in sound foundation.

Reporter:
Again, damning.

So: we add to their ranks a man who isn't even allowed to testify anymore in many states because he is notorious for making up evidence; who has dedicated his life to testifying against alleged victims of sexual abuse, who he doesn't even know, with the evidence he makes up; who was this thoroughly discredited before the False Memory Syndrome Foundation began, and who still produces arguments for them before various courts; and who, of course, helped create the entire organization.
And then there's his partner in crime....
Hollida Wakefield: Psychologist, Co-Founder.
A writer and editor working with husband Ralph Underwager. In their joint interview with Paidika, she explained her belief that it is not sexual abuse which hurts a child, but society's disapproval: that, in fact, if society would just lay off those poor pedophiles, there could be no harm done to the child.

"The problem, as I would state it, is that in the United States, paedophilia is viewed so negatively that I think the possibility of harming the young man would be very real. I don't know if a positive model is possible in the United States. The climate is such in the United States that it would be very, very difficult for a paedophile, even with the most idealistic of motives and aspirations, to make his relationship actually work in practice. Even if the boy at some point viewed it as positive, after coming into contact with the way the society as a whole viewed it, the very real danger would be created of making the experience harmful."5

Why didn't the rest of us think of that? Don't stop having sex with children - which is rape, by the way, because children don't have the developmental ability or knowledge required to be able to give informed consent about sexual acts - don't stop doing any of that at all! Just redefine it and make sure everyone tells kids it's great! They won't be fucked up at ALL!
This is the kind of brilliant logic about the effects of child abuse that you can get from your local chapter of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
Interestingly, after that interview, Underwager left the organization, and I've repeatedly heard it implied that he was forced to leave. But Wakefield is still serving on their board.

Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice

That was the original title Adolf Hitler chose for Mein Kampf; it might just as well be the wail of the FMSF Board, trying to understand why they are so maligned by survivor and pro-survivor communities.
In Treating Abuse Today, nurse Stephanie J. Dallam writes:

"...The FMSF's 2,056 unsubstantiated reports of 'false memory' must be understood in relation to the estimated millions of cases of sexual abuse and subsequent traumatic amnesia in our society. Rather than demonstrating an epidemic of false memories, the statistics provided by the FMSF demonstrate just the opposite: In spite of heavy media coverage, relatively few families have contacted or joined the organization. Furthermore, the incidence of false memory claims, which was never significant in proportion to the population, has declined steadily since 1992."3

As for its CIA connections, their inclusion here serves two purposes.
First of all, this organization above all denies that ritual abuse exists. And they use its perceived nonexistence repeatedly to argue against recovered memories. Pamela Freyd in particular, when interviewed by Treating Abuse Today, constantly cited people's memories of ritual abuse as proof that memories could be implanted and that all memories of abuse were questionable. Yet both their Board of Directors and (above all) their Scientific Advisory Board have always included some of the premier ritual abusers in the country, by almost any definition of the term, according to the government's own documents.
I'm just saying.
Secondly, several researchers and reporters have made the leap to asking why there are so many connections between the CIA and the FMSF. As Husayn Al-Kurdi observes in Toward Freedom,

"With links to CIA mind control experts and accused child abusers, the false memory movement turns 'blaming the victim' into a science... It should come as no surprise, then, that long-time CIA and 'intelligence complex' operatives turn up on the FMSF Advisory Board.19

Researcher and psychologist Colin Ross goes even further:

"...The idea that there could be a deliberate disinformation campaign element to the False Memory movement is perfectly plausible, consistent with history, and could be expected.... So here we have, with all of this documentation, all of this proof -- we know that it is perfectly possible that people we are seeing in therapy who are claiming to be victims of systematic military mind-control experimentation are telling us about what actually happened to them.... "Fortunately.... there is no way it could conceivably be possible, you will all agree, that there could... be any nervousness in the Intelligence Community about Manchurian Candidates spilling out into civilian psychotherapies and that a disinformation program based on False Memories would be required. It is obviously absurd. Nobody but a CIA conspiracy nut would ever suggest that."17

Whether the False Memory Syndrome Foundation is a CIA front or a group of innocent parents tearfully wondering why their children don't love them anymore - or something in between - one thing seems certain: they are a very, very bad idea. Because of the FMSF, much of the mainstream media in the United States is devoted to spreading the comfortable idea that abuse mostly doesn't happen, and that it's far more likely that a therapist is just messing with your head than that anything bad ever happened to you. Many a court case has been slammed shut because of misinformation from the FMSF. They taint the pool of information with discredited studies and misremembered "facts," and apparently, somehow, with sheer charisma.
But worst of all, I think, is the effect on the survivor who is just now recovering memories of abuse. There is the sonic boom impact of decades of concentrated emotion, the shock of understanding so much more about why things are the way they are, and of not understanding how such things could ever have happened. There is the long, wrenching, and powerful journey toward feeling safe and whole and loved. And now, they've given us the constant questioning of our sanity and the twitching certainty that when we finally tell someone this awful truth that we've spent so long working to accept, they will refuse to believe it, insist we have FMS, or even sue the people who have helped us deal with it.
Abuse itself is mindfuck enough. To extend that violation into adulthood, as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation has done, is unconscionable.
*Roll Credits*
1. http://www.fmsfonline.org/
2. http://fmsf.com/
3. http://fmsf.com/clinical.shtml
4. http://www.astraeasweb.net/politics/fmindex.shtml
5. http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/NudistHa...ager2.html
6. http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/NudistHa...bbles.html
7. http://members.aol.com/smartnews/Sample-Issue-35.htm
8. http://www.cjr.org/archives.asp?url=/97/4/memory.asp
9. http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/stopchi...t/fms.html
10. http://www.survivorsswindon.com/Not-True.htm
11. http://fmsf.com/v3n3-pfreyd.shtml
12. http://users.owt.com/crook/memory/
13. http://www.sidran.org/traumabr.html
14. http://www.smith-lawfirm.com/McGonigle_review.htm
15. http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/mindnet/mn116b.htm
16. http://www.fmsf.com/ethics.shtml
17. http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/mindnet/mn194.htm
18. http://www.kathleen-sullivan.com/Governm...search.htm
19. http://www.towardfreedom.com/1998/may98/messing.htm
20. http://members.aol.com/smartnews/fivecases.htm
21. http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Taubman...chive.html
22. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/a...ar?mode=PF
23. http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Taubman..._crit.html
1955 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103-5766
Telephone: 215-940-1040, Fax: 215-940-1042.
Email: mail@fmsfonline.org
Pamela Freyd, Ph.D., Executive Director
....
*Bonus Footage!*
(Scene switch to Peters' office )
Reporter: Do you think Underwager has got a lot to answer for over the years?
Peters: I think so. I think a lot of children have suffered at his hand. Children who probably have been abused...have been put back into situations where they're likely to have been molested again.
(Switch to Vaughan's office)
Vaughan: I think that Underwager must have trouble sleeping.
(Switch to Underwager's house where Underwager is standing over the reporter. A hulk of a man, Underwager is trying to kick the entire television crew out of his house.)
Reporter: Why don't you, why don't you sit down and talk about this? All this research that you quote.
(Throughout the following exchange, they are talking at the same time)
Underwager: You are to leave, you are to leave, you are to leave my home.
Reporter: Mr. Underwager you have researched, and quoted research, inaccurately, and distorted it for years, and you know it.
Underwager: You are to leave my home. I am not willing to continue. I am not willing to continue. You are a bastard
Reporter: No I'm not.
Underwager: You are a bastard.
Reporter: I just love children.
Underwager: And you're a bastard. To come here under false pretenses--
Reporter: Not at all. Some say you go to court under false pretenses, Mr. Underwager.
Underwager: You, leave my home. Your people can leave now, you go out the door now.
Reporter: Questions getting a bit hard, were they?
Underwager: You go out the door now.
Reporter: I would like to ask you about your qualifications. In the Mr. Bubbles case you said that your qualifications had never been questioned in relation to the Swann case.
Underwager: You go out the door now.
Reporter: You told an untruth in the Mr. Bubbles hearing.
Underwager: You go out the door now.
Reporter: You don't want to answer that?
Underwager: I'm telling you to go out the door now, or I'm calling the police.
Reporter: I think, uh, you're showing your true colors, we should leave. Thank you, Mr. Underwager. Appreciate the time. Sure you don't want to continue the interview?
Underwager: (Gives a small laugh) I'm sixty one years old Saturday. And I think you are one of the most dishonorable men that I have ever met.
Reporter: That's what a lot of clinical psychologists say about you. You should be aware of that.
Underwager: I am fully aware of that.
*Fade to black.*
http://everything2.com/title/False+Memor...Foundation

[Magda Hassan]

False memory syndrome proponents tactics

False memory syndrome proponents have done the following to try and ensure that only their point of view is in the public view.
1) Harassing debate opponents
Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter DOI: 10.1207/s15327019eb0802_2 Published in: Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998 , pages 115 – 124 Abstract – In 1988 I began a report on the accuracy of expert testimony in child sexual abuse cases utilizing Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield as a case study (Wakefield & Underwager, 1988). In response, Underwager and Wakefield began a campaign of harassment and intimidation, which included multiple lawsuits; an ethics charge; phony (and secretly taped) phone calls; and ad hominem attacks, including one that I was laundering federal grant monies. The harassment and intimidation failed as the author refused demands to retract. In addition, the lawsuits and ethics charges were dismissed.
http://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fm...s-learned/
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a918444284
Calof, D.L. (1998). Notes from a practice under siege: Harassment, defamation, and intimidation in the name of science, Ethics and Behavior, 8(2) pp. 161-187. Abstract: I have practiced psychotherapy, family therapy, and hypnotherapy for over 25 years without a single board complaint or lawsuit by a client. For over 3 years, however, a group of proponents of the false memory syndrome (FMS) hypothesis, including members, officials, and supporters of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, Inc., have waged a multimodal campaign of harassment and defamation directed against me, my clinical clients, my staff, my family, and others connected to me. I have neither treated these harassers or their families nor had any professional or personal dealings with any of them; I am not related in any way to the disclosures of memories of sexual abuse in these families. Nonetheless, this group disrupts my professional and personal life and threatens to drive me out of business. In this article, I describe practicing psychotherapy under a state of siege and place the campaign against me in the context of a much broader effort in the FMS movement to denigrate, defame, and harass clinicians, lecturers, writers, and researchers identified with the abuse and trauma treatment communities. http://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/notes-from-a-practice-under-siege/
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a918444287
JENNIFER A. HOULT in 1988, filed a civil suit against her father – a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation – (J. Hoult v. D.P. Hoult), whom she alleged had sexually abused her throughout her childhood. In 1993, this case was unanimously decided in her favor, and she was awarded monetary damages. However, Hoult has seen the facts of her case twisted and misreported in the media and by FMS proponents. She writes:
“Since 1995, I have become aware of the parallel between the intimidation and silencing in the microcosm of the abusive family and in the macrocosm of a society that is ill at ease in dealing with the abuse of children. During my childhood my father protected himself from being held accountable by threatening me into silence. I believe that published documents demonstrate how some members and supporters of false memory groups publish false statements that defame and intimidate victims of proven violence and their supporters. Such altered accounts are used to discredit others in court and in the press.” — Silencing the Victim: The Politics of Discrediting Child Abuse Survivors, p. 125. http://www.fmsf.com/ethics.shtml
Abstract: As a victim of child abuse who proved my claims in a landmark civil suit, there have been many attempts to silence and discredit me. This article provides an overview of my court case and its effects. Silencing the Victim: The Politics of Discrediting Child Abuse Survivors – Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998 , pages 125 – 140
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a918444285
2) Misrepresenting the data in the field
“Since at least 95 percent of child molesters initially deny their abusive behaviors, how can untrained lay people like Pamela Freyd and her staff “document” a real or “unreal” case of “FMS,” as appears to be the case with most of their communications, which usually occur over the telephone or by letter. (p. 76) (Memory and abuse: remembering and healing the effects of trauma By Charles L. Whitfield, Christine Courtois Published by HCI, 1995)
http://books.google.com/books?id=z1LW3u1e04YC
JENNIFER J. FREYD, PH.D., author of “Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse.”
“Despite this documentation for both traumatic amnesia and essentially accurate delayed recall, memory science is often presented as if it supports the view that traumatic amnesia is very unlikely or perhaps impossible and that a great many, perhaps a majority, maybe even all, recovered memories of abuse are false….Yet no research supports such an implication…and a great deal of research supports the premise that forgetting sexual abuse is fairly common and that recovered memories are sometimes essentially true.” (p. 107)
Science in the Memory Debate – Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998 , pages 101 – 113 http://www.fmsf.com/ethics.shtml
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a918444283
Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8 Issue 2 1998 ISSN: 1532-7019 (electronic) 1050-8422 (paper) http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g918444289
Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Anna Salter, Et Al., Defendants-Appellees., 22 F.3d 730 (7th Cir. 1994) Federal Circuits, 7th Cir. (April 25, 1994) Docket number: 93-2422
“Psychologists Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield have written two books…When a given reference fails to support their viewpoint they simply misstate the conclusion. When they cannot use a quotation out of context from an article, they make unsupported statements, some of which are palpably untrue and others simply unprovable. David L. Chadwick, Book Review, in 261 JAMA 3035 (May 26, 1989)”
“Both Salter and Toth came to believe that Underwager is a hired gun who makes a living by deceiving judges about the state of medical knowledge and thus assisting child molesters to evade punishment.” http://vlex.com/vid/36092881
3) Controlling the media
U-Turn on Memory Lane by Mike Stanton – Columbia Journalism Review – July/August 1997
“Rarely has such a strange and little-understood organization had such a profound effect on media coverage of such a controversial matter. The foundation is an aggressive, well-financed p.r. machine adept at manipulating the press, harassing its critics, and mobilizing a diverse army of psychiatrists, outspoken academics, expert defense witnesses, litigious lawyers, Freud bashers, critics of psychotherapy, and devastated parents. With a budget of $750,000 a year from members and outside supporters, the foundation’s reach far exceeds its actual membership of about 3,000.”
“As controversial memory cases arose around the country, FMSF boosters contacted journalists to pitch the false-memory argument, more and more reporters picked up on the issue, and the foundation became an overnight media darling. The story line that had dominated the press since the 1980s — an underreported toll of sexual abuse, including sympathetic stories of adult survivors resurrecting long-lost memories of it — was quickly turned around. The focus shifted to new tearful victims — respectable, elderly parents who could no longer see their children and grandchildren because of bad therapists who implanted memories…:” http://web.archive.org/web/2007121601115...memory.asp
[URL="http://web.archive.org/web/20071216011151/http://backissues.cjrarchives.org/year/97/4/memory.asp"]http://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/false-memory-syndrome-proponents-tactics/
[/URL]

[Magda Hassan]

CIA CONNECTIONS TO THE MIND CONTROL CULTS
Excerpts from Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A. By Alex Constantine Portland, OR : Feral House, 1995

Chapter Three THE FALSE MEMORY HOAX

Part I:

CIA CONNECTIONS TO THE MIND CONTROL CULTS

Swiss newspapers described the carnage inside the charred
farmhouse as a "wax museum of death." Within hours, 27 other
members of the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple were found
dead at chalets in Granges, Switzerland and Morin Heights,
Quebec. Luc Jouret, the Temple's grand master, the London Times
reported, "espoused a hybrid religion that owed more to Umberto
Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum than to any bible. His followers
called themselves 'knights of Christ.' The crusading codes of
the Knights Templar, the rose-and-cross symbolism of the
medieval Rosicrucian Order, Nazi occultism and new age mysticism
were joined together into a mumbo-jumbo mishmash that seemed
more designed for extracting money from disciples than saving
souls."
Jouret, born in the Belgian Congo in 1947, set out in
youth as a mystic with communist leanings, but his politics
apparently swung full circle. He has since been linked to a
clutch of neo-Nazis responsible for a string of bombings in
Canada. He told friends that he had once served with a unit of
Belgium paratroopers.
French-Canadian journalist Pierre Tourangeau investigated
the sect for two years. A few days after the mass murder, he
reported that the sect was financed by the proceeds of
gun-running to Europe and South America. Simultaneously, Radio
Canada announced that Jouret's Templars earned hundreds of
millions of dollars laundering the profits through the infamous
Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), closed by
authorities worldwide in 1991. Montreal's La Presse observed:
"each new piece of information only thickens the mystery"--but
the combination of international arms smuggling and BCCI
presented a familiar enough picture of CIA sedition. The
Manhattan D.A. who closed the American branch announced that 16
witnesses had died in the course of investigating the bank's
entanglements in covert operations of the CIA, arms smuggling to
Iraq, money laundering and child prostitution.
The average coffee table would crumple under the weighty
BCCI Book of the Dead. Journalist Danny Cassalaro and Vince
Foster appear in it--grim antecedents to the Solar Temple
killings. The cult's connection to BCCI (reported in Europe but
filtered from American newspaper accounts) fed speculation among
Canadian journalists that followers of Jouret were killed to bury
public disclosures of gun-running and money laundering.
But the fraternizing of America's national security elite
and the cults did not begin in Cheiry, Switzerland. Jouret's
Order of the Solar Temple was but the latest incarnation of mind
control operations organized and overseen by the CIA and
Department of Defense.

In a sense, we are in the same ethical
and moral dilemma as the physicists in the days
prior to the Manhattan Project. Those of us who
work in this field see a developing potential for
a nearly total control of human emotional status.

-- Dr. Wayne Evans
_U.S. Army Institute
of Environmental Medicine_

Scientists in the CIA's mind control fraternity lead
double lives. Many are highly respected, but if the truth were
known they would be deafened by the public outcry and drummed out
of their respective academic haunts.
Martin T. Orne, for example, a senior CIA/Navy
researcher, is based at the University of Pennsylvania's
Experimental Psychiatry Laboratory. He is also an original member
of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's advisory board, a
tightly-drawn coterie of psychiatrists, many with backgrounds in
CIA mind control experimentation in its myriad forms. The
Foundation is dedicated to denying the existence of cult mind
control and child abuse. It's primary pursuit is the castigation
of survivors and therapists for fabricating accusations of ritual
abuse.
Dismissing cult abuse as hysteria or false memory, a
common defense strategy, may relieve parents of preschool
children. In a small percentage of cult abuse cases it's possible
that children may be led to believe they've been victimized.
But the CIA and its cover organizations have a vested
interest in blowing smoke at the cult underground because the
worlds of CIA mind control and many cults merge inextricably. The
drum beat of "false accusations" from the media is taken up by
paid operatives like Dr. Orne and the False Memory Syndrome
Foundation to conceal the crimes of the Agency.
Orne's forays into hypno-programming were financed in the
1960s by the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA cover at Cornell
University and the underwriter of many of the formative mind
control experiments conducted in the U.S. and abroad, including
the gruesome brainwashing and remote mind control experiments of
D. Ewen Cameron at Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute. Research
specialties of the CIA's black psychiatrists included
electroshock lobotomies, drugging agents, incapacitants,
hypnosis, sleep deprivation and radio control of the brain, among
hundreds of sub-projects.
The secondary source of funding for Dr. Orne's work in
hypnotic suggestion and dissolution of memory is eerie in the
cult child abuse context. The voluminous files of John Marks in
Washington, D.C. (139 boxes obtained under FOIA, to be exact,
two-fifths of which document CIA interest in the occult) include
an Agency report itemizing a $30,000 grant to Orne from Human
Ecology, and another $30,000 from Boston's Scientific Engineering
Institute (SEI)--another CIA funding cover, founded by Edwin
Land of the Polaroid Corporation (and supervision of the U-2 spy
plane escapades). This was the year that the CIA's Office of
Research and Development (ORD) geared up a study of
parapsychology and the occult. The investigation, dubbed Project
OFTEN-CHICKWIT, gave rise to the establishment of a social
"laboratory" by SEI scientists at the University of South
Carolina--a college class in black witchcraft, demonology and
voodoo.
Dr. Orne, with SEI funding, marked out his own mind
control corner at the University of Pennsylvania in the early
1960s. He does not publicize his role as CIA psychiatrist. He
denies it, very plausibly. In a letter to Dr. Orne, Marks once
reminded him that he'd disavowed knowledge of his participation
in one mind-wrecking experimental sub-project. Orne later
recanted, admitting that he'd been aware of the true source of
funding all along.
Among psychiatrists in the CIA's mind control fraternity,
Orne ranks among the most venerable. He once boasted to Marks
that he was routinely briefed on all significant CIA behavior
modification experiments: "Why would they come to him," Martin
Cannon muses in The Controllers, which links UFO abductions to
secret military research veiled by screen memories of "alien"
abduction, "unless Orne had a high security clearance and worked
extensively with the intelligence services?"
To supplement his CIA income, the influential Dr. Orne
has been the donee of grants from the Office of Naval Research
and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. "I should like
to hear," Cannon says, "what innocent explanation, if any, the
Air Force has to offer to explain their interest in post-hypnotic
amnesia."
According to Army records, Orne's stomping grounds, Penn
U., was a bee-hive of secret experiments in the Vietnam War
period. The Pentagon and CIA--under the auspices of ORD's Steve
Aldrich, a doyen of occult and parapsychological studies--
conferred the Agency's most lucrative research award upon the
University of Pennsylvania to study the effects of 16
newly-concocted biochemical warfare agents on humans, including
choking, blistering and vomiting agents, toxins, poison gas and
incapacitating chemicals. The tests were abruptly halted in 1972
when the prison's medical lab burned to the ground.
Testimony before the 1977 Church Committee's probe of the
CIA hinted that, as of 1963, the scientific squalor of the CIA's
mind control regimen, code-named MKULTRA, had abandoned military
and academic laboratories, fearing exposure, and mushroomed in
cities across the country. Confirmation arrived in 1980 when
Joseph Holsinger, an aide to late Congressman Leo Ryan (who was
murdered by a death squad at Jonestown) exposed the formation of
eccentric religious cults by the CIA. Holsinger made the
allegation at a colloquium of psychologists in San Francisco on
"Psychosocial Implications of the Jonestown Phenomenon."
Holsinger maintained that a CIA rear-support base had been in
collusion with Jones to perform medical and mind control
experiments at People's Temple. The former Congressional aide
cited an essay he'd received in the mail, "The Penal Colony,"
written by a Berkeley psychologist. The author had emphasized:
Rather than terminating MKULTRA, THE CIA SHIFTED ITS PROGRAMS
FROM PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS TO PRIVATE CULT GROUPS, including the
People's Temple.
Jonestown had its grey eminence in Dr. Lawrence Laird
Layton of the University of California at Berkeley, formerly a
chemist for the Manhattan Project and head of the Army's chemical
warfare research division in the early 1950s. (Larry Layton, his
son, led the death squad that murdered Congressman Leo Ryan,
who'd arrived at Guyana to investigate the cult.) Michael Meiers,
author of Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?, scavenged for
information on the People's Temple for six years, concluding:
"The Jonestown experiment was conceived by Dr. Layton, staffed by
Dr. Layton and financed by Dr. Layton. It was as much his project
as it was Jim Jones'. Though it was essential for him to remain
in the background for security reasons, Dr. Layton maintained
contact with and even control of the experiment through his wife
and children." The African-American cult had at its core a
Caucasian inner-council, composed of Dr. Layton's family and
in-laws.
The press was blind to obvious CIA connections, but
survivors of the carnage in Guyana followed the leads and
maintained that Jim Jones was "an employee, servant, agent or
operative of the Central Intelligence Agency" from 1963--the
year the Agency turned to cult cut-outs to conceal MKULTRA mind
control activities--until 1978. In October 1981 the survivors of
Jonestown filed a $63 million lawsuit against Secretary of State
Cyrus Vance and Stansfield Turner, former director of the CIA,
currently a teacher at the University of Maryland and a director
of the Monsanto Corporation. The suit, filed in U.S. district
court in San Francisco, accused Turner of conspiring with Agency
operatives to "enhance the economic and political powers of James
Warren Jones," and of conducting "mind control and drug
experimentation" on the Temple flock.
The suit was dismissed four months later for "failure to
prosecute timely." All requests for an appeal were denied.
Ligatures of the CIA clung to the cults. Much of the
violence that has since exploded across the front pages was
incited by CIA academics at leading universities.
Small wonder, then, that Ted Goertzel, director of the
Forum for Policy Research at Rutgers, which maintains a symbiosis
with the CIA despite media exposure, should write that the most
susceptible victims of "cryptomnesia" (a synonym for false
memories) believe "in conspiracies, including the JFK
assassination, AIDS conspiracies, as well as the UFO cover-up."
The problem, Goertzel says, "may have its origins in early
childhood," and is accompanied by "feelings of anomie and anxiety
that make the individual more likely to construct false memories
out of information stored in the unconscious mind."
This side of gilded rationalizations, the CIA's links to
the cults are no manifestation of "cryptomnesia."
Like Jonestown, the Symbionese Liberation Army was a mind
control creation unleashed by the Agency. The late political
researcher Mae Brussell, whose study of The Firm commenced in
1963 after the assassination of John Kennedy, wrote in 1974 that
the rabid guerrilla band "consisted predominantly of CIA agents
and police informers." This unsavory group was, Brussell
insisted, "an extension of psychological experimentation
projects, connected to Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park."
(She went on to lament that "many of the current rash of
'senseless killings,' 'massacres,' and 'zombie-type murders' are
committed by individuals who have been in Army hospitals, mental
hospitals or prison hospitals, where their heads have been
literally taken over surgically to create terror in the
community.")
Evidence that the CIA conceived and directed the SLA was
obvious. The SLA leadership was trained by Colston Westbrook, a
Pennsylvania native. Westbrook was a veteran of the CIA's
murderous PHOENIX Program in South Vietnam, where he trained
terrorist cadres and death squads. In 1969 he took a job as an
administrator of Pacific Architects and Engineers, a CIA
proprietary in Southern California. Three of Westbrook's foot
soldiers, Emily and William Harris and Angela Atwood (a former
police intelligence informer), had been students of the College
of Foreign Affairs, a CIA cover at the University of Indiana.
Even the SLA symbol, a seven-headed cobra, had been adopted by
the OSS (America's wartime intelligence agency) and CIA to
designate precepts of brainwashing.
When the smoke cleared at SLA headquarters in L.A., Dr.
Martin Orne was called upon to examine Patricia Hearst in
preparation for trial. The government charged that she had
participated voluntarily in the SLA's gun-toting crime spree.
Orne's was a foregone conclusion--he sided with the government.
His opinion was shared by two other psychiatrists called to
appraise Ms. Hearst's state of mind, Robert Jay Lifton and Louis
Jolyon West. Dr. Lifton was a co-founder of the aforementioned
Human Ecology Fund. The CIA contractor that showered Orne with
research grants in the 1960s. Dr. West is one of the CIA's most
notorious mind control specialists, currently director of UCLA's
Neuropsychiatric Institute. It was West who brought a score of
mind control psychiatrists of the ultra-right political stripe to
the UCLA campus.
Drs. Orne, Lifton and West unanimously agreed that Patty
Hearst had been "persuasively coerced" to join the SLA. She had
been put through a grueling thought reform regimen. She'd been
isolated and sensory deprived, raped, humiliated, badgered,
politically indoctrinated with a surrealistic mutation of Third
World Marxism. Ms. Hearst was only allowed human companionship
when she exhibited signs of submission. Orne and his colleagues
assured that attention was narrowed to their psychologizing,
conveniently rendering evidence of CIA collusion extraneous to
consideration by the jury.
Another psychiatrist called to testify at the trial of
"Tania" surfaced with Dr. Orne in 1991 on the board of the False
Memory Syndrome Foundation. (The FMSF board is almost exclusively
composed of former CIA and military doctors currently employed by
major universities. None have backgrounds in ritual abuse--their
common interest is behavior modification. Dr. Margaret Singer, a
retired Berkeley Ph.D., studied repatriated prisoners-of-war
returning from the Korean War at the Walter Reed Army Institute
of Research in Maryland (1952-58).
Singer turned up in 1982 on the book jacket of Raven--
the CIA's code-name for Jim Jones--by San Francisco Examiner
reporters Tim Reiterman and John Jacobs, a thoroughly-researched
account of the People's Temple that completely side-steps CIA
involvement. Co-author John Jacobs was supposedly one of the
country's leading authorities on CIA mind control, a subject he
studied at length for a series published by the Washington Post.
Reiterman had been the Examiner reporter on the Patricia Hearst
beat. Yet both writers managed to avoid obvious intelligence
connections. Dr. Singer commended the book as "the definitive
psychohistory of Jim Jones." Raven, she opined, conveyed "the
essence of psychological and social processes that Jim Jones, the
ultimate manipulator, set in motion." The true "manipulators," of
course, were operatives of the CIA, and the public disinformation
gambit lauded by Dr. Singer was, according to Meiers, in tune
with "a concerted attempt to suppress information, stifle
investigations, censor writers and manipulate public
information."
The CIA and Pentagon have quietly organized and
influenced a long line of mind control cults, among them:
The Riverside Lodge of the Ordo Templis Orientis: Also
known as The Solar Lodge of the OTO, which followed the teachings
of cult messiah Aleister Crowley, whose fixed gaze on the astral
equinox resulted in instructions from his deities to form a
religious order. Crowley, high priest of the OTO and a British
intelligence agent, gave Winifred T. Smith a charter to open an
OTO lodge in Pasadena. The high priest of the lodge was Jack
Parsons, a rocket expert and founder of the California Institute
of Technology. Parsons, who took the oath of the anti-Christ in
1949, contributed to the design of the Pentagon under subsequent
CIA director John J. McCloy. He was killed in a still unexplained
laboratory explosion. There is a crater on the moon named after
him.
The OTO's Solar Lodge in San Bernardino was presided over
by Georgina "Jean" Brayton, the daughter of a ranking Air Force
officer in the 1960s. The cult subscribed to a grim, apocalyptic
view of the world, and like Charles Manson believed that race
wars would precipitate the Big Cataclysm. In the Faustian Los
Angeles underworld, the lodge was known for its indulgence in
sadomasochism, drug dealing, blood drinking, child molestation
and murder.
Candace Reos, a former member of the lodge, was deposed
by Riverside police in 1969. Reos said that Brayton controlled
the thinking of all cult members. One poor soul, she said, was
ordered to curb his sexual urges by cutting his wrists every time
he was aroused. Mrs. Reos told police, according to the report,
that when she became pregnant, Georgina was angry and told her
that she would have to condition herself to hate her child. Reos
told police that children of the cult's 43 adult members were
secluded from their parents and received "training" that took on
"very severe tones."
"There was a lot of spanking involved," she said, "a lot
of heavy criticism. There was a lot of enclosed in dark rooms."
The teachers, she added. "left welts."
If so ordered, adult cultists would beat their children.
According to a Riverside County Sheriff's report, a six
year-old child burned the group's school house to the ground. The
boy was punished by solitary confinement in a locked shipping
crate left in the desert, where the average temperature was 110
degrees, for two months. The boy was chained to a metal plate.
When police freed him, they were nauseated by the
suffocating stench of excrement. The child was smothered in flies
swarming from a tin-can toilet.
The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Movement: In 1985 the Portland
Oregonian published a 36-part, book-length series linking the
cult to opium trafficking, prostitution, money laundering, arson,
slave labor, mass poisonings, illegal wiretaps and the
stockpiling of guns and biochemical warfare weapons. The
year-long Oregonian investigation revealed cult ties to
CIA-trained mercenaries in El Salvador and the Far East.
Domestically, Rajneesh's secret police force worked with Agency
operatives.
Finders: On February 7, 1987 Customs agents raided a
child-porn ring in Tallahasee, Florida. Eight suspects and six
children were taken into custody. The children, according to a
Customs Department memo, behaved "like animals in a public park,"
and "were not aware of the function and purpose of telephones,
televisions and toilets."
The children told police that they were forced to live
outdoors and were given food only as a reward. A check on the
backgrounds of the adults turned up a police report, "specific in
describing 'bloody rituals' and sex orgies involving children,
and an as-yet unsolved murder." Customs agents searched a cult
safe house and discovered a computer room and documents recording
"high-tech" bank transfers, explosives, and a set of instructions
advising cult members on moving children through jurisdictions
around the country. One photographic album found in the house
featured the execution and disembowelment of goats, and
snapshots, according to a Customs report, of "adults and children
dressed in white sheets participating in a bloody ritual."
An American passport was found. The investigating agents
contacted the State Department and were advised to "terminate
further investigation."
They investigated anyway, reporting that "the CIA made
contact and admitted to owning the Finders ... as a front for a
domestic training organization, but that it had 'gone bad.'" The
late wife of Marion David Pettie, the cult's leader, had worked
for the Agency, and his son had been an employee of Air America,
the heroin-riddled CIA proprietary. Yet Pettie denied to a
reporter for U.S. News & World Report any connection to the Firm.
Police in Washington refused to comment. Officials of the CIA
dismissed as "hogwash" allegations of any connection to the
Finders cult.
MOVE: On May 13, 1985 MOVE's Philadelphia headquarters
was firebombed by local police. Not only did the fire consume the
cult's home--it devastated the entire neighborhood, leaving 11
dead and 250 homeless. The group was cofounded by Vince
Leapheart, aka John Africa, a Korean veteran. His intellectual
mentor and source of funding was Donald Glassey, a lecturer at
the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work. Glassey
was an admitted police "informant," but conducted himself like a
paid provocateur. He purchased weapons for the cult with cash
drawn from city coffers. John Africa, the cult's titular head,
claimed to be a messiah, and like Jim Jones to have Godly
"healing" powers and "total control" over his followers.
O.T.A.: The Order of the Temple of Astarte in Pasadena,
California is a "hermetic" occult organization that practices
"Magick in the Western Tradition." The cult is led by Fraters
Khenemel, a police officer, and Aleyin, a veteran Green Beret.
The cult's everyday language is unusual for a mystical order--
one group schedule is laden with words like "operation,"
"sixteen-thirty hours," and "travel orders." Demonology is among
the OTA's primary occult interests.
The police connection recalls the statement of Louis
Tackwood, the former LAPD provocateur whose revelations of secret
police subterfuge set off a political tempest in Los Angeles in
1973. "You don't know," he told journalist Donald Freed, "but
there's a devil worship cult in Pasadena. Actually in Altadena."
Tackwood alleged that the cultists were "on the LAPD payroll."
The CIA and Pentagon cooperate in the creation of cults.
To be sure, the Association of National Security Alumni, a public
interest veterans group opposed to covert operations, considers
it a "primary issue of concern" that the Department of Defense
has a "perceived role in satanic cult activities, which qualify
in and of themselves as very damaging exercises in mind control
and behavioral modification."
It is beginning to dawn on the psychiatric community at
large that the CIA's mind control clique is a menace reminiscent
of Nazi medical experimentation. In 1993, Dr. Corydon Hammond, a
professor at the University of Utah's School of Medicine,
conducted a seminar on federally-funded mind control experiments.
Topics covered by Hammond included brainwashing, post-hypnotic
programming and the induction of multiple personalities by the
CIA. Hammond contended that the cult underground has roots in
Nazi Germany, and that the CIA's cult mind control techniques
were based upon those of Nazi scientists recruited by the CIA for
Cold Warfare. (Researcher Lenny Lapon estimates in Mass Murderers
in White Coats that 5,000 Nazis resettled in the U.S. after WW
II.) Hammond was forced to drop this line of inquiry by
professional ridicule, especially from the CIA's False Memory
Syndrome Foundation, and a barrage of death threats. At a recent
regional conference on ritual child abuse, he regretted that he
could no longer speak on the theme of government mind control.
The psychological community is waking to the threat in
its ranks, to judge by APA surveys and personal communications
with ranking members of the mental health field, but the world at
large remains in the dark. The "mass hysteria" and "false memory"
bromides disseminated by the establishment press obscure federal
and academic connections to the mind control cults, which are
defended largely by organized pedophiles, cultists and hired guns
of psychiatry. An ambitious disinformation gambit has led the
world at large to side with cultists operating under federal
protection. As at Jonestown and Chiery, Switzerland, the
denouement of cult activity often ends in the destruction of all
witnesses. This cycle of abuse and murder can only be ended by
full public awareness of the federal mind control initiative.

Part: II

The CIA, THE FALSE MEMORY SYNDROME FOUNDATION AND THE POLITICS
OF RITUAL ABUSE

The conference session bears a passing resemblance to a
12-Step meeting. Assembled in a Portland religious retreat,
members of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), all
accused of child abuse, are encouraged to unload their anguish.
Only women take the stage (they leave reporters with a
sympathetic impression--men stigmatized by child abuse do not).
Pamela Freyd, a Foundation founder, assures these victims of
pernicious therapies they are not alone. The Foundation's office
in Philadelphia, she says, takes 60 calls on a typical day from
distraught adults hounded by their own confused children, rogue
therapists and sensation-seeking pack journalists.
The number of dues-paying members (each contributes $100
a year) varies according to the source. The group reported in
January 1993 that 1,200 families had made contact in its first
year of operation. The same month, the San Jose Mercury News
declared flatly that "nearly 3,000 families" from across the
country had been recruited. The FMSF now claims 5,000 families.
Time magazine raised the figure to "7,000 individuals and
families who have sought assistance."
The Foundation's distinctive handling of statistics is
incessant. In April of this year the FMSF claimed 12,000 families
have been strained by false child abuse allegations. A month
later, the figure dropped to "9,500 U.S. families." Yet the
Foundation prides itself on accuracy. One FMSF newsletter advises
members to insist the media "report accurate information. The
rumors and misinformation surrounding the false accusations based
on recovery of repressed memories are shocking." The same author
regrets that "65% of accusations of abuse are now
unsubstantiated, a whopping jump from 35% in 1976." This figure,
once gleefully disseminated by such pedophile defense groups as
NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) and VOCAL
(Victims of Child Abuse Laws) was debunked years ago. It was
fabricated by Douglas Besherov of the American Enterprise
Institute, a hard right-wing propaganda factory fueled by the
Olin Foundation, a CIA funding cover. (Christian conservatives
are often accused of propagating ritual abuse "hysteria," yet in
the 1992 presidential election the para-conservative wing of the
Republican Party slipped into its platform a strategy to put an
end to investigations of child abuse.)
The FMSF selectively ignores child abuse data that
disagrees with their own. Judith Herman, author of Trauma and
Recovery, reported in the Harvard Mental Health Letter that false
abuse allegations by children "are rare, in the range of 2-8% of
reported cases. False retractions of true complaints are far more
common, especially when the victim is not sufficiently protected
after disclosure and therefore succumbs to intimidation by the
perpetrator or other family members who feel that they must
preserve secrecy."
Other statistics shunned by the False Memory Syndrome
Foundation include a survey presented at a 1992 psychiatric
conference that found that a full 88% of all therapists in a
large sampling consider ritual child abuse to be a very real
social problem with devastating emotional effects. Another: In
1990 the State University of New York at Buffalo polled a
national sampling of clinical psychologists on ritual abuse.
About 800 psychologists--a third of the poll--were aware of
treating at least one case. Only 5% of all child abuse cases ever
enter the courtroom--half of these end with the child in the
custody of the abusive parent..
The recovered memory debate was discussed at a 1993
conference on multiple personality disorder. Richard Lowenstein,
a psychiatrist from the University of Maryland Medical School,
argued that the Foundation is "media-directed, dedicated to
putting out disinformation."
Other conference participants contemplated funding
sources and "possible CIA connections."

The Devil Denuded

The CIA, in fact, has several designates on the FMSF
advisory board. They have in common backgrounds in mind control
experimentation. Their very presence on the board, and their
peculiar backgrounds, reveal some heavily obscured facts about
ritual child abuse.
Martin T. Orne, a senior CIA researcher, is an original
board member of the Foundation, and a psychiatrist at the
University of Pennsylvania's Experimental Psychiatry Lab in
Philadelphia. In 1962 his forays into hypno-programming (the
elicitation of "anti-social" behavior, dissolving memory and
other mind-subduing techniques) were financed by a CIA front at
Cornell University. He was also funded by Boston's Scientific
Engineering Institute, another front, and a clearinghouse for the
Agency's investigation of the occult.
The CIA and Pentagon have formed a partnership in the
creation of cults. To be sure, the Association of National
Security Alumni, a public interest veterans group opposed to
clandestine ops, considers it a "primary issue of concern" that
the Department of Defense has a "perceived role in satanic cult
activities, which qualify in and of themselves as very damaging
exercises in mind control."
The smoothing over of the national security state's cult
connections is handled by academic "experts."
A forerunner of the Foundation is based in Buffalo, New
York, the Committee for Scientific Examination of Religion, best
known for the publication of Satanism in America: How the Devil
Got More Than His Due, widely considered to be a legitimate
study. The authors turn up their noses to ritual abuse,
dismissing the hundreds of reports around the country as mass
"hysteria." Cult researcher Carl Raschke reported in a March,
1991 article that he coincidentally met Hudson Frew, a Satanism
in America co-author, at a Berkeley bookstore. "Frew was wearing
a five-pointed star, or pentagram, the symbol of witchcraft and
earth magic," Raschke says. Shawn Carlson, a contributor to the
book, is identified by the media as a "physicist." Yet he runs
the Gaia Press in El Cerrito, California, a New Age publishing
house with an emphasis on witchcraft and occultic lore. Carlson
is also a "scientific and technical consultant" to the Committee
for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal" (a
promoter of the "false memory" theory of ritual abuse and UFO
abductions), publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer.


The FMS Foundation is no less eccentric. Within two years
of its founding, it was clear that the Foundation leadership was
far from disinterested on the workings of childhood memory, and
concealed a secret sexual and political agenda.
FMSF founder Ralph Underwager, director of the Institute
of Psychological Therapies in Minnesota, was forced to resign in
1993. Underwager (a former Lutheran pastor) and his wife Hollida
Wakefield publish a journal, Issues in Child Abuse Allegations,
written by and for child abuse "skeptics." His departure from the
False Memory Syndrome Foundation was hastened by a remark in an
interview, appearing in an Amsterdam journal for pedophiles, that
it was "God's Will" adults engage in sex with children. (His wife
Hollida remained on the Foundation's board after he left.) As it
happens, holy dispensation for pedophiles is the exact credo of
the Children of God cult. It was fitting, then, when Underwager
filed an affidavit on behalf of cult members tried in France in
1992, insisting that the accused were positively "not guilty of
abuse upon children." In the interview, he prevailed upon
pedophiles everywhere to shed stigmatization as "wicked and
reprehensible" users of children.
In keeping with the Foundation's creative use of
statistics, Dr. Underwager told a group of British reporters in
1994 that "scientific evidence" proved 60% of all women molested
as children believed the experience was "good for them."
Dr. Underwager invariably sides with the defense. His
grandiloquent orations have graced courtrooms around the world,
often by satellite. Defense lawyers for Woody Allen turned to
him, he boasts, when Mia Farrow accused her estranged husband of
molesting their seven year-old daughter. Underwager is a virtual
icon to the Irish Catholic lobby in Dublin, which raised its
hoary hackles against a child abuse prevention program in the
Irish Republic. He was, until his advocacy of pedophila tarnished
an otherwise glittering reputation, widely quoted in the press,
dismissing ritual child abuse as a hysterical aberration.
He is the world's foremost authority on false memory, but
in the courtroom he is repeatedly exposed as a charlatan. In
1988, a trial court decision in New York State held that Dr.
Underwager was "not qualified to render any opinion as to whether
or not (the victim) was sexually molested." In 1990 his testimony
on memory was ruled improper "in the absence of any evidence that
the results of Underwager's work had been accepted in the
scientific community." And In Minnesota a judge ruled that
Underwager's theories on "learned memory" were the same as
"having an expert tell the jury that (the victim) was not telling
the truth."
Peter and Pamela Freyd, executive directors of the
Foundation, joined forces with Underwager in 1991, and their
story is equally wretched. Jennifer Freyd, their daughter, a
professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, openly
leveled accusations of abuse against her parents at an August
1993 mental health conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
"My family of origin was troubled in many observable
ways, " she said. "I refer to the things that were never
'forgotten' and 'recovered,' but to things that we all knew
about." She gave her father's alcoholism as an example. "During
my childhood, my father sometimes discussed his own experiences
of being sexually abused as an 11 year-old boy, and called
himself a 'kept boy.'" Peter Freyd graduated to male prostitution
as an adolescent.
At the age of 13, Jennifer Freyd composed a poem about
her father's nocturnal visits:

I am caught in a web,
A web of deep, deep terror.

she wrote. The diaries of her youth chronicle the "reactions and
feelings (guilt, shame and terror) of a troubled girl and young
woman. My parents oscillated between denying these symptoms and
feelings ... to using knowledge of these same symptoms and
feelings to discredit me."
"My father," she says, "told various people that I was
brain damaged." The accusation was unlikely. At the time,
Jennifer Freyd was a graduate student on a National Science
Foundation fellowship. She has taught at Cornell and received
numerous research awards. The "brain damage" apologia did not
wash. Her mother suggested that Jennifer's memories were
"confabulations," and faulted therapeutic intervention. Pamela
Freyd turned to her own psychiatrist, Dr. Harold Lief, currently
an advisory board member of the Foundation, to diagnose Jennifer.
"He explained to me that he did not believe I was
abused," Jennifer recalls. Dr. Lief's diagnosis was based on his
belief that Peter Freyd's fantasies were strictly "homoerotic."
Of course, his daughter furrows a brow at the assumption that
homoerotic fantasies or a heterosexual marriage exclude the
possibility of child molestation. Lief's skewed logic is a
trademark of the Foundation.
He is a close colleague of the CIA's Martin Orne. Dr.
Lief, a former major in the Army medical corps, joined the
University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1968, the peak of
federally-funded behavioral modification experiments at
Holmesburg Prison. Dr. Orne consulted with him on several studies
in hypnotic programming. His academic writing reveals a peculiar
range of professional interests, including "Orgasm in the
Postoperative Transsexual" for Archives of Sexual Behavior, and
an exploration of the possibility of life after death for a
journal on mental diseases edited by Foundation fellow Paul
McHugh. Lief is a director of the Center for Sexuality and
Religion, past president of the Sex Information and Education
Council.
And an original board member of the False Memory Syndrome
Foundation. Two others, Jon Baron from Penn U. and Ray Hyman (an
executive editor of the aforementioned Skeptical Inquirer), a
professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, resigned
from the board after Jennifer Freyd went public with her account
of childhood abuse, and the facetious attempts of her parents and
their therapist to discredit her. They were replaced by David
Dinges, co-director--with the ubiquitous Martin Orne--of the
Unit for Experimental Psychiatry at the University of
Pennsylvania.
"At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered
'false,'" Jennifer says, "and my alcoholic father's memory is
considered rational and sane." She does not, after all, remember
impossible abuses: "I remember incest in my father's house....
My first memories came when I was at home a few hours after my
second session with my therapist, a licensed clinical
psychologist working within an established group in a large and
respected medical clinic.
"During that second visit to my therapist's office, I
expressed great anxiety about the upcoming holiday visit from my
parents. My therapist asked about half way into the session,
whether I had ever been sexually abused. I was immediately thrown
into a strange state. No one had ever asked me such a question. I
responded, 'no, but...' I went home and within a few hours I was
shaking uncontrollably, overwhelmed with intense and terrible
flashbacks." Jennifer asks herself why her parents are believed.
"In the end, is it precisely because I was abused that I am to be
discredited despite my personal and professional success?"
Pamela Freyd published an open letter defending her
husband in Ralph Underwager's Issues in Child Abuse Accusations
in 1991. It was reprinted in Confabulations, a book published a
year later. Laced with lubricious sentiment, the book bemoans the
"destruction of families" brought on by false child abuse
accusations, and maligns "cult-like" support groups and
feminists, or "lesbian cults." Executive director Freyd often
refers to the feminist groups that have taken up the cause of
child abuse survivors as "lesbians," after the bizarre Dr.
Underwager, who claims, "these women may be jealous that males
are able to love each other, be comrades, friends, be close,
intimate."
Pamela Freyd's account of the family history, Jennifer
insists, is patently false. In an electronic message from her
father, he openly acknowledged that in his version of the story
"fictional elements were deliberately inserted."
"'Fictional' is rather an astounding choice of words,"
Jennifer observed at the Ann Arbor conference. The article
written by her parents contends that Jennifer was denied tenure
at another university due to a lack of published research. "In
fact," Jennifer counters, "I moved to the University of Oregon in
1987, just four years after receiving my Ph.D. to accept a
tenured position as associate professor in the psychology
department, one of the world's best psychology departments.... My
mother sent the Jane Doe article to my colleagues during my
promotion year--that is, the year my case for promotion to full
professor was being considered. I was absolutely mortified to
learn of this violation of my privacy and this violation of
truth."
Manipulative tactics are another Foundation imprimatur.
Lana Alexander, editor of a newsletter for survivors of child
sexual abuse, observes that "many people view the false memory
syndrome theory as a calculated defense strategy developed by
perpetrators and the lawyers and expert witnesses who defend
them."
A legitimizing barrage of stories in the press has shaped
public opinion and warmed the clime for defense attorneys. The
concept of false memory serves the same purpose as Holocaust
denial. It shapes opinion. Unconscionable crimes are obstructed,
the accused is endowed with the status of martyr, the victim
reviled.
The emphasis on image is obvious in "How Do We Know We
are Not Representing Pedophiles," an article written for the
February 29, 1992 FMS Foundation Newsletter by Pamela Freyd. In
it, she derides the suggestion that many members of the group
could be molesters because "we are a good-looking bunch of
people, greying hair, well dressed, healthy, smiling; just about
every person who has attended is someone you would surely find
interesting and want to count as a friend."

Friendly Fire

People forget things. Horrible things.
Here at the Foundation someone had a repressed
memory, or what would be called a false memory,
that she had been sexually abused.

--Pamela Freyd
FMS Foundation Founder

The debate's bloodiest stage is the courtroom. The hired
guns of Martin Orne's circle of psychiatrists are constantly
called upon to blow smoke at the jury's gallery to conceal CIA
mind control operations. This branch of the psychiatric community
is steeped in the programming of serial killers, political
assassins and experiments on involuntary subjects. Agency
psychiatrists on the witness stand direct the press away from the
CIA, and the prosecution to a predetermined end. Martin Orne's
high-toned psychologizing in the Hillside Strangler case, for
example, is a strategy adopted by the FMS foundation to stifle
the cries of mind control survivors.
Orne's influence contributed to the outcome of a
high-profile abuse case, the $8 million lawsuit filed by Gary
Ramona of Napa, California against child therapist Marche
Isabella and psychiatrist Richard Rose. Ramona charged that his
daughter Holly's therapists elicited from her flashbacks of
sexual molestation that never occurred, decimating his marriage
and career as a vice president at Robert Mondavi wineries. His
wife and employer, note, immediately believed Holly's
accusations. In May of 1994 Ramona received a $500,000 jury
award. He hailed the decision as a "tremendous victory."
Nevertheless, Holly Ramona still maintains that she was
sexually abused by her father, though no criminal charges have
been filed. Holly first confronted her father with the
allegations on March 15, 1990, with her mother and Isabella
present. She filed a civil action against him in Los Angeles
County, but before it went to trial her father's suit got
underway in Napa.
The suit turned on the use of sodium amytal to resurrect
buried memories. Holly Ramona exhibited telltale symptoms of
abuse--fear of gynecological examinations, a phobia of pointy
teeth, like her father's--and asked to be treated with sodium
amytal. Dr. Rose wrote in his notes that under the influence of
the drug, Holly "remembered specific details of sexual
molestation." But Orne, who has pioneered in the use of sodium
amytal in hypnosis research, cautioned in a court brief that the
drug is "not useful in ascertaining 'truth.' The patient becomes
receptive to suggestions due to the context and to the comments
of the interviewers."
Yet the jury foreman stated for the record that Isabella
and Rose did not implant false memories of abuse, as Holly's
father had complained, but were negligent in reinforcing the
memories as Holly described them under the influence of the
barbiturate. The court considered it irrelevant whether Holly
actually suffered abuse, narrowing the legal focus instead to the
chemical evocation of Holly's recollections and her therapist's
leading questions.
Left hanging was the question of Ramona's guilt or
innocence, not exactly an irrelevant issue. Orne offered no
opinion. The "tremendous victory" in Napa, given these facts,
begins to look like a manipulation of the court system,
especially the use of "expert" testimony.
The therapists did not, contrary to most press reports,
bear the full brunt of blame. The jury found that Ramona himself
bore 5% of the blame for what happened to him, Holly's therapists
55%, and 45% was borne by the girl's mother and the Robert
Mondavi winery.
But the 55% solution is diluted by Holly's memories.
Contrary to the impression left by the press, her past has not
been explained away. "I wouldn't be here if there was a question
in my mind," she testified in Napa.
False memory had no clinical history or symptomology
(repressed memory has both), but the concept had held up in
court.
All that remained was to provide a scientific
explanation. The Foundation had spread the word that a "syndrome"
was winding through society and "destroying families." But what
is the origin of false (not inaccurate or clouded or fragmented)
memories? What are the symptoms? It remained to supply a
cognitive model for false memories of ritual molestation.
One of the most prolific and quotable popularizers of
false memory is Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and
law at the University of Washington in Seattle, and an advisory
board member of the Foundation. Her dual academic interests have
fueled suspicions that the organization is more committed to
defending perpetrators than ferreting out the facts. Loftus
testified in over 150 criminal cases prior to joining the
Foundation, always on behalf of defendants. In 1991 she published
a professional autobiography, Witness for the Defense, a study of
eight criminal trials in which she appeared as an expert witness.
In her book, Loftus--billed as "the expert who puts memory on
trial"--conceded that her critics deem her research "unproven in
real-life situations," and her courtroom dissertations "premature
and highly prejudicial."
One book reviewer for the New York Times grumbled: "Her
testimony would be less controversial if she could distinguish
between the innocent and the guilty and reserve her help for the
former."
Elizabeth Loftus has two criteria for taking the stand.
The first is when eyewitness identification is the sole or
primary evidence against the defendant. Secondly, the accused
must act innocent--she regrets testifying on behalf of Ted Bundy
because the serial killer once smiled at the prosecutor, which
she regards as an expression of guilt--and defense attorneys
must believe it.
Loftus stood at the Harvard Medical School podium in May,
1994 to inform a conference on false memory of her research, "in
which false memories about childhood events were created in 24
men and women ages 18 to 63." Dr. Loftus reported that the
parents of volunteers "cooperated to produce a list of events
that had supposedly taken place in the volunteer's early life."
Three of the events actually took place. But one, a shopping
trip, never happened. Some of the volunteers had memories,
implanted by suggestion, of wandering lost on the fictitious
shopping expedition.
Karen Olio, the author of scores of articles on sexual
abuse, complains that Loftus's memory studies "examine only the
possibility of implanting a single memory with which most people
could easily identify (being lost in a mall, awakened by a noise
in the night). The possibility of 'implanting' terrifying and
shameful memories that differ markedly from an individual's
experience, such as memories of childhood abuse in individuals
who do not have a trauma history," remains to be proven."
Psychiatrist John Briere of the University of Southern
California has found that nearly two-thirds of all ritual abuse
survivors report episodic or complete amnesia at some point after
it occurred. The younger the child, the more violent the abuse,
the more likely that memory lapses occurred. these findings have
been duplicated at the University of California at San Francisco
by psychiatrist Lenore Terr, who concluded that children
subjected to repeated abuse were more likely to repress memories
of it than victims of a single traumatic event.
Clinical psychologist Catherine Gould has treated scores
of ritually abused children at her office in Encino, California.
At the September 1993 National Conference on Crimes Against
Children in Washington, D.C., Gould objected that the studies of
Elizabeth Loftus ignore past research on trauma and its influence
on memory.
"My concern about Elizabeth Loftus," Gould said, "is that
she has stated in print, and correctly so, that her data tells us
nothing about the nature of memory of traumatic events. And yet
she has failed to protest the misapplication of her findings by
groups who are involved in discrediting the accounts survivors
are giving of their traumatic history. I believe that Dr. Loftus,
like other psychologists, has an ethical responsibility to do
everything possible to ensure that her research findings are
interpreted and applied accurately, and are not manipulated to
serve the political agenda of groups like the False Memory
Syndrome Foundation. I question whether she has met this ethical
responsibility."
Some psychologists accuse Loftus of faking her research
data.
Her study did not live up to its promise. But now that
she had "proven" that a false memory could be implanted, friends
of the Foundation at the Harvard conference announced they'd
identified the neurological and cognitive causes of disorder.
Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychologist and conference organizer,
claimed that the "confabulator" selects a fragment of a real
memory, "but confuses its true context, and draws on other bits
of experience to construct a story that makes sense of it." Dr.
Morris Moscovitch, a neuro-psychologist at the University of
Toronto, claimed that "brain damage" could also evoke false
memories. He noted that mental patients with frontal lobe defects
frequently confuse imaginary stories with actual memories.
A superficially plausible revelation was provided by
Cornell psychologist Stephen Ceci, who reported on five studies
of 574 preschool children. After 10 weeks of repeated
questioning, 58% of them concocted a false account for at least
one fictitious event.
But like the studies of Elizabeth Loftus, Ceci did not
attempt to explain the supposed amnesiac effect of severe trauma
on children and adults alike (veterans of WW II and Vietnam have
been known to "forget" atrocities of war). Besides, the average
preschooler is bound to invent at least one fantasy in 10 long
weeks of repetitive questioning. Toddlers aren't known for their
consummate adherence to objective reality. An invisible playmate
and the Cat in the Hat are not "false memories."
The research results presented at the Harvard conference
were not exactly staggering. All that had been proven was that
children forget, become confused and make things up.
Seattle therapist James Cronin, one of the Foundation's
harshest critics, believes that the false memory concept is
promoted by "fact and artifice" to a public conditioned to the
fragmentation of knowledge, intellectual charades, elitism and
the sterile abstractions that often pass for university education
and expertise. The so-called experts now jumping on the side of
false memory and therapist 'bias' are opportunists."
Yet the New York Times hailed the Harvard conference as
"epic." The conference had given a gracious "scientific nod to
the frailty of memory." Victims of aggravated child abuse had
nothing to celebrate, but the Times reporter was ecstatic. At
long last, scientists everywhere had arrived at "a consensus on
the mental mechanisms that can foster false memories." A
consensus? Actually, the "consensus" of psychologists, at least
the 88% mentioned earlier--only a vast majority--believe it to
be a very real scourge.
The Times story is typical of the scorn the press has
shown ritual abuse victims and their therapists.
Sixty Minutes, for example, publicly exonerated Kelly
Michaels, a day-care worker in New Jersey, of charges that she
sexually molested dozens of youngsters in 1984. Michaels was
sentenced to 47 years in prison for sodomizing the children in
her care with kitchen implements, among related charges. Her
conviction was overturned in March 1993 when the state appeals
court ruled that Michaels had not had a fair trial.
But in its rush to present Michaels as a blushing
innocent, the Sixty Minutes research department somehow
overlooked a May 1991 New York Times story on the abuse trial,
and the testimony of four Essex County corrections officers who
witnessed Miss Michaels and her father kissing and "fondling" one
another during jail visitations. Jerry Vitiello, a jailer, said
that "he saw Ms. Michaels use his tongue when kissing his
daughter, rub her buttocks and put his hand on her breasts."
Similar incestuous liaisons were detailed in the courtroom by
three women working in the jail. The bizarre sexual antics of
Kelly Michaels--damningly chronicled in Nap Time by Lisa
Manshel in 1990--was nixed from the one-sided Sixty Minutes
account, which made her out to be grist for the meat grinder of
wrong-headed child abuse laws.

The Forgettable "Remembering Satan"

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation made its collective
debut in "Remembering Satan," a two-part story by Lawrence Wright
in the New Yorker for April and May 1993. The story (republished
in 1994 in book form) concerns a ritual abuse trial in Olympia,
Washington that culminated with a 20-year prison sentence for
Thurston County Sheriff Paul Ingram, chairman of the local
Republican Party. Ingram has since filed motions to withdraw his
guilty plea, a move rejected by an appellate court in 1992. Also
charged, but not convicted, were Jim Rabie, a lobbyist with the
Washington State Law Enforcement Association and a former police
detective assigned to child abuse cases, and Ray Risch, an
employee of the State Patrol's body-and-fender shop. Wright's
conclusion, however, is based on the opinions of False Memory
Syndrome Foundation psychiatrists: that accusations made by
Ingram's two daughters, and his own confession to police, were
fantasies misinterpreted by Ingram himself and his daughters as
actual memories.
Wright fumigates any question of abuse with false memory
theory. Among the authorities consulted by Wright was Foundation
board member Paul McHugh, director of the department of
psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins. Like
Margaret Singer, he is a veteran of the Walter Reed Army
Institute of Research (1961-64) and moves in political circles.
For three years (1986-89), McHugh was chairman of the
bio-psychology study section of the National Institutes of
Health, and a former member of the Maryland Governor's Advisory
Commission.
McHugh is an unshakable skeptic of repressed memories. He
told Wright that "most severe traumas are not blocked out by
children but are remembered all too well." Most, in fact, are.
But McHugh's own professional opinion leaves open the possibility
that some severe traumas are repressed.
He cites as an example the children of chowchilla,
California, who were kidnapped in a school bus and buried alive.
McHugh claims they remembered the horror "all too well." Not
exactly. In fact, the FBI's subsequent use of investigative
hypnosis was largely the result of the Chowchilla children's
failure of memory. After their release, none of the children had
a clear recollection of the kidnappers, could not identify them--
and neither did the bus driver, Ed Ray, who managed to recite the
license-plate number of the abductor's van under hypnosis.
Wright's defense of Ingram turns on the opinion of
Richard Ofshe, a Berkeley psychologist, reputed mind control
expert and friend of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Ofshe
has written, Wright explains, "extensively about how the
thought-control techniques developed in Communist china, the
Soviet Union and North Korea had come to be employed and refined
by various religious cults in the United States." Pointing to
mind control in Communist countries is a favorite tactic of the
American mind control fraternity to divert attention from the
highly sophisticated techniques employed in "Democratic"
countries (often in the form of experimentation on unknowing
subjects). This historical revision is a fine example of "mirror
imaging," the CIA technique of vilifying others, and ignoring the
Agency's own role in the formation and control of mind control
cults. Ofshe has not been directly linked to the CIA, but his
work parrots the writings of UCLA'S Louis Jolyon West and other
psychiatrists with Agency credentials.
Wright somehow failed to mention that Ofshe is sharply at
odds with much of the American Psychological Association. He has
filed a suit, with Margaret Singer, for $30 million against the
APA for engaging in a "onspiracy" to "destroy" their reputations
and prevent them from testifying in the courtroom. Both Ms.
Singer and Richard Ofshe derive a significant part of their
income as consultants and expert witnesses on behalf of accused
child abusers. Their complaint, filed under federal racketeering
laws--tripling any financial damages--claims that members of
the APA set out with "repeated lies" to "discredit them and
impair their careers."
The Association flatly denied the charges. Two courts
quickly dismissed the case. The APA released a statement to the
press stating that the organization had merely advised members
against testifying in court on the subject of brainwashing with
"persuasive coercion" (a concept, after all, pushed during the
Korean war by the CIA to justify barbaric mind control
experimentation on American citizens), and had in no way
conspired to impair the careers of Ofshe, Singer or anyone else.
Many in Ofshe's own profession believe him to be a
world-class opportunist. He is a constant in newspaper interviews
and on the talk show circuit, where he claims there is "no
evidence" to support ritual abuse allegations. His categorical
denial ignore's Ingram's own confession and a number of jury
decisions across the country. And then there are, to cite one
documented example of evidence from the glut that Ofshe ignores,
the tunnels beneath the McMartin preschool, the most
widely-publicized case. And a raid on the Children of God
compound in Argentina in 1993 turned up videos of ritual abuse
and child pornography. Evidence does exist--Ofshe simply refuses
to acknowledge the fact. A cult specialist with Ofshe's
credentials would surely explore the abundance of evidence if he
was a legitimate psychologist. Instead, he chirps a categorical
"no evidence," perfectly aware that most mental health
professionals will see through him. A credulous public will not.
On the December 3, 1993 Rolanda talk show, a woman was
interviewed who'd had flashback memories of abuse before
consulting with a therapist. Dr. Ofshe appeared on the program,
his silver beard groomed, looking every inch the authority.
Rolanda asked Ofshe if "a terrible childhood memory, as bad as
child abuse, (can) actually be repressed."
"There is absolutely no reason to think that that is
true," Ofshe told her. "And it's not just what I say--this is
the sum and substance of everything science knows about how
memory works." This, of course, is a transparent lie. Ofshe
dismissed repressed memories of abuse as the reigning
"psychological quackery of the 20th century."
Dr. Daniel Lutzker, a psychologist at the Milton Erickson
Institute, was sitting in the audience--turning crimson with
rage at Ofshe's misrepresentations of the psychology of trauma.
He stood up and argued that sex abuse can indeed begat buried
recollections. "Repressed memories," Lutzker countered, "are not
only important, they are the cornerstone of most psychotherapies.
the fact is that the more awful the experience, the more likely
it is to be repressed!"
Ofshe responded that there was "no evidence" so support
such "nonsense."
Grimacing with disbelief, Lutzker said that Ofshe
wouldn't make such outrageous comments if he bothered to pick up
"any basic textbook on psychotherapy."
"Your making it up!" Ofshe spat. Lutzker stared at him in
disbelief.
But the crowning contradiction to Ofshe's "expert"
opinions appeared in a September 1994 L.A. Weekly article on
alien abductions (another phenomenon said by the Foundation to
breed "false memories").
"There are a lot of not particularly well-certified
people out there," Dr. Ofshe told Gardetta, "using very powerful
techniques on people. Visualizing this kind of stuff under
hypnosis--abduction, Satan cults, sexual abuse--is the closest
thing that anyone can experience short of the experience itself.
That's why it's so traumatic to the individuals undergoing
hypno-therapy, and why the hypno-therapist today can be seen as a
new form of sexual predator."
But one morning, shortly thereafter, Gardetta awoke to
find a triangular rash on the palm of his left hand.
"It didn't surprise me," Gardetta wrote. "Things around
the house--which sits on a hilltop in a semi-rural area--had
been getting weird. A jet-wash noise buzzed some afternoons
around the house, its origin impossible to discern. Lights were
turning themselves on, and the alarm system's motion sensor was
tripping itself every morning between 5 and 6. One early evening,
small footsteps crossed the roof. I ran outside to find the
electrical wires leading to a nearby telephone pole swaying in
the windless dusk."
The mysterious federal mind control fraternity had struck
again, leaving behind more memories to be denounced by the
"skeptics" of the FMS Foundation--the CIA's answer to the Flat
Earth Society.

[Ed Jewett]

July 17, 2010

Researchers implant false symptoms:

An intriguing study just published in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology has found that we can be convinced we reported symptoms of mental illness that we never mentioned and, as a result, we can actually start believing we have the symptom itself.
The faking and exaggerating of psychiatric and neurological symptoms is a big problem in the medical world, not because it is difficult to see when symptoms are inconsistent with the person's medical history, but because they can also be arise unconsciously without any intent to deceive.
For example, imagine someone experiences a minor car crash but afterwards reports that their legs are paralysed. Of course, they could be outright faking, but they could also be experiencing what is now diagnosed as conversion disorder, where they have no neurological damage that would prevent them moving their legs but where they also have no conscious control over their movements.
It is probably true to say that the condition is not well understood, but it seems that the paralysis occurs through problems in the organisation of activity patterns in the brain, rather than through 'damaged wiring'.
In terms of the medical diagnosis, however, the distinction can often rely on making a difficult judgement about the person's intentions and motivations - whether they are deliberately faking, have no control or are somewhere in between.
These issues become even more tricky when the reported symptoms are psychological in nature - e.g. memory loss, emotional disturbance, difficulty concentrating - because it can be even harder to make the distinction between genuine, exaggerated or outright faked symptoms.
This is also a legal problem, because patients making insurance or compensation claims have a financial incentive to report more symptoms.
Psychologists have developed numerous tests and evaluations to assess the genuineness of symptoms and whether someone is putting their full effort into ability tests, but this new study shows that the line between conscious and unconscious exaggeration can be quite blurry.
The research team, led by psychologist Harald Merckelbach, asked two groups of student participants to read a description of a legal case where the defendant had illegally entered a medieval building and accidentally dislodged some stones which had fatally wounded a young girl.
They were then told to imagine they were the defendant and to fill in a medical assessment questionnaire. One group was told to fill it in honestly, and other was told to fake a serious psychological condition in a credible way to minimise their criminal responsibility.
The twist came when, after an hour of doing unrelated puzzles and quizzes, the participants in the dishonest group were told they had been detected as fakers, and were asked to fill in the medical questionnaire again - but this time honestly. Those in the honest group were simply told that sometimes people can change their mind and were asked to complete the assessment again.
The group asked to 'fake' the first time around showed much higher levels of symptom exaggeration and faking on the second assessment - even though they were told to complete the questionnaire honestly.
In an interesting parallel to a recent study showing that just wearing counterfeit designer clothes led by higher levels of deception, just having experience of earlier deliberate faking led to unconscious exaggeration later on.
But perhaps the most interesting part came in their second experiment. Participants were asked to complete a checklist of symptoms, to report, honestly, on their mental health.
After handing in the questionnaires, the researchers secretly altered a couple of the participants responses - for example, when the participant answered a question about concentration difficulties with 0 ("not at all"), this score was surreptitiously changed to a 2 ("occasionally").
One of the research team then went through the questionnaire and asked each participant to explain why they answered the way they did.
During the interview, more than two-thirds of the participants gave justification for why a faked item was true, without realising it had been manipulated, and over half were completely blind to the fact that both items had been changed.
The researchers described how "participants would say that they occasionally or rather often experienced concentration difficulties because they had been drinking a lot of coffee lately or because they were going through a difficult time in life with a lot of exams".
Afterwards, the participants were given the same questions again and those who had justified the faked responses tended to change their answers - having seemingly come to believe more strongly that they really did experience the symptoms 'given' to them by the researchers. The effect was not dramatic, but still a significant shift.
In some ways, the study is an extension of the many studies that have found how easy it is to implant fictitious experiences into the memories of everyday folk. But it also shows that there is no cut and dry line between deliberate faking and unconscious motivation and that we can give exaggerated answers even when we're trying to be brutally honest.

Link to PubMed entry for study.
—Vaughan.

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July 16, 2010

An epidemic of false memories:

A gripping edition of This American Life explores the 'recovered memory movement' of the 1990s where patients became convinced that they had experienced horrific, sometimes supernatural, abuse as children, led on by credulous therapists who used techniques now know to cause false memories.
The programme is a 2002 exploration of when experts give bad advice. Skip the first 8 minutes - it's some irrelevant chattering about car mechanics - as it's the next 35 minutes that matter.
The piece explores the now infamous recovered memory movement which led to therapists convincing patients that they had suffered dreadful, sometimes theatrically 'satanic' abuse, at the hand of their families, which they had supposedly 'repressed' into their unconscious mind.
Therapists believed they were detecting the unconscious traces of these 'experiences' in the dreams and emotional upset of genuine patients and encouraged their clients to elaborate on what was usually nothing but prejudice.
We now know, largely from research sparked from the work of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, that we can easily form false memories with this sort of elaboration, leading patients to believe that these experiences genuinely happened, despite having no memories of it prior to therapy.
Of course, we forget things and remember them again later, but we know now that traumatic experiences are the least likely to be forgotten. In fact, there is still no convincing evidence, or indeed, a single well-verified example, of a 'repressed' traumatic experience that was later 'recovered'.
It's probably worth noting, as the programme does, that the 'recovered memory movement' arrived when the full extent of child sexual abuse was just becoming known and when people were realising that victims of sexual abuse where often dismissed or not believed.
Without the evidence we have today on the remarkable malleability of memory, many therapists began to see what they thought were signs of repressed sexual abuse in their patients, even when this was denied, and began to encourage their clients 'recover' their memories.
The programme talks to both people who were falsely led to believe they were abused, and therapists who were caught up in the movement and helped patients 'recover' their baseless memories.
The piece is neither voyeuristic nor sensational and carefully weaves together the history of the social phenomenon and the personal stories of those affected.
As an aside, the reporter is Alix Spiegel who makes consistently brilliant mind, brain and mental health radio almost all of which is available online on the NPR archives and This American Life the archives.

Link to 'An Epidemic Created By Doctors'.
—Vaughan.

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[Jan Klimkowski]

July 16, 2010

An epidemic of false memories:

This American Life explores the 'recovered memory movement' of the 1990s where patients became convinced that they had experienced horrific, sometimes supernatural, abuse as children, led on by credulous therapists who used techniques now know to cause false memories.

So, the Big Lie is still being perpetrated by MSM.

We now know, largely from research sparked from the work of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, that we can easily form false memories with this sort of elaboration, leading patients to believe that these experiences genuinely happened, despite having no memories of it prior to therapy.

As this thread demonstrates, Loftus was a founding member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, whose purpose was to discredit those who had suffered horrifically at the hands of covert "MK-ULTRA" type programmes and organized paedophile networks.

Loftus cannot be cited as a credible source.

February 11, 1996, Toronto Star: "She (Loftus) is a prolific research psychologist - with no clinical experience and no expertise in child sexual abuse or traumatic memory - who criss crosses the continent as a highly paid witness for the accused. A current Psychology Today profile practically drools with admiration, not least over her cream-colored Mercedes and fancy home. Some observers estimate that, according to her own boasts, Dr. Loftus must have earned between $3 million and $5 million as an expert witness - for hire - she even testified on behalf of mass murderer Ted Bundy." After 20 years she suddenly quit the American Psychological Association (APA) in January 1996, arguing that the association was moving "far from scientific thinking and more toward therapeutic and professional guild interests." Later it turned out that in November 1995 two separate ethics complaints had been filled with the APA against Loftus. Jennifer Hoult and Lynn Crook had recovered memories of severe childhood sexual abuse, found corroborating evidence, sued their fathers, and won. Hoult's father, who was defended by Loftus, appealed the case as far as possible, losing each time. Jennifer was awarded $500,000 in damages. The rule of the APA is that no member is allowed to resign while an ethics complaint is being investigated. Supposedly, Loftus didn't know about these complaints at the moment she resigned. Interestingly, Jennifer's father became an active member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation after the trial.

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it....
:evil:

[Ed Jewett]

July 16, 2010

An epidemic of false memories:

This American Life explores the 'recovered memory movement' of the 1990s where patients became convinced that they had experienced horrific, sometimes supernatural, abuse as children, led on by credulous therapists who used techniques now know to cause false memories.

So, the Big Lie is still being perpetrated by MSM.

I thought that post would make your hair stand on end. Yes, indeed, they keep calling that tune on the Wurlitzer.

[Ed Jewett]

THE CIA & THE FALSE MEMORY SYNDROME FOUNDATION (FMSF)

20th July 2010

By Alex Constantine
• CIA Connections to the Mind Control Cults • The CIA, The False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the Politics of Ritual Abuse • The Devil Denuded • Friendly Fire • The Forgettable “Remembering Satan”
The False Memory Hoax
CIA Connections to the Mind Control Cults
[From Psychic Dictatorship in the USA, 1995]
CIA Connections to the Mind Control Cults
… Within hours, 27 other members of the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple were found dead at chalets in Granges, Switzerland and Morin Heights, Quebec. Luc Jouret, the Temple’s grand master, the London Times reported, “espoused a hybrid religion that owed more to Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum than to any bible. His followers called themselves ‘knights of Christ.’ The crusading codes of the Knights Templar, the rose-and-cross symbolism of the medieval Rosicrucian Order, Nazi occultism and new age mysticism were joined together into a mumbo-jumbo mishmash that seemed more designed for extracting money from disciples than saving souls.”
Jouret, born in the Belgian Congo in 1947, set out in youth as a mystic with communist leanings, but his politics apparently swung full circle. He has since been linked to a clutch of neo-Nazis responsible for a string of bombings in Canada. He told friends that he had once served with a unit of Belgium paratroopers.
French-Canadian journalist Pierre Tourangeau investigated the sect for two years. A few days after the mass murder, he reported that the sect was financed by the proceeds of gun-running to Europe and South America.
Simultaneously, Radio Canada announced that Jouret’s Templars earned hundreds of millions of dollars laundering the profits through the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), closed by authorities worldwide in 1991. Montreal’s La Presse observed: “each new piece of information only thickens the mystery” – but the combination of international arms smuggling and BCCI presented a familiar enough picture of CIA sedition. The Manhattan D.A. who closed the American branch announced that 16 witnesses had died in the course of investigating the bank’s entanglements in covert operations of the CIA, arms smuggling to Iraq, money laundering and child prostitution.
The average coffee table would crumple under the weighty BCCI Book of the Dead. Journalist Danny Casolaro and Vince Foster appear in it – grim antecedents to the Solar Temple killings. The cult’s connection to BCCI (reported in Europe but filtered from American newspaper accounts) fed speculation among Canadian journalists that followers of Jouret were killed to bury public disclosures of gun-running and money laundering.
But the fraternizing of America’s national security elite and the cults did not begin in Cheiry, Switzerland. Jouret’s Order of the Solar Temple was but the latest incarnation of mind control operations organized and overseen by the CIA and Department of Defense.
In a sense, we are in the same ethical and moral dilemma as the physicists in the days prior to the Manhattan Project. Those of us who work in this field see a developing potential for a nearly total control of human emotional status. – Dr. Wayne Evans, U.S. Army Institute of Environmental Medicine, 1978
Scientists in the CIA’s mind control fraternity lead double lives. Many are highly respected, but if the truth were known they would be deafened by the public outcry and drummed out of their respective academic haunts.
Martin T. Orne, for example, a senior CIA/Navy researcher, is based at the University of Pennsylvania’s Experimental Psychiatry Laboratory. He is also an original member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation’s advisory board, a tightly-drawn coterie of psychiatrists, many with backgrounds in CIA mind control experimentation in its myriad forms. The Foundation is dedicated to denying the existence of cult mind control and child abuse. It’s primary pursuit is the castigation of survivors and therapists for fabricating accusations of ritual abuse.
Dismissing cult abuse as hysteria or false memory, a common defense strategy, may relieve parents of preschool children. In a small percentage of cult abuse cases it’s possible that children may be led to believe they’ve been victimized.
But the CIA and its cover organizations have a vested interest in blowing smoke at the cult underground because the worlds of CIA mind control and many cults merge inextricably. The drum beat of “false accusations” from the media is taken up by paid operatives like Dr. Orne and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation to conceal the crimes of the Agency.
Orne’s forays into hypno-programming were financed in the 1960s by the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA cover at Cornell University and the underwriter of many of the formative mind control experiments conducted in the U.S. and abroad, including the gruesome brainwashing and remote mind control experiments of Dr. Ewen Cameron at Montreal’s Allen Memorial Institute. Research specialties of the CIA’s black psychiatrists included electroshock lobotomies, drugging agents, incapacitants, hypnosis, sleep deprivation and radio control of the brain, among hundreds of sub-projects.
The secondary source of funding for Dr. Orne’s work in hypnotic suggestion and dissolution of memory is eerie in the cult child abuse context. The voluminous files of John Marks in Washington, D.C. (139 boxes obtained under FOIA, to be exact, two-fifths of which document CIA interest in the occult) include an Agency report itemizing a $30,000 grant to Orne from Human Ecology, and another $30,000 from Boston’s Scientific Engineering Institute (SEI) – another CIA funding cover, founded by Edwin Land of the Polaroid Corporation (and supervision of the U-2 spy plane escapades). This was the year that the CIA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) geared up a study of parapsychology and the occult. The investigation, dubbed Project OFTEN-CHICKWIT, gave rise to the establishment of a social “laboratory” by SEI scientists at the University of South Carolina – a college class in black witchcraft, demonology and voodoo.
Dr. Orne, with SEI funding, marked out his own mind control corner at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. He does not publicize his role as CIA psychiatrist. He denies it, very plausibly. In a letter to Dr. Orne, Marks once reminded him that he’d disavowed knowledge of his participation in one mind-wrecking experimental sub-project. Orne later recanted, admitting that he’d been aware of the true source of funding all along.
Among psychiatrists in the CIA’s mind control fraternity, Orne ranks among the most venerable. He once boasted to Marks that he was routinely briefed on all significant CIA behavior modification experiments: “Why would they come to him,” Martin Cannon muses in The Controllers, which links UFO abductions to secret military research veiled by screen memories of “alien” abduction, “unless Orne had a high security clearance and worked extensively with the intelligence services?”
To supplement his CIA income, the influential Dr. Orne has been the donee of grants from the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. “I should like to hear,” Cannon says, “what innocent explanation, if any, the Air Force has to offer to explain their interest in post-hypnotic amnesia.”
According to Army records, Orne’s stomping grounds, Penn U., was a bee-hive of secret experiments in the Vietnam War period. The Pentagon and CIA – under the auspices of ORD’s Steve Aldrich, a doyen of occult and parapsychological studies – conferred the Agency’s most lucrative research award upon the University of Pennsylvania to study the effects of 16 newly-concocted biochemical warfare agents on humans, including choking, blistering and vomiting agents, toxins, poison gas and incapacitating chemicals. The tests were abruptly halted in 1972 when the prison’s medical lab burned to the ground.
Testimony before the 1977 Church Committee’s probe of the CIA hinted that, as of 1963, the scientific squalor of the CIA’s mind control regimen, code-named MKULTRA, had abandoned military and academic laboratories, fearing exposure, and mushroomed in cities across the country. Confirmation arrived in 1980 when Joseph Holsinger, an aide to late Congressman Leo Ryan (who was murdered by a death squad at Jonestown) exposed the formation of eccentric religious cults by the CIA. Holsinger made the allegation at a colloquium of psychologists in San Francisco on “Psychosocial Implications of the Jonestown Phenomenon.” Holsinger maintained that a CIA rear-support base had been in collusion with Jones to perform medical and mind control experiments at People’s Temple. The former Congressional aide cited an essay he’d received in the mail, “The Penal Colony,” written by a Berkeley psychologist. The author had emphasized: Rather than terminating MKULTRA, the CIA shifted its programs from public institutions to private cult groups, including the People’s Temple.
Jonestown had its grey eminence in Dr. Lawrence Laird Layton of the University of California at Berkeley, formerly a chemist for the Manhattan Project and head of the Army’s chemical warfare research division in the early 1950s. (Larry Layton, his son, led the death squad that murdered Congressman Leo Ryan, who’d arrived at Guyana to investigate the cult.) Michael Meiers, author of Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?, scavenged for information on the People’s Temple for six years, concluding:
“The Jonestown experiment was conceived by Dr. Layton, staffed by Dr. Layton and financed by Dr. Layton. It was as much his project as it was Jim Jones”
Though it was essential for him to remain in the background for security reasons, Dr. Layton maintained contact with and even control of the experiment through his wife and children.” The African-American cult had at its core a Caucasian inner-council, composed of Dr. Layton’s family and in-laws.
The press was blind to obvious CIA connections, but survivors of the carnage in Guyana followed the leads and maintained that Jim Jones was “an employee, servant, agent or operative of the Central Intelligence Agency” from 1963 – the year the Agency turned to cult cut-outs to conceal MKULTRA mind control activities – until 1978. In October 1981 the survivors of Jonestown filed a $63 million lawsuit against Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Stansfield Turner, former director of the CIA, currently a teacher at the University of Maryland and a director of the Monsanto Corporation. The suit, filed in U.S. district court in San Francisco, accused Turner of conspiring with Agency operatives to “enhance the economic and political powers of James Warren Jones,” and of conducting “mind control and drug experimentation” on the Temple flock.
The suit was dismissed four months later for “failure to prosecute timely.” All requests for an appeal were denied.
Ligatures of the CIA clung to the cults. Much of the violence that has since exploded across the front pages was incited by CIA academics at leading universities.
Small wonder, then, that Ted Goertzel, director of the Forum for Policy Research at Rutgers, which maintains a symbiosis with the CIA despite media exposure, should write that the most susceptible victims of “cryptomnesia” (a synonym for false memories) believe “in conspiracies, including the JFK assassination, AIDS conspiracies, as well as the UFO cover-up.” The problem, Goertzel says, “may have its origins in early childhood,” and is accompanied by “feelings of anomie and anxiety that make the individual more likely to construct false memories out of information stored in the unconscious mind.”
This side of gilded rationalizations, the CIA’s links to the cults are no manifestation of “cryptomnesia.”
Like Jonestown, the Symbionese Liberation Army was a mind control creation unleashed by the Agency. The late political researcher Mae Brussell, whose study of The Firm commenced in 1963 after the assassination of John Kennedy, wrote in 1974 that the rabid guerrilla band “consisted predominantly of CIA agents and police informers.” This unsavory group was, Brussell insisted, “an extension of psychological experimentation projects, connected to Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park.” (She went on to lament that “many of the current rash of ‘senseless killings,’ ‘massacres,’ and ‘zombie-type murders’ are committed by individuals who have been in Army hospitals, mental hospitals or prison hospitals, where their heads have been literally taken over surgically to create terror in the community.”)
Evidence that the CIA conceived and directed the SLA was obvious. The SLA leadership was trained by Colston Westbrook, a Pennsylvania native. Westbrook was a veteran of the CIA’s murderous PHOENIX Program in South Vietnam, where he trained terrorist cadres and death squads. In 1969 he took a job as an administrator of Pacific Architects and Engineers, a CIA proprietary in Southern California. Three of Westbrook’s foot soldiers, Emily and William Harris and Angela Atwood (a former police intelligence informer), had been students of the College of Foreign Affairs, a CIA cover at the University of Indiana. Even the SLA symbol, a seven-headed cobra, had been adopted by the OSS (America’s wartime intelligence agency) and CIA to designate precepts of brainwashing.
When the smoke cleared at SLA headquarters in L.A., Dr. Martin Orne was called upon to examine Patricia Hearst in preparation for trial. The government charged that she had participated voluntarily in the SLA’s gun-toting crime spree. Orne’s was a foregone conclusion – he sided with the government. His opinion was shared by two other psychiatrists called to appraise Ms. Hearst’s state of mind, Robert Jay Lifton and Louis Jolyon West. Dr. Lifton was a co-founder of the aforementioned Human Ecology Fund. The CIA contractor that showered Orne with research grants in the 1960s. Dr. West is one of the CIA’s most notorious mind control specialists, currently director of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. It was West who brought a score of mind control psychiatrists of the ultra-right political stripe to the UCLA campus.
Drs. Orne, Lifton and West unanimously agreed that Patty Hearst had been “persuasively coerced” to join the SLA. She had been put through a grueling thought reform regimen. She’d been isolated and sensory deprived, raped, humiliated, badgered, politically indoctrinated with a surrealistic mutation of Third World Marxism. Ms. Hearst was only allowed human companionship when she exhibited signs of submission. Orne and his colleagues assured that attention was narrowed to their psychologizing, conveniently rendering evidence of CIA collusion extraneous to consideration by the jury.
Another psychiatrist called to testify at the trial of “Tania” surfaced with Dr. Orne in 1991 on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. (The FMSF board is almost exclusively composed of former CIA and military doctors currently employed by major universities. None have backgrounds in ritual abuse – their common interest is behavior modification. Dr. Margaret Singer, a retired Berkeley Ph.D., studied repatriated prisoners-of-war returning from the Korean War at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland (1952-58).
Singer turned up in 1982 on the book jacket of Raven – the CIA’s code-name for Jim Jones – by San Francisco Examiner reporters Tim Reiterman and John Jacobs, a thoroughly-researched account of the People’s Temple that completely side-steps CIA involvement. Co-author John Jacobs was supposedly one of the country’s leading authorities on CIA mind control, a subject he studied at length for a series published by the Washington Post. Reiterman had been the Examiner reporter on the Patricia Hearst beat. Yet both writers managed to avoid obvious intelligence connections. Dr. Singer commended the book as “the definitive psychohistory of Jim Jones.” Raven, she opined, conveyed “the essence of psychological and social processes that Jim Jones, the ultimate manipulator, set in motion.” The true “manipulators,” of course, were operatives of the CIA, and the public disinformation gambit lauded by Dr. Singer was, according to Meiers, in tune with “a concerted attempt to suppress information, stifle investigations, censor writers and manipulate public information.”
The CIA and Pentagon have quietly organized and influenced a long line of mind control cults, among them:
The Riverside Lodge of the Ordo Templis Orientis:
Also known as The Solar Lodge of the OTO, which followed the teachings of cult messiah Aleister Crowley, whose fixed gaze on the astral equinox resulted in instructions from his deities to form a religious order. Crowley, high priest of the OTO and a British intelligence agent, gave Winifred T. Smith a charter to open an OTO lodge in Pasadena. The high priest of the lodge was Jack Parsons, a rocket expert and founder of the California Institute of Technology. Parsons, who took the oath of the anti-Christ in 1949, contributed to the design of the Pentagon under subsequent CIA director John J. McCloy. He was killed in a still unexplained laboratory explosion. There is a crater on the moon named after him.
The OTO’s Solar Lodge in San Bernardino was presided over by Georgina “Jean” Brayton, the daughter of a ranking Air Force officer in the 1960s. The cult subscribed to a grim, apocalyptic view of the world, and like Charles Manson believed that race wars would precipitate the Big Cataclysm. In the Faustian Los Angeles underworld, the lodge was known for its indulgence in sadomasochism, drug dealing, blood drinking, child molestation and murder.
Candace Reos, a former member of the lodge, was deposed by Riverside police in 1969. Reos said that Brayton controlled the thinking of all cult members. One poor soul, she said, was ordered to curb his sexual urges by cutting his wrists every time he was aroused. Mrs. Reos told police, according to the report, that when she became pregnant, Georgina was angry and told her that she would have to condition herself to hate her child. Reos told police that children of the cult’s 43 adult members were secluded from their parents and received “training” that took on “very severe tones.”
“There was a lot of spanking involved,” she said, “a lot of heavy criticism. There was a lot of enclosed in dark rooms.” The teachers, she added. “left welts.”
If so ordered, adult cultists would beat their children.
According to a Riverside County Sheriff’s report, a six year-old child burned the group’s school house to the ground. The boy was punished by solitary confinement in a locked shipping crate left in the desert, where the average temperature was 110 degrees, for two months. The boy was chained to a metal plate.
When police freed him, they were nauseated by the suffocating stench of excrement. The child was smothered in flies swarming from a tin-can toilet.
The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Movement:
In 1985 the Portland Oregonian published a 36-part, book-length series linking the cult to opium trafficking, prostitution, money laundering, arson, slave labor, mass poisonings, illegal wiretaps and the stockpiling of guns and biochemical warfare weapons. The year-long Oregonian investigation revealed cult ties to CIA-trained mercenaries in El Salvador and the Far East. Domestically, Rajneesh’s secret police force worked with Agency operatives.
The Finders:
On February 7, 1987 Customs agents raided a child-porn ring in Tallahasee, Florida. Eight suspects and six children were taken into custody. The children, according to a Customs Department memo, behaved “like animals in a public park,” and “were not aware of the function and purpose of telephones, televisions and toilets.”
The children told police that they were forced to live outdoors and were given food only as a reward. A check on the backgrounds of the adults turned up a police report, “specific in describing ‘bloody rituals’ and sex orgies involving children, and an as-yet unsolved murder.”
Customs agents searched a cult safe house and discovered a computer room and documents recording “high-tech” bank transfers, explosives, and a set of instructions advising cult members on moving children through jurisdictions around the country. One photographic album found in the house featured the execution and disembowelment of goats, and snapshots, according to a Customs report, of “adults and children dressed in white sheets participating in a bloody ritual.”
An American passport was found. The investigating agents contacted the State Department and were advised to “terminate further investigation.”
They investigated anyway, reporting that “the CIA made contact and admitted to owning the Finders … as a front for a domestic training organization, but that it had ‘gone bad.’” The late wife of Marion David Pettie, the cult’s leader, had worked for the Agency, and his son had been an employee of Air America, the heroin-riddled CIA proprietary. Yet Pettie denied to a reporter for U.S. News & World Report any connection to the Firm. Police in Washington refused to comment. Officials of the CIA dismissed as “hogwash” allegations of any connection to the Finders cult.
O.T.A.:
The Order of the Temple of Astarte in Pasadena, California is a “hermetic” occult organization that practices “Magick in the Western Tradition.” The cult is led by Fraters Khenemel, a police officer, and Aleyin, a veteran Green Beret. The cult’s everyday language is unusual for a mystical order – one group schedule is laden with words like “operation,” “sixteen-thirty hours,” and “travel orders.” Demonology is among the OTA’s primary occult interests.
The police connection recalls the statement of Louis Tackwood, the former LAPD provocateur whose revelations of secret police subterfuge set off a political tempest in Los Angeles in 1973. “You don’t know,” he told journalist Donald Freed, “but there’s a devil worship cult in Pasadena. Actually in Altadena.” Tackwood alleged that the cultists were “on the LAPD payroll.”
The CIA and Pentagon cooperate in the creation of cults. To be sure, the Association of National Security Alumni, a public interest veterans group opposed to covert operations, considers it a “primary issue of concern” that the Department of Defense has a “perceived role in satanic cult activities, which qualify in and of themselves as very damaging exercises in mind control and behavioral modification.”
It is beginning to dawn on the psychiatric community at large that the CIA’s mind control clique is a menace reminiscent of Nazi medical experimentation. In 1993, Dr. Corydon Hammond, a professor at the University of Utah’s School of Medicine, conducted a seminar on federally-funded mind control experiments. Topics covered by Hammond included brainwashing, post-hypnotic programming and the induction of multiple personalities by the CIA. Hammond contended that the cult underground has roots in Nazi Germany, and that the CIA’s cult mind control techniques were based upon those of Nazi scientists recruited by the CIA for Cold Warfare. (Researcher Lenny Lapon estimates in Mass Murderers in White Coats that 5,000 Nazis resettled in the U.S. after WW II.) Hammond was forced to drop this line of inquiry by professional ridicule, especially from the CIA’s False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and a barrage of death threats. At a recent regional conference on ritual child abuse, he regretted that he could no longer speak on the theme of government mind control.
The psychological community is waking to the threat in its ranks, to judge by APA surveys and personal communications with ranking members of the mental health field, but the world at large remains in the dark. The “mass hysteria” and “false memory” bromides disseminated by the establishment press obscure federal and academic connections to the mind control cults, which are defended largely by organized pedophiles, cultists and hired guns of psychiatry. An ambitious disinformation gambit has led the world at large to side with cultists operating under federal protection. As at Jonestown and Chiery, Switzerland, the denouement of cult activity often ends in the destruction of all witnesses. This cycle of abuse and murder can only be ended by full public awareness of the federal mind control initiative.
The CIA, The False Memory Syndrome Foundation
and the Politics of Ritual Abuse
The conference session bears a passing resemblance to a 12-Step meeting. Assembled in a Portland religious retreat, members of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), all accused of child abuse, are encouraged to unload their anguish. Only women take the stage (they leave reporters with a sympathetic impression – men stigmatized by child abuse do not). Pamela Freyd, a Foundation founder, assures these victims of pernicious therapies they are not alone. The Foundation’s office in Philadelphia, she says, takes 60 calls on a typical day from distraught adults hounded by their own confused children, rogue therapists and sensation-seeking pack journalists.
The number of dues-paying members (each contributes $100 a year) varies according to the source. The group reported in January 1993 that 1,200 families had made contact in its first year of operation. The same month, the San Jose Mercury News declared flatly that “nearly 3,000 families” from across the country had been recruited. The FMSF now claims 5,000 families. Time magazine raised the figure to “7,000 individuals and families who have sought assistance.”
The Foundation’s distinctive handling of statistics is incessant. In April of this year the FMSF claimed 12,000 families have been strained by false child abuse allegations. A month later, the figure dropped to”9,500 U.S. families.” Yet the Foundation prides itself on accuracy. One FMSF newsletter advises members to insist the media “report accurate information. The rumors and misinformation surrounding the false accusations based on recovery of repressed memories are shocking.” The same author regrets that “65% of accusations of abuse are now unsubstantiated, a whopping jump from 35% in 1976.” This figure, once gleefully disseminated by such pedophile defense groups as NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) and VOCAL (Victims of Child Abuse Laws) was debunked years ago. It was fabricated by Douglas Besherov of the American Enterprise Institute, a hard right-wing propaganda factory fueled by the Olin Foundation, a CIA funding cover. (Christian conservatives are often accused of propagating ritual abuse “hysteria,” yet in the 1992 presidential election the para-conservative wing of the Republican Party slipped into its platform a strategy to put an end to investigations of child abuse.)
The FMSF selectively ignores child abuse data that disagrees with their own. Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery, reported in the Harvard Mental Health Letter that false abuse allegations by children “are rare, in the range of 2-8% of reported cases. False retractions of true complaints are far more common, especially when the victim is not sufficiently protected after disclosure and therefore succumbs to intimidation by the perpetrator or other family members who feel that they must preserve secrecy.”
Other statistics shunned by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation include a survey presented at a 1992 psychiatric conference that found that a full 88% of all therapists in a large sampling consider ritual child abuse to be a very real social problem with devastating emotional effects. Another: In 1990 the State University of New York at Buffalo polled a national sampling of clinical psychologists on ritual abuse. About 800 psychologists – a third of the poll – were aware of treating at least one case. Only 5% of all child abuse cases ever enter the courtroom – half of these end with the child in the custody of the abusive parent..
The recovered memory debate was discussed at a 1993 conference on multiple personality disorder. Richard Lowenstein, a psychiatrist from the University of Maryland Medical School, argued that the Foundation is “media-directed, dedicated to putting out disinformation.”
Other conference participants contemplated funding sources and “possible CIA connections.”
The Devil Denuded
The CIA, in fact, has several designates on the FMSF advisory board. They have in common backgrounds in mind control experimentation. Their very presence on the board, and their peculiar backgrounds, reveal some heavily obscured facts about ritual child abuse.
Martin T. Orne, a senior CIA researcher, is an original board member of the Foundation, and a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Experimental Psychiatry Lab in Philadelphia. In 1962 his forays into hypno-programming (the elicitation of “anti-social” behavior, dissolving memory and other mind-subduing techniques) were financed by a CIA front at Cornell University. He was also funded by Boston’s Scientific Engineering Institute, another front, and a clearinghouse for the Agency’s investigation of the occult.
The CIA and Pentagon have formed a partnership in the creation of cults. To be sure, the Association of National Security Alumni, a public interest veterans group opposed to clandestine ops, considers it a “primary issue of concern” that the Department of Defense has a “perceived role in satanic cult activities, which qualify in and of themselves as very damaging exercises in mind control.”
The smoothing over of the national security state’s cult connections is handled by academic “experts.”
A forerunner of the Foundation is based in Buffalo, New York, the Committee for Scientific Examination of Religion, best known for the publication of Satanism in America: How the Devil Got More Than His Due, widely considered to be a legitimate study. The authors turn up their noses to ritual abuse, dismissing the hundreds of reports around the country as mass “hysteria.” Cult researcher Carl Raschke reported in a March, 1991 article that he coincidentally met Hudson Frew, a Satanism in America co-author, at a Berkeley bookstore. “Frew was wearing a five-pointed star, or pentagram, the symbol of witchcraft and earth magic,” Raschke says. Shawn Carlson, a contributor to the book, is identified by the media as a “physicist.” Yet he runs the Gaia Press in El Cerrito, California, a New Age publishing house with an emphasis on witchcraft and occultic lore. Carlson is also a “scientific and technical consultant” to the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal” (a promoter of the “false memory” theory of ritual abuse and UFO abductions), publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer.
The FMS Foundation is no less eccentric. Within two years of its founding, it was clear that the Foundation leadership was far from disinterested on the workings of childhood memory, and concealed a secret sexual and political agenda.
FMSF founder Ralph Underwager, director of the Institute of Psychological Therapies in Minnesota, was forced to resign in 1993. Underwager (a former Lutheran pastor) and his wife Hollida Wakefield publish a journal, Issues in Child Abuse Allegations, written by and for child abuse “skeptics.” His departure from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was hastened by a remark in an interview, appearing in an Amsterdam journal for pedophiles, that it was “God’s Will” adults engage in sex with children. (His wife Hollida remained on the Foundation’s board after he left.) As it happens, holy dispensation for pedophiles is the exact credo of the Children of God cult. It was fitting, then, when Underwager filed an affidavit on behalf of cult members tried in France in 1992, insisting that the accused were positively “not guilty of abuse upon children.” In the interview, he prevailed upon pedophiles everywhere to shed stigmatization as “wicked and reprehensible” users of children.
In keeping with the Foundation’s creative use of statistics, Dr. Underwager told a group of British reporters in 1994 that “scientific evidence” proved 60% of all women molested as children believed the experience was “good for them.”
Dr. Underwager invariably sides with the defense. His grandiloquent orations have graced courtrooms around the world, often by satellite. Defense lawyers for Woody Allen turned to him, he boasts, when Mia Farrow accused her estranged husband of molesting their seven year-old daughter. Underwager is a virtual icon to the Irish Catholic lobby in Dublin, which raised its hoary hackles against a child abuse prevention program in the Irish Republic. He was, until his advocacy of pedophila tarnished an otherwise glittering reputation, widely quoted in the press, dismissing ritual child abuse as a hysterical aberration.
He is the world’s foremost authority on false memory, but in the courtroom he is repeatedly exposed as a charlatan. In 1988, a trial court decision in New York State held that Dr. Underwager was “not qualified to render any opinion as to whether or not (the victim) was sexually molested.” In 1990 his testimony on memory was ruled improper “in the absence of any evidence that the results of Underwager’s work had been accepted in the scientific community.” And In Minnesota a judge ruled that Underwager’s theories on “learned memory” were the same as “having an expert tell the jury that (the victim) was not telling the truth.”
Peter and Pamela Freyd, executive directors of the Foundation, joined forces with Underwager in 1991, and their story is equally wretched. Jennifer Freyd, their daughter, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, openly leveled accusations of abuse against her parents at an August 1993 mental health conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“My family of origin was troubled in many observable ways, ” she said. “I refer to the things that were never ‘forgotten’ and ‘recovered,’ but to things that we all knew about.” She gave her father’s alcoholism as an example. “During my childhood, my father sometimes discussed his own experiences of being sexually abused as an 11 year-old boy, and called himself a ‘kept boy.’”
Peter Freyd graduated to male prostitution as an adolescent.
At the age of 13, Jennifer Freyd composed a poem about her father’s nocturnal visits:
“I am caught in a web/A web of deep, deep terror”
she wrote. The diaries of her youth chronicle the “reactions and feelings (guilt, shame and terror) of a troubled girl and young woman. My parents oscillated between denying these symptoms and feelings … to using knowledge of these same symptoms and feelings to discredit me.”
“My father,” she says, “told various people that I was brain damaged.” The accusation was unlikely. At the time, Jennifer Freyd was a graduate student on a National Science Foundation fellowship. She has taught at Cornell and received numerous research awards. The “brain damage” apologia did not wash. Her mother suggested that Jennifer’s memories were “confabulations,” and faulted therapeutic intervention. Pamela Freyd turned to her own psychiatrist, Dr. Harold Lief, currently an advisory board member of the Foundation, to diagnose Jennifer.
“He explained to me that he did not believe I was abused,” Jennifer recalls. Dr. Lief’s diagnosis was based on his belief that Peter Freyd’s fantasies were strictly “homoerotic.” Of course, his daughter furrows a brow at the assumption that homoerotic fantasies or a heterosexual marriage exclude the possibility of child molestation. Lief’s skewed logic is a trademark of the Foundation.
He is a close colleague of the CIA’s Martin Orne. Dr. Lief, a former major in the Army medical corps, joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1968, the peak of federally-funded behavioral modification experiments at Holmesburg Prison. Dr. Orne consulted with him on several studies in hypnotic programming. His academic writing reveals a peculiar range of professional interests, including “Orgasm in the Postoperative Transsexual” for Archives of Sexual Behavior, and an exploration of the possibility of life after death for a journal on mental diseases edited by Foundation fellow Paul McHugh. Lief is a director of the Center for Sexuality and Religion, past president of the Sex Information and Education Council.
And an original board member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Two others, Jon Baron from Penn U. and Ray Hyman (an executive editor of the aforementioned Skeptical Inquirer), a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, resigned from the board after Jennifer Freyd went public with her account of childhood abuse, and the facetious attempts of her parents and their therapist to discredit her. They were replaced by David Dinges, co-director – with the ubiquitous Martin Orne – of the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.
“At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered ‘false,’” Jennifer says, “and my alcoholic father’s memory is considered rational and sane.” She does not, after all, remember impossible abuses: “I remember incest in my father’s house…. My first memories came when I was at home a few hours after my second session with my therapist, a licensed clinical psychologist working within an established group in a large and respected medical clinic.
“During that second visit to my therapist’s office, I expressed great anxiety about the upcoming holiday visit from my parents. My therapist asked about half way into the session, whether I had ever been sexually abused. I was immediately thrown into a strange state. No one had ever asked me such a question. I responded, ‘no, but…’ I went home and within a few hours I was shaking uncontrollably, overwhelmed with intense and terrible flashbacks.” Jennifer asks herself why her parents are believed. “In the end, is it precisely because I was abused that I am to be discredited despite my personal and professional success?”
Pamela Freyd published an open letter defending her husband in Ralph Underwager’s Issues in Child Abuse Accusations in 1991. It was reprinted in Confabulations, a book published a year later. Laced with lubricious sentiment, the book bemoans the “destruction of families” brought on by false child abuse accusations, and maligns “cult-like” support groups and feminists, or “lesbian cults.” Executive director Freyd often refers to the feminist groups that have taken up the cause of child abuse survivors as “lesbians,” after the bizarre Dr. Underwager, who claims, “these women may be jealous that males are able to love each other, be comrades, friends, be close, intimate.”
Pamela Freyd’s account of the family history, Jennifer insists, is patently false. In an electronic message from her father, he openly acknowledged that in his version of the story “fictional elements were deliberately inserted.”
“‘Fictional’ is rather an astounding choice of words,” Jennifer observed at the Ann Arbor conference. The article written by her parents contends that Jennifer was denied tenure at another university due to a lack of published research. “In fact,” Jennifer counters, “I moved to the University of Oregon in 1987, just four years after receiving my Ph.D. to accept a tenured position as associate professor in the psychology department, one of the world’s best psychology departments…. My mother sent the Jane Doe article to my colleagues during my promotion year – that is, the year my case for promotion to full professor was being considered. I was absolutely mortified to learn of this violation of my privacy and this violation of truth.”
Manipulative tactics are another Foundation imprimatur. Lana Alexander, editor of a newsletter for survivors of child sexual abuse, observes that “many people view the false memory syndrome theory as a calculated defense strategy developed by perpetrators and the lawyers and expert witnesses who defend them.”
A legitimizing barrage of stories in the press has shaped public opinion and warmed the clime for defense attorneys. The concept of false memory serves the same purpose as Holocaust denial. It shapes opinion. Unconscionable crimes are obstructed, the accused is endowed with the status of martyr, the victim reviled.
The emphasis on image is obvious in “How Do We Know We are Not Representing Pedophiles,” an article written for the February 29, 1992 FMS Foundation Newsletter by Pamela Freyd. In it, she derides the suggestion that many members of the group could be molesters because “we are a good-looking bunch of people, greying hair, well dressed, healthy, smiling; just about every person who has attended is someone you would surely find interesting and want to count as a friend.”
Friendly Fire
People forget things. Horrible things. Here at the Foundation someone had a repressed memory, or what would be called a false memory, that she had been sexually abused. — Pamela Freyd, FMS Foundation Founder
The debate’s bloodiest stage is the courtroom. The hired guns of Martin Orne’s circle of psychiatrists are constantly called upon to blow smoke at the jury’s gallery to conceal CIA mind control operations. This branch of the psychiatric community is steeped in the programming of serial killers, political assassins and experiments on involuntary subjects. Agency psychiatrists on the witness stand direct the press away from the CIA, and the prosecution to a predetermined end. Martin Orne’s high-toned psychologizing in the Hillside Strangler case, for example, is a strategy adopted by the FMS foundation to stifle the cries of mind control survivors.
Orne’s influence contributed to the outcome of a high-profile abuse case, the $8 million lawsuit filed by Gary Ramona of Napa, California against child therapist Marche Isabella and psychiatrist Richard Rose. Ramona charged that his daughter Holly’s therapists elicited from her flashbacks of sexual molestation that never occurred, decimating his marriage and career as a vice president at Robert Mondavi wineries. His wife and employer, note, immediately believed Holly’s accusations. In May of 1994 Ramona received a $500,000 jury award. He hailed the decision as a “tremendous victory.”
Nevertheless, Holly Ramona still maintains that she was sexually abused by her father, though no criminal charges have been filed. Holly first confronted her father with the allegations on March 15, 1990, with her mother and Isabella present. She filed a civil action against him in Los Angeles County, but before it went to trial her father’s suit got underway in Napa.
The suit turned on the use of sodium amytal to resurrect buried memories. Holly Ramona exhibited telltale symptoms of abuse – fear of gynecological examinations, a phobia of pointy teeth, like her father’s – and asked to be treated with sodium amytal. Dr. Rose wrote in his notes that under the influence of the drug, Holly “remembered specific details of sexual molestation.” But Orne, who has pioneered in the use of sodium amytal in hypnosis research, cautioned in a court brief that the drug is “not useful in ascertaining ‘truth.’ The patient becomes receptive to suggestions due to the context and to the comments of the interviewers.”
Yet the jury foreman stated for the record that Isabella and Rose did not implant false memories of abuse, as Holly’s father had complained, but were negligent in reinforcing the memories as Holly described them under the influence of the barbiturate. The court considered it irrelevant whether Holly actually suffered abuse, narrowing the legal focus instead to the chemical evocation of Holly’s recollections and her therapist’s leading questions.
Left hanging was the question of Ramona’s guilt or innocence, not exactly an irrelevant issue. Orne offered no opinion. The “tremendous victory” in Napa, given these facts, begins to look like a manipulation of the court system, especially the use of “expert” testimony.
The therapists did not, contrary to most press reports, bear the full brunt of blame. The jury found that Ramona himself bore 5% of the blame for what happened to him, Holly’s therapists 55%, and 45% was borne by the girl’s mother and the Robert Mondavi winery.
But the 55% solution is diluted by Holly’s memories. Contrary to the impression left by the press, her past has not been explained away. “I wouldn’t be here if there was a question in my mind,” she testified in Napa.
False memory had no clinical history or symptomology (repressed memory has both), but the concept had held up in court.
All that remained was to provide a scientific explanation. The Foundation had spread the word that a “syndrome” was winding through society and “destroying families.” But what is the origin of false (not inaccurate or clouded or fragmented) memories? What are the symptoms? It remained to supply a cognitive model for false memories of ritual molestation.
One of the most prolific and quotable popularizers of false memory is Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and law at the University of Washington in Seattle, and an advisory board member of the Foundation. Her dual academic interests have fueled suspicions that the organization is more committed to defending perpetrators than ferreting out the facts. Loftus testified in over 150 criminal cases prior to joining the Foundation, always on behalf of defendants. In 1991 she published a professional autobiography, Witness for the Defense, a study of eight criminal trials in which she appeared as an expert witness. In her book, Loftus – billed as “the expert who puts memory on trial” – conceded that her critics deem her research “unproven in real-life situations,” and her courtroom dissertations “premature and highly prejudicial.”
One book reviewer for the New York Times grumbled: “Her testimony would be less controversial if she could distinguish between the innocent and the guilty and reserve her help for the former.”
Elizabeth Loftus has two criteria for taking the stand. The first is when eyewitness identification is the sole or primary evidence against the defendant. Secondly, the accused must act innocent – she regrets testifying on behalf of Ted Bundy because the serial killer once smiled at the prosecutor, which she regards as an expression of guilt – and defense attorneys must believe it.
Loftus stood at the Harvard Medical School podium in May, 1994 to inform a conference on false memory of her research, “in which false memories about childhood events were created in 24 men and women ages 18 to 63.” Dr. Loftus reported that the parents of volunteers “cooperated to produce a list of events that had supposedly taken place in the volunteer’s early life.” Three of the events actually took place. But one, a shopping trip, never happened. Some of the volunteers had memories, implanted by suggestion, of wandering lost on the fictitious shopping expedition.
Karen Olio, the author of scores of articles on sexual abuse, complains that Loftus’s memory studies “examine only the possibility of implanting a single memory with which most people could easily identify (being lost in a mall, awakened by a noise in the night). The possibility of ‘implanting’ terrifying and shameful memories that differ markedly from an individual’s experience, such as memories of childhood abuse in individuals who do not have a trauma history,” remains to be proven.”
Psychiatrist John Briere of the University of Southern California has found that nearly two-thirds of all ritual abuse survivors report episodic or complete amnesia at some point after it occurred. The younger the child, the more violent the abuse, the more likely that memory lapses occurred. These findings have been duplicated at the University of California at San Francisco by psychiatrist Lenore Terr, who concluded that children subjected to repeated abuse were more likely to repress memories of it than victims of a single traumatic event.
Clinical psychologist Catherine Gould has treated scores of ritually abused children at her office in Encino, California. At the September 1993 National Conference on Crimes Against Children in Washington, D.C., Gould objected that the studies of Elizabeth Loftus ignore past research on trauma and its influence on memory.
“My concern about Elizabeth Loftus,” Gould said, “is that she has stated in print, and correctly so, that her data tells us nothing about the nature of memory of traumatic events. And yet she has failed to protest the misapplication of her findings by groups who are involved in discrediting the accounts survivors are giving of their traumatic history. I believe that Dr. Loftus, like other psychologists, has an ethical responsibility to do everything possible to ensure that her research findings are interpreted and applied accurately, and are not manipulated to serve the political agenda of groups like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. I question whether she has met this ethical responsibility.”
Some psychologists accuse Loftus of faking her research data.
Her study did not live up to its promise. But now that she had “proven” that a false memory could be implanted, friends of the Foundation at the Harvard conference announced they’d identified the neurological and cognitive causes of disorder. Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychologist and conference organizer, claimed that the “confabulator” selects a fragment of a real memory, “but confuses its true context, and draws on other bits of experience to construct a story that makes sense of it.” Dr. Morris Moscovitch, a neuro-psychologist at the University of Toronto, claimed that “brain damage” could also evoke false memories. He noted that mental patients with frontal lobe defects frequently confuse imaginary stories with actual memories.
A superficially plausible revelation was provided by Cornell psychologist Stephen Ceci, who reported on five studies of 574 preschool children. After 10 weeks of repeated questioning, 58% of them concocted a false account for at least one fictitious event.
But like the studies of Elizabeth Loftus, Ceci did not attempt to explain the supposed amnesiac effect of severe trauma on children and adults alike (veterans of WW II and Vietnam have been known to “forget” atrocities of war). Besides, the average preschooler is bound to invent at least one fantasy in 10 long weeks of repetitive questioning. Toddlers aren’t known for their consummate adherence to objective reality. An invisible playmate and the Cat in the Hat are not “false memories.”
The research results presented at the Harvard conference were not exactly staggering. All that had been proven was that children forget, become confused and make things up.
Seattle therapist James Cronin, one of the Foundation’s harshest critics, believes that the false memory concept is promoted by “fact and artifice” to a public conditioned to the fragmentation of knowledge, intellectual charades, elitism and the sterile abstractions that often pass for university education and expertise. The so-called experts now jumping on the side of false memory and therapist ‘bias’ are opportunists.”
Yet the New York Times hailed the Harvard conference as “epic.” The conference had given a gracious “scientific nod to the frailty of memory.” Victims of aggravated child abuse had nothing to celebrate, but the Times reporter was ecstatic. At long last, scientists everywhere had arrived at “a consensus on the mental mechanisms that can foster false memories.” A consensus? Actually, the “consensus” of psychologists, at least the 88% mentioned earlier – only a vast majority – believe it to be a very real scourge.
The Times story is typical of the scorn the press has shown ritual abuse victims and their therapists.
60 Minutes, for example, publicly exonerated Kelly Michaels, a day-care worker in New Jersey, of charges that she sexually molested dozens of youngsters in 1984. Michaels was sentenced to 47 years in prison for sodomizing the children in her care with kitchen implements, among related charges. Her conviction was overturned in March 1993 when the state appeals court ruled that Michaels had not had a fair trial.
But in its rush to present Michaels as a blushing innocent, the Sixty Minutes research department somehow overlooked a May 1991 New York Times story on the abuse trial, and the testimony of four Essex County corrections officers who witnessed Miss Michaels and her father kissing and “fondling” one another during jail visitations. Jerry Vitiello, a jailer, said that “he saw Ms. Michaels use his tongue when kissing his daughter, rub her buttocks and put his hand on her breasts.” Similar incestuous liaisons were detailed in the courtroom by three women working in the jail. The bizarre sexual antics of Kelly Michaels – damningly chronicled in Nap Time by Lisa Manshel in 1990 – was nixed from the one-sided Sixty Minutes account, which made her out to be grist for the meat grinder of wrong-headed child abuse laws.
The Forgettable “Remembering Satan”
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation made its collective debut in “Remembering Satan,” a two-part story by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker for April and May 1993. The story (republished in 1994 in book form) concerns a ritual abuse trial in Olympia, Washington that culminated with a 20-year prison sentence for Thurston County Sheriff Paul Ingram, chairman of the local Republican Party. Ingram has since filed motions to withdraw his guilty plea, a move rejected by an appellate court in 1992. Also charged, but not convicted, were Jim Rabie, a lobbyist with the Washington State Law Enforcement Association and a former police detective assigned to child abuse cases, and Ray Risch, an employee of the State Patrol’s body-and-fender shop. Wright’s conclusion, however, is based on the opinions of False Memory Syndrome Foundation psychiatrists: that accusations made by Ingram’s two daughters, and his own confession to police, were fantasies misinterpreted by Ingram himself and his daughters as actual memories.
Wright fumigates any question of abuse with false memory theory. Among the authorities consulted by Wright was Foundation board member Paul McHugh, director of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins. Like Margaret Singer, he is a veteran of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (1961-64) and moves in political circles. For three years (1986-89), McHugh was chairman of the bio-psychology study section of the National Institutes of Health, and a former member of the Maryland Governor’s Advisory Commission.
McHugh is an unshakable skeptic of repressed memories. He told Wright that “most severe traumas are not blocked out by children but are remembered all too well.” Most, in fact, are. But McHugh’s own professional opinion leaves open the possibility that some severe traumas are repressed.
He cites as an example the children of chowchilla, California, who were kidnapped in a school bus and buried alive. McHugh claims they remembered the horror “all too well.” Not exactly. In fact, the FBI’s subsequent use of investigative hypnosis was largely the result of the Chowchilla children’s failure of memory. After their release, none of the children had a clear recollection of the kidnappers, could not identify them – and neither did the bus driver, Ed Ray, who managed to recite the license-plate number of the abductor’s van under hypnosis.
Wright’s defense of Ingram turns on the opinion of Richard Ofshe, a Berkeley psychologist, reputed mind control expert and friend of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Ofshe has written, Wright explains, “extensively about how the thought-control techniques developed in Communist china, the Soviet Union and North Korea had come to be employed and refined by various religious cults in the United States.” Pointing to mind control in Communist countries is a favorite tactic of the American mind control fraternity to divert attention from the highly sophisticated techniques employed in “Democratic” countries (often in the form of experimentation on unknowing subjects). This historical revision is a fine example of “mirror imaging,” the CIA technique of vilifying others, and ignoring the Agency’s own role in the formation and control of mind control cults. Ofshe has not been directly linked to the CIA, but his work parrots the writings of UCLA’s Louis Jolyon West and other psychiatrists with Agency credentials.
Wright somehow failed to mention that Ofshe is sharply at odds with much of the American Psychological Association. He has filed a suit, with Margaret Singer, for $30 million against the APA for engaging in a “conspiracy” to “destroy” their reputations and prevent them from testifying in the courtroom. Both Ms. Singer and Richard Ofshe derive a significant part of their income as consultants and expert witnesses on behalf of accused child abusers. Their complaint, filed under federal racketeering laws – tripling any financial damages – claims that members of the APA set out with “repeated lies” to “discredit them and impair their careers.”
The Association flatly denied the charges. Two courts quickly dismissed the case. The APA released a statement to the press stating that the organization had merely advised members against testifying in court on the subject of brainwashing with “persuasive coercion” (a concept, after all, pushed during the Korean war by the CIA to justify barbaric mind control experimentation on American citizens), and had in no way conspired to impair the careers of Ofshe, Singer or anyone else.
Many in Ofshe’s own profession believe him to be a world-class opportunist. He is a constant in newspaper interviews and on the talk show circuit, where he claims there is “no evidence” to support ritual abuse allegations. His categorical denial ignore’s Ingram’s own confession and a number of jury decisions across the country. And then there are, to cite one documented example of evidence from the glut that Ofshe ignores, the tunnels beneath the McMartin preschool, the most widely-publicized case. And a raid on the Children of God compound in Argentina in 1993 turned up videos of ritual abuse and child pornography. Evidence does exist – Ofshe simply refuses to acknowledge the fact. A cult specialist with Ofshe’s credentials would surely explore the abundance of evidence if he was a legitimate psychologist. Instead, he chirps a categorical “no evidence,” perfectly aware that most mental health professionals will see through him. A credulous public will not.
On the December 3, 1993 Rolanda talk show, a woman was interviewed who’d had flashback memories of abuse before consulting with a therapist. Dr. Ofshe appeared on the program, his silver beard groomed, looking every inch the authority. Rolanda asked Ofshe if “a terrible childhood memory, as bad as child abuse, (can) actually be repressed.”
“There is absolutely no reason to think that that is true,” Ofshe told her. “And it’s not just what I say – this is the sum and substance of everything science knows about how memory works.” This, of course, is a transparent lie. Ofshe dismissed repressed memories of abuse as the reigning “psychological quackery of the 20th century.”
Dr. Daniel Lutzker, a psychologist at the Milton Erickson Institute, was sitting in the audience – turning crimson with rage at Ofshe’s misrepresentations of the psychology of trauma. He stood up and argued that sex abuse can indeed begat buried recollections. “Repressed memories,” Lutzker countered, “are not only important, they are the cornerstone of most psychotherapies. the fact is that the more awful the experience, the more likely it is to be repressed!”
Ofshe responded that there was “no evidence” so support such “nonsense.”
Grimacing with disbelief, Lutzker said that Ofshe wouldn’t make such outrageous comments if he bothered to pick up “any basic textbook on psychotherapy.”
“Your making it up!” Ofshe spat. Lutzker stared at him in disbelief.
But the crowning contradiction to Ofshe’s “expert” opinions appeared in a September 1994 L.A. Weekly article on alien abductions (another phenomenon said by the Foundation to breed “false memories”).
“There are a lot of not particularly well-certified people out there,” Dr. Ofshe told Gardetta, “using very powerful techniques on people. Visualizing this kind of stuff under hypnosis – abduction, Satan cults, sexual abuse – is the closest thing that anyone can experience short of the experience itself. That’s why it’s so traumatic to the individuals undergoing hypno-therapy, and why the hypno-therapist today can be seen as a new form of sexual predator.”
But one morning, shortly thereafter, Gardetta awoke to find a triangular rash on the palm of his left hand.
“It didn’t surprise me,” Gardetta wrote. “Things around the house – which sits on a hilltop in a semi-rural area – had been getting weird. A jet-wash noise buzzed some afternoons around the house, its origin impossible to discern. Lights were turning themselves on, and the alarm system’s motion sensor was tripping itself every morning between 5 and 6. One early evening, small footsteps crossed the roof. I ran outside to find the electrical wires leading to a nearby telephone pole swaying in the windless dusk.”
The mysterious federal mind control fraternity had struck again, leaving behind more memories to be denounced by the “skeptics” of the FMS Foundation – the CIA’s answer to the Flat Earth Society.


http://www.antifascistencyclopedia.com/a...ation-fmsf

[Dawn Meredith]

In 1992 there was a case here in Austin that I followed very closely. Just now I thought I would see the latest on that case, to see if the convictions were upheld. The article below is from the local "leftist" (used to be called "underground" ) Austin free paper. How uneducated most in the media are.

Yesterday in court I was told about a hung jury on a child sex case. Once again the alleged victim was just not believed. The reasoning was that she did not tell until several years after the alleged rape. I know that this is often the case. In fact I know all too well. Someone in my family.

When I am appointed on child rape cases I ask the court to appoint someone else. Unless the abuser is willing to take responsibility, otherwise I feel too strongly about this and cannot provide a defense that the Constitution calls for.

Dawn


The Satanic Abuse Scare
BY JORDAN SMITH




The sensational charges against Fran and Danny Keller and their home day care were not unique. By 1992, the year the Kellers were tried, about 100 child-care workers across the country had been charged with ritual sex abuse of children, and 20 day care workers had been convicted in similar cases. The most notorious concerned the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, Calif. There, more than 300 children would eventually make statements accusing their teachers not only of sexually violating them but also of subjecting them to bizarre, ritualistic abuse. Many of the allegations made by children in the McMartin case were curiously similar to those that would be made against the Kellers. In 1990, after a decade in the courts for what became the longest and most expensive criminal case in American history, the McMartin defendants were acquitted.

But the public hysteria surrounding alleged day care abuse, exemplified and fed by the McMartin prosecution, was still very much in the cultural atmosphere. So was a widespread notion that a vast network of Satanists was intent on corrupting and sexually abusing children and that many of its practitioners could be found working in child care. (The cults avoided discovery and prosecution, some claimed, because law enforcement members were themselves part of the satanic network. In the Kellers' case, one parent told Texas Monthly writer Gary Cartwright she suspected longtime District Attorney Ronnie Earle – in part because he lived near a goat farm.)

Partly for this reason, the allegations made by the children against the Kellers were hardly tested at all. Apparently, the prosecutors and some of the police investigators believed at least some of the wildest allegations – specifically, that there was cult abuse at work.

Satanic ritual abuse is a fictional pop-culture archetype – mostly in horror movies – but it was widely introduced to the public as a real, hidden conspiracy with the 1980 publication of the book Michelle Remem*bers. The co-authors, Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and a longtime patient of his, Michelle Smith (whom Pazder later married), recount the therapy that led to her purportedly "remembering" that she had been abused in the 1950s by her mother and other members of a "satanic cult" in British Columbia. The book has since been exposed as a hoax by several researchers, but at the time, its revelations – including the notion that there was a widespread cult of Satanists torturing and sexually abusing children – caught public attention and fed the fears of parents who, with many women now in the workplace, were increasingly leaving their children in the care of others during the day. The notion of a powerful, underground cult of Satanists convinced many parents, therapists, and credulous prosecutors, leading to a series of satanic ritual abuse-related child-care cases, beginning with the notorious McMartin case. By the time of the allegations against the Kellers, the satanic ritual abuse script for child abuse was already well established and had not yet met much meaningful challenge.

An excellent history of the satanic ritual abuse panic is Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker (Basic Books, 336 pp., 1995). For more information on people wrongly accused or convicted of crimes against children, visit the website of the National Center for Reason and Justice, http://www.ncrj.org.


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