Intelligence by Susan Hasler (Thomas Dunne Books. St. Martin’s Press: New York 2010)

A review by Richard Thieme

There is enough white-hot rage in this book to steam a skunk.

Take that as a compliment. Twenty-one years at the CIA in diverse capacities would generate post-traumatic stress in anyone, but not many can pen a narrative that addresses the relevant characters, issues, and complexities of that tenure. “Intelligence” pretty much does, within the constraints of agency pre-publication review.

This book is more or less true, I believe, to its ultimate purpose, which is to channel the complex, sometimes contradictory vectors of energy that warred within the author during her 21 years of service into characters with conflicting points of view, emotions, and allegiances. If there is a flaw in the book, it is that those conflicts result in a “happy ending” at odds with the headlines, if not today’s, then certainly tomorrow’s.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free,” reads the ironic quote at the entrance to the CIA, ironic because the biblical quote refers to that transcendent truth that includes and surpasses all lesser allegiances (which the biblical narrative casts as various forms of idolatry) whereas the agency is fused with the lesser purposes of the nation state that sanctions its work and methods. (I once asked a Naval intelligence analyst about the sticky problem of “intelligence ethics,” and he said, “we have a code: don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal. But it doesn’t say, Don’t kill. That’s why we exist.”)

It gets messy, once one is assimilated into the “inside circle” of an agency like the CIA where those higher imperatives are lopped off at the start from the definition of the mission. Over time the addictive drug of being an insider consumes one. Having access to inside information, knowing what others can only guess, and often guess wrong, receiving reinforcement only from one’s cohorts for the privilege of being special, exempt, and in the know, receiving permission to violate legal or ethical norms that outsiders must acknowledge from time to time … over time, this leads to a murky mix in which the struggle to do one’s job, keep one’s job, and keep one’s soul more or less intact … well, it all gets messy, over time.

And over time, intense bonds of collegiality and friendship and the pressures of keeping secrets and working together in the trenches bond soldiers to one another. That’s depicted vividly in this book. So inevitably tensions mount when there is a political agenda and directive to distort intelligence on behalf of a political purpose, particularly when it makes the practitioner of the craft look stupid or inept despite the facts.

Yes, that has always been true, a friend of mine at one of the agencies said. But post 9/11, it got much worse. Many of us hated what the administration did to paint us as the bad guys, when they were lying and deceiving while we were trying to do our jobs. They only wanted results that supported a predetermined agenda, namely, to go to war in Iraq, with predictable consequences. When we warned that such a war would fan the flames of jihad worldwide, we were summarily dismissed – as characters in this book, so warning, are dismissed.

All that, I believe, is one source of the anger in this work. Oh, there’s humor, yes, amusing incidents and relationships, that ameliorate the fury, but the white-hot fire burns through cracks like the flames in a pot-belly stove. So one obvious subtext of this book is to pay back those responsible for that distortion and what it did personally to those in the trenches who could not mount a podium and shout denials in response. All they could do was leak it, hint it, and when they could, put it into  fictional form.

Another subtext results from the author’s twenty-one years of growing frustration at the self-interested territory-and-career protecting agendas and behaviors that make a person crazy inside the agency – and inside other organizations, too, of course (an executive of a large bank told me they spend at least 60% of their time in internal politics, like a whale regulating its internal temperature so it doesn’t cook from the inside out). Everyone of a certain age knows that it is the unwritten rules that say how one had better behave in an organizational culture and that one violates those rules to ones personal and professional peril. That awareness informs this book in both positive and negative ways – positive because the writer, Susan Hasler, was sufficiently motivated to disclose all this in the guise of fiction, but negative because it turns the narrative into a wish-fulfillment, a tale of how she hopes or wishes it would turn out in the actual agency, the real world. A wish fulfillment is a dream, as Freud said,  and a dream does not always make for good literature. Think of the movie “Chinatown” with the alternative happy ending that wasn’t used, Evelyn Mulwray killing Noah Cross, getting off free, hitching up with Jake, and the whole corrupt mess exposed and dismantled.

In the real world, it doesn’t happen that way. That’s why Roman Polanski’s canny version won out, and why the film lasts. Layers of corrupt allegiances and practices have more than nine lives and hide better, too, than any cat.

So any sane person would become angry, dealing with all that but muzzled by secrecy agreements. Yet … this fictional narrative of work in the “Mines” as the trenches of daily intelligence operations are called, saw the light of day fairly quickly. I know former intelligence professionals whose attempts to publish were long stalled or so censored that the remaining text made the work unpublishable. I recall Melissa Mahle, who had hoped to make a speech on rendition for an intelligence ethics conference, removing herself from the agenda because the agency had “gutted her talk” by removing 75% of it – not because the details were unknown but because her speech would affirm them. Publication in the media allowed for “no comment” or plausible deniability. Her speech would not. So it wasn’t that people didn’t know, but that they did not know “officially” and it is official truth that matters.

That in fact is a major theme of this book, that “official truth” and the truth that sets you free often conflict. The dream is that the half-mad intelligence agent, Maddie, will have her day before Congress and cameras and expose the “real bad guys” and set the agency right again, that is, realign the CIA or an alternative part of it anyway with its real task, to gather intelligence and provide it in a useful form for leaders with some modicum of integrity and the desire to use it in the right way. It is ironic, of course, that it takes someone who has gone over the edge and thrown caution to the wind to speak the simple truth.

In short, the fact that this book is out, in this form, means that this is a story somebody wanted told.  The distortion of intelligence, bent to political agendas in ways that cost lives and careers, distortion as both policy and practice, must enrage many senior practitioners of the craft. Some of them want us to know, that while they can not mount the podium and speak, they can allow a “fictionalized” account to make their point.

I returned to writing fiction myself when a friend at one of the agencies said, in effect, you can’t talk about the things we talk about unless you write fiction. It’s the only way you can tell the truth. The result was “Mind Games,” nineteen stories of edgy anomalies published earlier this year  (www.thiemeworks.com). It is only a hunch, of course, but an informed hunch, that a similar motivation fueled the writing of this novel.

The public biography of Susan Hasler also suggests some other conflicts that generated the heat and light in this book. She was an intelligence analyst, which gives credibility to detailed scenes of inside-the-agency dynamics revealing the frustrations, political strife, and personal interactions that keep us reading. If this were only fiction, that is, rather than a wink-wink nod-nod peek inside, some of the narrative might be of less interest. The conflicts at the heart of the narrative derive at least some of their interest from the overlay our brains constantly provide, comparing and contrasting the “real” world of the past ten years with events in the book.

Hasler’s biography also states that she wrote speeches for three directors of Central Intelligence and one director of the National Recognizance Office. Having written a few speeches for others myself, always as a “ghost,” I know that this means an ability to get inside the mind of another, to see the world through their eyes like some empathetic science fiction alien taking over the apparatus of an earthling, speaking in their own words, from their perspectives. That same empathy and ability to hold multiple points of view in creative tension while managing one’s own cognitive dissonance until some integration of data takes place, that testifies to Hasler’s street cred and significant abilities as a counter terrorism and Soviet analyst as well. Her years of experience are evident.

So Hasler had to learn to manage all that, do her work, keep her job, keep her cats healthy like one of the characters, and stay reasonably sane. The ability to manage multiple personalities and perspectives and remember how to come home to one’s own (while reading details of ingenious ways others are planning to kill us)  distinguishes someone who is bitterly sane from one who is over the line and as crazed as the character Maddie threatens to become. Maddie seems to be an alter-ego who carries the rage on behalf of the group that is not allowed to do their work. The affirmation of Maddie’s vision is one way for the author to remain loyal to the ultimate truth. The challenge is to find a way to integrate Maddie’s loyalty to the higher purpose of both agency and world with allegiance to the nation state and all its bad actors and detours and do justice to it all.

But as I said, the resolutions in the book are probably more wish fulfillment than fact, as much as “outsiders” can know or guess. How often the employees of the CIA stand and turn their backs en masse on a director they have learned to disrespect is a matter of conjecture. But celebrating the possibility is obviously a therapeutic path for this author who spent so many years unable to speak “outside” of what she knew and is now searching for a suitable voice that enables multiple streams of her life to come together—a fact which leads Maddie in the book but the author as well, perhaps, to conclude that leaving the agency for a dull academic life would condemn her to boredom and irrelevance, once one has been inside. Academics may pontificate at length but don’t know what they don’t know or even that they don’t know. Life “outside” is literally unthinkable, a de facto lobotomy, except as a daydream that enables one to make it through the day. Think of Henry Hill in the movie “Goodfellas,” just a schnook in the witness protection program, instead of the adrenalin junkie who loved a life of crime despite its pitfalls.

In the final dream-wish of the book, a vindicated and triumphant Maddie remains to direct an “alternative” track whose job is to take names and kick ass, which she anticipates doing with relish and glee, and to keep the agency safe for those who not only seek the truth in all of its forms but seek as well to speak truth to power and live to speak another day.

<sigh>

If only.

Another personal aside: I was once advised by a therapist to read about trauma because my interaction with those who had been tortured and those who torture others had pushed me over a line. “You’re showing symptoms of  secondary trauma,” she said.

So is Susan Hasler, I believe, in this novel, and the book strikes me as an attempt to reconcile the multiple conflicts of which I have written and find peace. Having projected her mind and heart into the persona of three DCIs, having done years of detailed research with access to data most don’t know and spent sleepless nights rehearsing the dire threats, imagining the psyches of Soviets and terrorists and putting hyerself in their places as much as in the directors’ speeches, splicing her mind to the purposes of others, she must now take back the strings of all those marionettes and make her own soul dance to a tune congruent with her deeper commitments and the self she remains.

Her loyalties did clearly include those in the trenches, her brothers and sisters, who bonded  in the face of the live fire of real threats, trying to act on behalf of the higher good that once motivated their youthful hearts. Those loyalties are tested in the context of the bitter truths of political life that veterans like Hasler know and can never unlearn. The terrorists’ threats and actions, presented as the main narrative thread, are intense but less emotionally dense than the conflicts of the professionals in the trenches. That’s where Hesler lived her life, after all, and decades of  interfacing with those diverse people and agendas, as abrasive as hair shirts, requires one imagines a certain amoung of purging. .

The “enemy,” then, is the “voice with many names” that articulates in brief the ethos of Islamic terrorists, but also intelligence professionals themselves, and bureaucrats, and political hacks. That fact has serious consequences. As career goals eclipse counter-terrorism efforts and political spin eclipses facts about a world that can never be perfectly secured, the real threats of terrorism are amplified. A la “coming in from the cold,” the author tells us aside how bad it really is, how enraging to watch television “news” programs juxtapose images to create an unthinking sheeplike population that neither knows the truth nor how to find it as it is led to war and more.

The author no doubt knows the beltway joke, that the CIA we think exists is not the real CIA, but a front projected into the world to convince enemies we can not do intelligence properly. The real work of a real CIA is hidden in some bunker in the hills of Virginia.

That’s the CIA with which the author chooses to identify. That’s the one to which she believes she belongs.

Perhaps that’s true for all of us, one way or another.  Perhaps that’s how we all live with ourselves.

I strongly recommend this book. It is really worth reading. The author, having left the agency after decades of work, remains in her brain inside the “real CIA,” in a spin cycle that may go on for the rest of her life “outside.” The rest of us can only speculate and guess, and watch as growing numbers of intelligence workers commute from suburbia, park in vast lots, then disappear into doors in the sides of hills which from the air look just like grass. All we know at the end is that they disappear into doors to which “we the people” do not for the moment have keys and they can only report their experience in veiled and sanctioned ways.

The UFO Encyclopedia : The Phenomenon from the Beginning (2 Volume Set) by Jerome Clark

Many have wished for the existence of a fundamental reader on the immense topic of UFOlogy that cuts through the self-promotions of the cottage industry, sees hoaxes and likely errors of perception for what they are, respects the scientific method as the best way to approach irreducible and anomalous data, understands the impact of organized disinformation and inevitable misinformation on a proto-science denied the multidisciplinary efforts that would bring its data into clearer focus, yet keeps in front of us the best quality of information and presents it with appreciation for the critiques of both debunkers and agnostics applying Occam’s razor to interpretations.

Jerry Clark’s 2-volume UFO Encyclopedia does this in a comprehensive, thorough, extraordinary way. His work and mind are – duh!–encyclopedic in all the best senses of the term. No exploration of this subject would be complete without reference to this material.

A Tale of Two Sciences: Memoirs of a Dissident Scientist

by Peter A. Sturrock

(Exoscience: Palo Alto) 2009.

by Richard Thieme

“A Tale of Two Sciences:  Memoirs of a Dissident Scientist,” by Dr. Peter A. Sturrock, is a personal work by the well-known Stanford physicist and astrophysicist, reflecting on the sometimes complementary, sometimes discordant threads of his professional lives: one as a conventional scientist, with a long list of respected publications, and one as an unconventional scientist who explored anomalous phenomena, in particular UFO phenomena.

His conventional scientific career might be a surprise to those who know him only in relationship to UFO studies; it is recounted here in terms that any educated layman can understand – in fact, the simplicity and clarity of his explanations of, say, plasma physics or pulsars, are a testimony to his deep knowledge – one can’t explain complex phenomena so clearly otherwise. And for readers who want to go a little deeper, there is a small bit of helpful math in appendices.

His unconventional career, on the other hand, has resulted in the full spectrum of responses which unfortunately are familiar to all researchers in anomalies –embarrassed smiles, curt dismissals, ridicule, the bemused shaking of a lot of heads – all of which tell the researcher that he or she is at best tolerated as an eccentric and at worst dismissed as a nut case.

The two strands of his unconventional career consist of accumulated evidence, the content of his explorations, food for further thought and research, and his personal account of reactions to that work and in turn his reactions to those reactions over a lifetime.

This is a memoir, not a scientific treatise, so it must be evaluated for what it tells us about the man and his internal journey as well as the rewards of a long career in orthodox scientific research. It is well-written, careful in its pronouncements, understated, eminently sane, and occasionally mind-boggling, especially for the uninitiated who previously accepted the dismissal of anomalies like UFOs and ESP uncritically. The book is a significant contribution to the psychology of science and scientists as well and can serve as the wise words of a mentor for younger scientists tempted by the forbidden. Sturrock warns those who would follow in his footsteps to count the cost. Enduring decades of abrasive dismissals by scientists who at their personal worst are unscientific makes this path a long-distance run, not a sprint, that requires stamina, grit, and renewable commitment.

A lifetime of cognitive dissonance is one result of the subject matter Sturrock investigates and frequent rejection of the pursuit itself, much less the fruits of that pursuit. At the core his commitment is the essence of a properly scientific attitude, namely, curiosity, curiosity about the ineluctably real that imprints itself indelibly on one’s consciousness.  Reading this narrative, one thinks of Francis Bacon’s response when criticized by the Church for dissecting cadavers to learn about human anatomy because the Church was afraid that his discoveries might contradict its teachings: “Whatever deserves to exist deserves to be known.”

So ultimately there has been for Peter Sturrock not two careers but one and one mode of knowing and wanting to know, the scientific mode applied rigorously and without prejudice. Conventional and unconventional science alike are the front and back of a single discipline requiring that one attends to the data, formulate hypotheses, then test and revise them, leaving the next generation with a slightly better understanding of what seems to exists in a complex universe.

Sturrock is well known in UFO circles as the organizer of the Pocantico Conference in September 1997 which brought together an eclectic group of scientists at the Pocantico Conference Center near Tarrytown, New York to hear presentations on selected cases and some summaries of UFO effects by serious researchers. Financed by Laurence Rockefeller, the conference straddled the forbidden and the familiar and included researchers known to readers of this journal such as Jacques Vallee, Mark Rodigher, and Richard Haines. The medium, a respectable scientific conference, was intended to be the message as well, leading to greater credibility for research into UFO phenomena. The conference concluded with carefully phrased, conservative, thoughtful suggestions that challenged orthodox scientists by proposing additional topics and structures for research.

Sturrock wrote about the conference in detail in “The UFO Enigma: a New Review of the Physical Evidence,” published in 1999 by Warner Books.  Much of that material is reviewed in this memoir, but because this is a memoir, there is a critical difference: “It is not easy to have a split personality,” Sturrock writes in the first sentence of the preface; “this book is – in part – an attempt to remedy that situation.” That compelling drive to clarify the data, integrate it into a unified framework, and articulate tentative but provocative conclusions about what it tells us to explore next – this is a subtext of this work. That drive, Sturrock makes clear, is motivated in part by the desire to alleviate the cognitive dissonance of which I spoke; that internal conflict must be addressed by a mature healthy ego, one’s life work must be justified and justifiable, to others as well as oneself. That too is a subtext of this work. Sturrock the man as well as the wary scientist shows up and makes his case. By establishing basic criteria – does it exist? therefore is it deserving of being understood? – for work in all arenas, Sturrock challenges again and again the irrational or non-rational rejection of the subject matter in itself by those who claim the scientific method as their modus opperandi. He places the burden on scientists who refuse even to look much less pay attention. And that challenge, I am afraid, will be handled by most career scientists as they have handled both Sturrock and the subject matter in the past, by not acknowledging that it exists.

Because Sturrock is willing in this personal account to reveal more of the feeling behind his thinking, he is impelled to conclusions that have not been often articulated in the past. UFO researchers since Hynek have noted the “strangeness” of some reports, aspects of the experience that might sound like science fiction to those unfamiliar with the now-voluminous body of research. At the end of the work, he advances an alternative view of physics that might account for the “strangeness” of some UFO reports, that vehicles or entities seem to be here yet not here at the same time, that observers walk around a luminous object which disappears as if tucked into a nook of spacetime behind a hidden curtain, that experiences of telepathic communication or transfer of knowledge have taken place… and that the compelling testimony of people for sixty years (and likely more) from all over the world, their experiences in agreement in many small details … this mass of experience and data should not be ignored.

His conclusions suggest in essence that current models of reality derived from physics do not account for what has been observed; therefore oblique trajectories must be drawn and followed to explore possibilities to begin to account for them – and perhaps reap practical rewards for spacetime travel, energy consumption, and medicine.

And because the narrative is from one point of view an apologia, a justification of a lifetime of unorthodox pursuits, and because sanity, like wisdom, is contextual, the author marshals a sequence of historical antecedents of theories that were rejected out of hand when first proposed but that turned out to be of merit. Consensus realities in the past led to the same kind of ridicule and “debunking” that UFO researchers experience today; heterodox ideas gained a foothold among mainstream scientists “one funeral at a time,” as Max Planck described progress in science.  Sturrock refers to the famous instance of meteorites which could not possibly exist because “rocks do not fall from the sky,” and battered child syndrome, the details of which could not be heard when first presented to doctors, and the theory of plate tectonics, and in his primary domain of expertise, theories about neutrinos and pulsars.  One thinks too of Raymond Dart and his work on Australopithecus, widely rejected for many years.

Such stories are widely known, and some of the motive power for repeating them comes I suspect from the need to establish a “tradition” of advances in science that occurred after prophets who first articulated them had been scorned and dishonored.  So on one level, the text reminds both scientists and laity that good science ought to consider anomalies worthy of investigation, and on a personal or psychological level, the author must make the case that in all of the work he has done, he listens carefully, observes scrupulously, and rigorously investigates before formulating a hypothesis.

Part of making his case is the entire first part of the memoir which reviews Sturrock’s educational and vocational history, linked by memories of influential teachers, mentors, and colleagues. That organizing principle is an attribute of memoirs too, the narrative sequence determined by memories of people important to the author’s personal and professional life.  Those chapters establish that Sturrock was indeed mentored and respected by conventional scientists of some renown, that some of the best people in his field led him into research in Europe and the United States in astrophysics and physics that resulted in numerous papers and a long distinguished career at Stanford University, one of the most respected academic environments in the world.

Then, having hung that framework like a curtain, Sturrock discusses his “other” career as a dissident scientist. A man, in other words, who was curious and found the universe, as Alice said, even “curiouser and curiouser.”

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? That the scientific mind is curious?  Yet again and again, Sturrock was frustrated by the absence of this core attribute, arguably the cornerstone of intelligence, the willingness to poke one’s whiskers out beyond the door of one’s snug abode and sniff the air;  that frustration comes to the surface in anecdote after anecdote.  So many colleagues were tamed and constrained by a culture of caution and hesitancy, a fear of being branded a heretic, a terror, after all, of losing one’s benefits.

In addition to UFO phenomena, Sturrock discusses possible instances of the paranormal, spontaneous healing, and reincarnation.  But UFO phenomena is in the foreground of his research. In the past he has discussed case histories, summaries of physical and psychological effects, and phenomena which seems to violate known laws of physics. He has always been appropriately cautious in public pronouncements, mindful of mine fields, tiptoeing with care.  He has generally avoided mention of personal reactions to his work, such as the near-terror of SETI researchers, for example, who thought he was attending a conference on extraterrestrial life and might advance the UFO point of view to their embarrassment. (My experience interviewing Frank Drake and Jill Tarter echoed Sturrock’s. The economic and political requirements of SETI, fighting for several hundred million dollars in endowment funds against a strong political headwind, necessitated, Tarter told me, a strict divorce of their project from “bad science,” defined as anything that might taint their efforts. She used her own mistaken identification of the moon as a UFO during an airplane ride as an example of why all UFO reports must be something similar. When I observed that this was not scientific, she did not respond. I recall feeling – as Sturrock often did – taken aback by the lack of a scientific attitude on the part of a well-known scientist.)

In all of his multiple pursuits, it is possible – not certain – that Sturrock’s English upbringing influenced some of his attitudes and interests. Based on my experiences while living in England as a young man, I offer these speculations.

First, I learned in England that loud expressions of enthusiasm are often frowned on. I recall that when Sesame Street was introduced to English television audiences, for example, a friend said a much better program was the one in which children sat quietly on the floor while a teacher read a story. When an Englishman felt strongly about something, he was more inclined  to say “um” quietly instead of “oh boy gee whiz wow!”

This is relevant because this is a review of a memoir, not a scientific paper. It underscores the habitual understatement which for an Englishman born and bred reveals rather than contradicts intensity of feeling. If an exuberant American extrovert like myself were to write this account, it might say: Please, people! this is DATA! this is observable, frequently reported data! and it challenges the way we believe the universe works! Let’s THINK about it, shall we?

But Sturrock is English, and always, his conclusions and proposals are those of a careful scientist. He insists on using Bayes’ Theorem as a touchstone for a sane way to proceed in every investigation, he never goes beyond the data itself, and he restricts the presentation of data to documented events.

Here’s a second hunch about “things English:” in addition to advances that created modern scientific thinking beginning with the Royal Society, there has been regard in England for the eccentric, the anomalous, the struggle to reconcile the known and the unknown into one big picture. The work of the Society for Psychical Research at the turn of the twentieth century included psychologists like Frederick W. H. Myers, philosophers like William James, politicians like Lord Balfour, physicists like Oliver Lodge, and serious, thoughtful investigation of mediums, spirits, spontaneous manifestations of apparitions at a time of crisis, the survival of bodily death, and the like. My hunch is simply that Sturrock is part of that tradition too. He knew that wise distinguished men did not reject a subject a priori but peered into the shadows on the edges of experience. He knew that Conan Doyle and Williams Butler Yates evangelized for the existence of faeries. That framework is part of the heritage of a man who suggests that when we turn around and look at the world, we transit a full 360 degrees before coming home again, knowing that when we do, the self at which we arrive will not be the self which departed on that journey.

A few years ago, I reviewed Jonathan Moreno’s “Mind Wars,” an investigation by a neuroscientist and bioethicist with good credentials. Moreno investigated research based on biology and neuroscience for warfare and “perception management.” Like Sturrock, Moreno advanced conventional credentials again and again, recounting his work with intelligence agencies, for example, so he could insist to a skeptical audience that he was not “a conspiracy theorist” or a nut-case but a legitimate credentialed academic.

Moreno worked with intelligence professionals and wrote openly about national security and secrecy issues. He told me scientists often “clammed up” when he asked about their research, that they dared not say a word for the record. Sturrock does not dwell on that aspect of research into anomalous phenomena but it is there nevertheless. Not only do sociological and cultural molds for conformity mold the clay of scientific research, but precisely because the data is compelling, precisely because it would have attracted attention, and research, and dollars in the past, whatever might have been discussed behind closed doors is beyond our reach. Life in the national security state since World War 2 adds even greater cognitive dissonance to our quest for understanding. It is not only the universe that plays dice with us but, closer to home, it is likely that some in positions of authority do too. No wonder we feel so often we are looking into a fun-house mirror when we try to connect the dots. The elusiveness of anomalies is further distorted by the fact that we don’t and can’t know what we don’t know … about who does know more about them.

It is a characteristic of an anomaly that it does not connect with other known facts. It hangs in the air like the grin of a Cheshire cat, tantalizing but out of reach. That characteristic also afflicts the fruits of research into anomalies. The Pocantico Conference, for example, resulted in distinguished scientists contradicting the Condon Report, the last known “official” Government paper on UFOs,  and made recommendations, and then … nothing. The investigation of anomalies became, itself, anomalous. Sturrock also cites GEPAN/SEPRA as one model for investigation of UFO events, so one might expect the work done by the French to be on our radar, but … it remains anomalous, too. A society which Sturrock helped to found – The Society for Scientific Exploration –an attempt to bridge the two worlds – and its publication, The Journal of Scientific Exploration, have also resulted in important work but … the society, the journal, remain in limbo, a bit off the beaten path, interesting to some, but anomalous. For the moment, those efforts are here and not here at the same time, lacking integration into mainstream thought. They accumulate but remain liminal to the primary concerns of establishment scientists, mainstream media, and 21^st century consensus reality.

The promise of this thoughtful, so-interesting memoir is that one more drip in a sequence of drips on the rocks of reality will help to wear away the resistant rock. The fear is that this work too will be dismissed as a quirky look into weird, new-agey experiences, an off-road trip irrelevant to the highways of career science.

The counter-cultural view? If it exists, it is worthy of being understood.

And so is Peter Sturrock.

Originally published in IUR: The International UFO Reporter (Volume 33, Number 1) March 2010, the official publication of CUFOS

A Review of “This Way to the Stars: How Quantum Physics Changes Current Space Propulsion Paradigms, Making Inter-Galactic Travel a Possibility” (Timeless Voyager Press: 2008) 96 pages by Paul Kirsch.

by

Richard Thieme

www.themeworks.com

From Paul Hill’s posthumously published “Unconventional Flying Objects” to Nick Cook’s “Hunt for Zero Point,” a number of people have attempted to formulate a valid scientific model for understanding what is often reported by eyewitnesses to UFO events – anomalous vehicles with capabilities that suggest that our current understanding of physics is primitive.

Of course, “current understanding” is a moving target. Some of what was reported early on – like stealth technology – has now been developed, and when the Wall Street Journal reports on invisibility cloaking as they did on March 13, 2009, it seems that some attributes formerly thought “too strange to be real” are not so strange after all.

But that does not mean that everything that sounds strange or impossible is simply waiting for the right engineer. Some things really aren’t possible. Some things really can’t happen.

So while we should not at the outset cavalierly dismiss Paul Kirsch’s claim to reveal “How Quantum Physics Changes Current Space Propulsion Paradigms, Making Inter-Galactic Travel a Possibility,” as “This Way to the Stars” is subtitled, neither should we simply accept it as presented. Science requires more than earnestness, it also requires good science. We must not only trust, but verify. Fanciful narratives like Bob Lazar’s fable of reverse-engineering alien craft litter the messy floors of historical UFOlogy.

When we apply science to Kirsch’s lovingly illustrated picture book, a shift from physics to science fiction takes place.

Kirsch is not a physicist. He works in medical administration, has a longtime interest in UFOs, and became fascinated with the ideas of Larry D. Maurer and Michael E. Miller, principals at UNITEL, a Portland OR company formed in 1982 to research and develop practical applications of new theories in magnetism, electricity and quantum mechanical physics. According to information posted on the company’s web site, a patent entitled the “Acousto-Electromagnetic Hologistic Resonant System ” was awarded but there is no indication that commercial applications or proposed research have ever seen the light of day, not for that system or for any other.

Maurer had a UFO sighting in Portland in the early 1980s and he wanted to know “how it was done.” He and Miller developed plans for an interstellar spacecraft based on extrapolations from “fringe physics” and what he believed he had seen. The proposal was published as a book, “Quantum Electromagnetic Laser Propulsion,” and last year as a novel, “Debris.”

Kirsch attempts to render in pictures and brief commentary this complex project for a craft that would in effect become a single electron and tunnel through space-time. He creates some nice images to illustrate difficult ideas and reduces detailed arguments to bullet points and short paragraphs like those in a PowerPoint presentation. The project hinges, however, on arguments from quantum physics. Since I am no more a physicist than Kirsch, I looked for others more qualified to evaluate the claims.

Physicist Edward Halerewicz, Jr. conveniently took on that task and wrote an extensive review of “Quantum Electromagnetic Laser Propulsion.”  He also wrote a mathematical analysis of the specifications of the spacecraft, did a physical review of the vehicle and analyzed the magnetic field strength of the craft. He admires the audacity of a proposal for a vehicle that uses cutting-edge physics to make travel near the speed-of-light possible with present-day technology but notes that the book is essentially a promotional “gimmick” to fund the project and promote interest in UNITEL’s work.  Funding did not materialize, however, and efforts to convince investors and engineers have apparently not succeeded.

The review of quantum physics and mathematics necessary to understand Halerewicz’s argument is best done with the original documents which can be found at www.stealthskater.com. His conclusions, however, were unequivocal: “I am highly skeptical of most claims … and the equations are largely based on the assertions of UNITEL, not on ‘hard science.’”

In a letter to Maurer, Halerewicz said, “I don’t believe existing experiments prove that the propulsion concept would work.  If it were possible to “teleport” an apple from New York to Hawaii, you would have something.  But at present, there is only circumstantial evidence which backs the propulsion concept.  [Your proposal] …  reeks too much of perpetual motion.”

Because he was listed in a 2002 corporate document as a “technical consultant” of UNITEL, I also asked physicist Hal Puthoff, Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, for his opinion. Puthoff did have some early conversations with UNITEL – he responded politely to questions, that is – but never served as a paid consultant or provided professional services.  Speaking to what he saw six or eight years ago, he characterized their ideas as highly speculative, far beyond what was known or could be practically applied. Because their theoretical ideas could not be extrapolated from current knowledge, the proposal depended entirely on the ability to build something workable. Puthoff is radically open to possibilities because “experiment trumps theoretical expectation every time,” but to date, nothing has been demonstrated, only asserted.

Another scientist (who asked to remain anonymous) was approached by UNITEL and also rejected official status as a consultant, although he too was listed as one. There were severe difficulties with the concept, he said, and he could not connect the materials science behind the plans (his specialization) to the goal of intergalactic travel. It was not science, he concluded, but science fiction.

There are more conversations like that to report, but you get the idea. “This Way to the Stars” has a “cool factor,” the short book is fun to read, but until a tighter weave of theoretical and/or experimental data supports the extreme claims, the book is best cataloged as fiction, more like the Bob Lazar narrative than the balanced reasonable work of Paul Hill. I suggest that anyone interested in scientifically grounded speculation about “how we might get there” begin with Hill’s “Unconventional Flying Objects” – and also take courses in physics so that every exotic idea does not sound equal to every other.

Richard Thieme (www.thiemeworks.com) is an author and professional speaker focused on the deeper implications of technology, religion, and science for twenty-first century life. He addresses the challenges posed by new technologies, how to reinvent ourselves (as individuals or organizations) to meet these challenges, and practical approaches to
creativity, Email rthieme@thiemeworks.com for details.

Originally published in MUFON: The Mutual UFO Network Journal

Steven Miles is a professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota. His forthcoming book, which has the working title Oath Betrayed: Military Medicine and the War on Terror, stemmed from his attempt to learn why the U.S. medical staff in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay did not report or intervene to stop the abuse of prisoners for the two years preceding the public release of the Abu Ghraib photographs. For this, he reviewed about 25,000 pages of government documents and trial testimony obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Miles has assisted victims of war and torture in 25 years of international work with the American Refugee Committee and the Center for Victims of Torture. He is a past president of the American Association of Bioethics and served on President Clintons Bioethics Working Group on Health Care Reform. Dr. Miles was interviewed for the National Catholic Reporter by Richard Thieme about the failure of physicians to reveal torture.

Thieme: What first attracted your attention to the issue of the medical community’s responsibility toward torture?

Miles: When the Abu Ghraib pictures were published, it was clear this had been going on for a while. Clearly doctors were present in the prisons because doctors are always present in prisons so they must have seen the abuse or signs of the abuse. Why was this surfacing as a leaked CD rather than a report by the medical profession? I found somewhat to my amazement that it was not just a matter of not reporting but it was actually a matter of being involved in setting the harshness of the interrogation plans and delaying reports of homicide, which would have been an important signal to the public of what was wrong inside the prison.

Thieme:Are you aware of formal or informal pressures or influence brought to bear on the medical profession to enlist doctors in the practices you decry?

Miles:At the present time, I do not see any research agenda or set of programs comparable to MKSEARCH or MKULTRA [mind-control research conducted by the CIA from the 1950s to the late 1960s, including covert drug tests on unwitting citizens]. On the other hand, it is very clear that if you go all the way back to the beginning of the war on terror, the United States decided that the Geneva Convention did not apply. The next thing that happened was Guantanamo asked for policies to guide interrogations in the absence of the Geneva Convention. The JAG [Judge Advocate General Corps] officer at Guantanamo proposed an outline of policy for monitoring interrogation. The antecedent memos by the Department of Justice had already written off prisoner standards as not being violations of the Geneva Convention. Then [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld set up a board to develop interrogation policy that fleshed out the role for medical monitoring and has since sketched the policy that was elaborated on as it went down the chain of command. It was not a matter of an informal pickup at the prison of various practices in the prison system but rather a matter of recruiting professionals into a centrally directed policy with guidelines. Thats an important difference.

Thieme: One antecedent for this discussion is Operation Paperclip, the program that brought formerly Nazi scientists and engineers to the United States after the war. Some were rocket scientists, but some were doctors who carried out horrific experiments with freezing, for example. One of those concentration camp doctors continued his experiments on behalf of helping American flyers downed in cold waters and I believe theres a building at Brooks Air Force Base named after him.

Miles:Paperclip was not the only one. We tried some doctors at Nuremberg [in Germany where war crimes trials were conducted by the United States following World War II] but elected not to have doctors trials in Japan in order to secure their cooperation in getting their biological warfare data. We made a policy decision that it would endanger the appropriation of that material if we went ahead with a war crimes trial. Some experiments using vivisection were done on American POWs.

I think there is a difference, however. I am just not finding a research agenda in Iraq. I have been looking at different historical roots because there are different historical problems. For example, in terms of the neglect of prisoners, you can look back to Andersonville [in Georgia, a notorious Confederate prison in the Civil War] and Elmira [in New York, a Union prison in the Civil war]. Or alternatively go back to World War II and the Thai-Burmese railroad. [During the building of the Thai-Burmese railroad, 11,000 of 60,000 prisoners died of starvation.] The Japanese had not signed the Geneva Convention but signed the Hague Convention of 1927, which promised adequate treatment of prisoners. They waived that in World War II, but said they would treat prisoners well anyway. Their documents have astonishing parallels to United States documents in 2005. The president issued an ambiguous directive suspending the Geneva Convention directing the Armed Forces to treat detainees humanely to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity.The government traduced domestic and international laws to create special categories of people, illegal combatants,who had truncated rights and who were dispatched to secret prisons and subject to special Kafkaesque tribunals. Red Cross monitors were locked out of prisons, given false information and were especially kept from ghost detainees.Hundreds of people were secretly transported to nations who imprisoned, interrogated and tortured them on our behalf.

Thieme: The book Journey into Madness by Gordon Thomas discusses Dr. Aziz al-Abub, who assisted Hezbollah in the torture of William Buckley, CIA station chief in Beirut, who was tortured to death over a long period of time, with video tapes of his treatment provided to document the event. Thomas drew a parallel with what we did during MKULTRA, Bluebird, Artichoke and similar programs when we experimented on people without their consent in often-horrific ways. He suggested that perhaps the moral high ground so often claimed by Americans had been surrendered through those programs and practices.

Miles:There are a couple of ways to look at that which are of great interest to ethicists. One is to speak of creating a precedent. For example, there was the business of Spc. Keith Maupin, an American soldier in Iraq who was kidnapped and killed — but only after the Abu Ghraib photos were shown. Before the photos became public, every POW returned alive, but not afterward. [Television carried the Abu Ghraib photographs on April 29, 2004. The first of the 11 beheadings in Iraq occurred 12 days later.]

The other way to look at it is using the concept of legitimacy. A world power does not simply have power, it has legitimacy. By behaving in these ways, we undermine our legitimacy as a world leader. Thats a different problem than establishing precedents for others to follow.

The State Department issued a report, for example, that criticized China for violation of human rights, for detentions and torture, and China blew off the United States and so did Russia. How do we speak on behalf of these matters? What is the legitimacy of our protests in the present climate?

Thieme:There seem to be things Americans need to believe about themselves that require that we filter certain facts out of our awareness. In my work with the Hoover archives at Stanford, I came across documentation from an authoritative source who named 10 specific countries with which we partner in torture. We may not be the ones turning on the electricity, but our people are present when it happens. He claims this did not begin with 9/11.

Another source discussed the use of children in those experiments done decades ago.

Miles: Its interesting that there was a certain coyness about the data that came out of Iraq. The photographs that have been released so far are all photographs of men. Photographs of women have been retained and have not been released by the media sources that have them.

Thieme:[Investigative journalist] Sy Hersh said the other photos are much worse. He mentioned audio recordings of children screaming while being sodomized.

Miles:All of the prisoner deaths that have been included in official tabulations, which are admittedly incomplete — curiously, you find references to the death of children by the Department of Defense only in footnotes. There is no reporting of kids’ deaths in official lists or in death certificates or anything else. So there are sets of this data that remain hidden. The data has obviously been scrubbed.

Thieme: What have you seen?

Miles:I have seen the footnotes referring to the kidsdeaths and have seen credible evidence of sexual abuse described in Army investigations. I have not seen photos. I do not need to see them, but I have seen investigators’ reports.

Thieme:Steve, aren’t we describing war crimes?

Miles:Yes. We are describing war crimes and I think its important to name them for what they are for a couple of reasons. First, when you name it as a war crime, you hint at the reality of the things we have described, the gravity of the harms that have occurred. Second, in describing it as a war crime you also describe accurately the transgressions against a framework of justice and the damage to the civil order that would be avoided by pretending these are not war crimes. I think thats important to do.

Thieme:If there are war crimes, there are war criminals. Do you anticipate trials of named war criminals? They would probably include Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush, wouldn’t they?

Miles:As you know, many war criminals have never been tried for a variety of political reasons. That does not mean it is not worth stating that they are war criminals, that indictable war crimes have been committed and that the people who created the policies that led to them are responsible. It is the nature of war crimes that they are patterns of offense, not isolated events. You cannot track an individual act — for example the arrest of Anne Frank — to Adolph Eichman. Instead you see broad policy implications and a pattern, a series of acts at many different sites over a long period of time. In this case, there were all those things and these are war crimes. Its worthwhile naming what they are because historical accountability is important. In the case of Pinochet, we see that the long-term tracing of the acts can result in increasing accountability.

Now, I think this is a very important point. The world is at a very interesting tipping point as to war crimes as we steadily ratchet up degrees of accountability. We see, for example, Slobodon Milosevich tried in almost real time. We have seen action around Nazi stolen art totally change in the last 15 years. Swiss bank accounts no longer lack transparency. So even if indictments and trials do not follow, it sets the stage for greater accountability and thats a good thing.

Thieme:Who are your allies in this work?

Miles:Dr. Robert J. Lifton is one. Looking at why people or how people can do these things, Lifton coined the term “atrocity-producing situations” in a study of veterans of the war in Vietnam. Some soldiers suffered severe psychic damage by participating in atrocities. Lifton, a psychiatrist, proposed that extreme stress, a dehumanized enemy, and encouragement to commit moral transgressions create atrocity-producing situations. He quotes a combat medic in Vietnam. “I delighted in the destruction and yet was a healer.” That medics words strikingly resemble a medic who described his feeling while beating prisoners during his service in Iraq: “You get a burning in your stomach, a rush, a feeling of hot lead running through your veins, and you get a sense of power. … Imagine wearing point-blank body armor, an M-16 and all the power in the world, and the authority of God. That power is very attractive.”

Its also important to look at groups like HRW [Human Rights Watch] and the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union]. By pulling out the documents and working on their largely legal pieces, they make it possible for more specialized scholars like myself to do our work. If the ACLU had not put all those documents on their Web site, I’d be just another guy with opinions and a pen.

Thieme:Groups like HRW, because they scrutinize the practices of nations cooperating with us in counterterror, are designated terror support groups and the police in those countries are encouraged to treat them accordingly. This can be daunting.

Miles:Yes, but thats an epiphenomenon of being a torturing society. A torturing society is a society that is abraded by the process of dehumanization. In that process, we essentially create our own mirrored netherworlds. We posit a secret omnipresent anarchist non-Christian entity against which we put up the people of the true faith,and thats one reason torture is so dangerous to societies, because torturing societies do have these epiphenomenon that spill out into the broader society and result in less discriminating thinking and less understanding. People ask me all the time if I think I’ll be killed for doing this work, which to me is an astonishing statement. I dont see a risk in getting killed. What I do see in the question is a direct indication of the degree to which living in a torturing society has damaged our larger civil society.

One of our problems is the paradox that we are one of the most parochial and provincial empires ever to exist on earth. That creates real problems for us because many of our political debates wind up being hermetically sealed and that hurts our ability to engage constructively with the world. Our ability to contextualize our own internal discussions of what it means to be a global empire is impaired. We wind up misreading our incredible impact not only on the world but on our own desires to project a civil society around the world. We can’t contextualize our actions internationally if we don’t have an international vision within our own domestic conversation.

Thieme:That brings us full circle. We start with transparency and accountability and the need for third-party points of view and contributions. Why are so many Americans incapable of hearing how others perceive us?

Miles:Americans have kept the reality of torture far from consciousness. Although we are steeped in fictional torture, we are nearly insensate to the reality of torture. We are unfamiliar with its techniques, its effects on individuals and civil societies, and with how widely it is used. Fictional governmental torture is usually depicted as occurring in developing countries. We are only dimly aware of the United Statesdisastrous complicity with torturing regimes in El Salvador, [Fulgencio] Batistas Cuba, Cambodia, Chile, Iran, South Vietnam, Guatemala, Argentina, Israel or Egypt.

There are creative voices in the United States that can speak to the larger international issues, outside the provincial paradigm, groups like Human Rights Watch that are perceived as a threat within the provincial perspective because of their cosmopolitan view of society and thats why they are marginalized and precisely why they are necessary. They are necessary because of the torture issues but also because, if we want to globalize the economy, we have to transcend our limited point of view.

Thieme:Do you get much negative response, that is, hate mail?

Miles:Many people express a fear that writing a book on the subject endangers my life. That disturbs me, as I said, because of what it says about fear of our government, a fear that reveals the damage that a torturing society does to the sense of civil liberties. That fear fosters a silence in which torture thrives. The implication that I, a citizen of the United States, should acquiesce to that fear strikes me as deeply disrespectful to my colleagues in Turkey, Egypt, Chile, South Africa, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union who have assumed much greater risks to fight torture in their nations. Some have been jailed, tortured or had their children murdered. For most Americans, it takes little more than the courage to be inconvenienced to speak against torture in the United States. If we are truly at risk of greater danger, it is all the more necessary that we should speak out.

A brief review of CIA-funded research into mind control
By Richard Thieme

Projects MKULTRA, MKSEARCH, Bluebird and Artichoke were code names for a series of mind control research programs in the 1950s and 1960s. Details were revealed by hearings of the Church Committee, headed by Sen. Frank Church, and the Pike Committee, headed by Rep. Otis Pike, and the Rockefeller Commission investigations in the 1970s, despite efforts to destroy evidence of the program. Then- CIA director Richard Helms ordered the documents related to the programs shredded, but thousands of financial documents were overlooked that detailed links between covert medical research funded by the CIA using hypnosis, electromagnetic fields, drugs and other chemicals to alter brain functioning, memory and behavior.

The intelligence community at the time was searching for a solution to the problem of brainwashing,which was believed to be the result of sophisticated new methodologies discovered by the Chinese and Russians. In fact, nothing new was involved, but the United States pursued the research in a way consistent with its own cultural bias, that is, the use of technology to alter human behavior.

One of the most notorious accounts of experimentation details the work of Dr. Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist who believed that he had the right to destroy the personalities of mental patients entrusted to his care and endow them with new personalities. The sleep roomof Montreals Allan Memorial Psychiatric Institute was the site of a series of barbaric experiments conducted on patients over a nine-year period beginning in 1955. Cameron invented a technique he called psychic drivingthat the CIA thought might have potential as a brainwashing technique. Cameron used electroshock in extreme doses, drugs and sensory deprivation to depatternbehavior, create amnesia, and attempt to restructure the personalities of patients. Cameron died with many honors and was at various times head of the Quebec, Canadian, and American Psychiatric Associations, and a cofounder and first president of the World Psychiatric Association.

By locating the experiments on foreign soil, the CIA intended to establish a basis for plausible deniability of its involvement.

The Church committee wrote: The deputy director of the CIA revealed that over 30 universities and institutions were involved in an extensive testing and experimentationprogram which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.Several tests involved administering LSD to unwitting subjects in social situations,resulting in at least one death.

Bluebird was approved by the CIA director on April 20, 1950. In August 1951, the Project was renamed Artichoke. Bluebird and Artichoke included work on the creation of amnesia, hypnotic couriers and what came to be called Manchurian Candidatesafter the novel and movie of the same name. Artichoke documents verify that hypnotic couriers functioned effectively in real-life simulations conducted by the CIA in the early 1950s. Artichoke and Bluebird were administratively rolled over into MKULTRA by the CIA on April 3, 1953. MKULTRA was in turn rolled over into MKSEARCH on June 7, 1964. MKSEARCH ran until June 1972, at which time Helms ordered the shredding of the files. Documents that survived are available through Freedom of Information Act requests and on the Internet.

Further information on these programs can be found in:

Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans by Jonathan D. Moreno (W.H. Freeman and Company, 2000)

The Mind Manipulators by Alan W. Scheflin and Edward M. Opton Jr. (Paddington Press Ltd., 1978)

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control/The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences by John Marks (W. W. Norton and Company, 1979)

Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists by Colin A. Ross M.D. (Manitou Communications, 2000)

This interview with Dr. Steven Miles was published on January 13, 2006 by the National Catholic Reporter (http://www.natcath.com/). Copyright The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Comapny.

Related Web sites

American Civil Liberties Union
www.aclu.org

Center for Bioethics
www.bioethics.umn.edu

Human Rights Watch
www.hrw.org

Executive Secrets: Covert Action and the Presidency by William J. Daugherty

“Executive Secrets” reviews the history of covert action since WW2 and provides information the general reader might not have had (contrary to other reviews, there are no “secret” secrets in this book, since the author limits his examples to declassified data approved by the CIA, which eliminates much information in the public domain that the agency can not or will not acknowledge, One good recent example of the impact of this policy is the an attempt by former CIA officer Melissa Mahle to deliver a speech at the 2007 conference of the International Ethics and Intelligence Association on rendition, prevented when the agency “gutted” her talk by removing information in the public domain which it did not want to give an imprimatur of official acknowledgement).

The author is a former ranking official of the CIA and the context of this book is apologetic and defensive. It repetitively makes these points: (1) the CIA acts only when ordered to do so by the President, which orders since 1974 have been reviewed by relevant Senators and Representatives – except when it does not, e.g. Iran-Contra, in which cases it is wrong and (2) the ability to reflect honestly and deeply by an experienced intelligent career professional is compromised significantly by assimilation into the agendas of a complex organizational structure and the bureaucratic distinctions that become highly relevant inside, but not to the outside observer or citizen.

Because these two themes are the subtext of this book and the emotional energy of Daugherty’s polemic, what is revealed is the impact of a lifelong career of assimilation to “insider” thinking and the blind spots and hubris that engenders.

Examples:

(1) The department or executive who did or did not approve particular actions is not, to the citizen, what is most important. Inside, it is. “Not on my desk” is a frequent defense, often heard. I once asked why a proposal was languishing inside one of the agencies and was told that it was being moved from desk to desk because no one wanted to go on record denying it. Thus has it always been; thus will it always be.

(2) The entire enterprise of how and why covert action is executed is the primary concern of the citizen, not the oft-repeated mantra that nothing is done without approval of the President. That matters, of course, but it is subordinate to the larger issues which are ignored in this book. To the citizen, what the nation is doing is critical, not simply the chain of command which exonerates intelligence agencies of responsibility by denying deniability to the executive branch. So focused is the author on pressing accountability back to the White House from Truman forward that he does not seem to notice that he is undermining the “plausible deniability” it is his sworn obligation to uphold. Therefore, the righteous indignation which suffuses so many pages is undercut by exactly the kind of CYA activities in Washington that cause citizens to become cynical and dismissive.

(3) The author fails to take fully into account, despite lip service to the fact of it, that the erosion of boundaries between foreign/domestic and our nation/other nation thanks to technological transformation of geopolitical realities (of which I have written extensively) means that “blowback” is not an incidental event but a chronic state of being for all of us. Actions and speech acts take place everywhere in the world at once, not just “here” or “there.” Actions prohibited by the Constitution are now undertaken (the author would say – by order of the President! not independently by the agency! – and he would be absolutely right, but he would miss the point) from our ground and on our ground, obscuring former legal distinctions. As far back as the fifties, when the CIA appointed itself a Ministry of Culture and supported writers, artists, publishers, etc. to oppose Soviet “socialist realism” and propaganda, the hidden effect on America was immense. Writers favored by the agency because their works supported a covert political agenda prospered while those who wrote, for example, about the poor, like John Steinbeck, did not, or they made their way on their own without hidden financial and organizational support. Daugherty says of this and other efforts, “it is hard to imagine any American being upset over these actions of the CIA.”

There perhaps is the essence of his blind spot. Those who matured during that era were victims as were all other unwitting people in the world of a false belief that a free market for art and literature and music as for other things evolved in an organic way, according to its own internal dynamics. This is, in fact, the essence of a principled conservatism, this respect for and love of the organic processes of society. But what was happening in fact was the emergence of a manipulated, leveraged, hidden structure of power – what Eisenhower called “the military industrial complex” in a warning that went unheeded and which now includes media, entertainment, academia, and all of the key components of a “free market” society – and thus the simple accepted truths of a generation of Americans were fundamentally betrayed by this radical inauthenticity at the core of our American enterprise.

That Daugherty and other apologists like him can not entertain this, can not understand why this betrayal of the marketplace of ideas in the body politic is key to the cynicism of many Americans is the real problem with this work. Insiders become so imbued with the righteousness of their cause and the territorial distinctions of bureaucracy that this wholesale shift is unseen or, if seen, ignored or, if not ignored, celebrated with what feels like a smirk of innate superiority. That the entire establishment in Washington, including the intelligence community, was not elected or authorized to do this except by its own secret and self-justifying machinations is exactly the point. Oversight by a few Congressional representatives who are assimilated into the process as insiders, the elusive quality of executives orders like EO12333 which can be changed without public notice on the fly, the hot potato game of who gave the orders (it is always mutual and collusive) – all this suggests why, when George Bush outlined at Camp David his intended responses to 9/11 and some advisors objected that at least some of them violated the Constitution, and the President replied, “The Constitution is nothing but a piece of paper” … all of this suggests why we find ourselves, these days, with a cynical electorate, impatient with precisely the kinds of insider distinctions that for Daugherty are the end of the game.

If you love Raymond Chandler …

Reading these seven prior reviews, it stands out that all of them are pretty much right. The strengths of this book are its strengths and the weaknesses are its weaknesses. But that isn’t the whole story.

The Long Embrace is a subjective account of a subjective experience that in turn requires a particular frame for the subjective experience of the reader in relationship to Raymond Chandler.  If you love Raymond Chandler and his work as much as Freeman, you will love this book. It you don’t like Chandler or are neutral to his work, you might not like it. It’s a homage, and a reverie, and a critical work, and above all, the projection of an author in search of both objective and subjective correlatives for her vision and life experience. Objectively she is struggling to map her own biography and history with the history and the landscape of Los Angeles, but not just any Los Angeles – it’s the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler’s fiction that constitutes her quest, an imaginary landscape more real to her than the smoggy basin she inhabits. That makes the search doubly difficult. So she spends energy and time driving the city streets in search of markers for the many way-stations with which Chandler and his wife Cissy mapped their own erratic trajectory through life, his career, and a city that devours itself daily. Because Chandler’s vision seized Freeman’s heart and soul as well as her agile and creative mind, she needed to build a three-dimensional tic-tac-toe-like representation of all this, and as I say, if you too have loved Chandler and his special gift to us, you will appreciate, savor and understand the compelling necessity of her quest.

Young people who have not experienced the constant destruction of the markers of our histories as American cities cannibalize themselves by enabling predatory builders to bulldoze the external signs of our past may not appreciate the emotional impact of Freeman’s journey, her attempt to overlay transparencies of the current physical city in which she lives on the even deeper emotional landscape of Chandler’s fiction. Maybe only middle-aged people and older ones can really appreciate why this book exists.

And people who do not intuitively understand why noir is the appropriate lens for those of us who grew to maturity in post World War 2 America may not resonate with this quest. When Freeman cites the film Chinatown as the “most brilliant movie of them all,” either you know exactly what she means, or not. You sit up and quack like a duck, or you don’t. Since I cite in my own work – my speeches and my non-fiction collection, Islands in the Clickstream, in particular – Chinatown and Blade Runner, another LA-noir classic, more frequently than any other two films, I think I do understand. If you know what I mean when I say that, if you smile with recognition, you will love reading this book.

Yes, there are passages you might scan, when Freeman indulges herself in her own experiences and observations on site, but that might also be because her existential journey which this book represents is not your primary interest. That’s fair enough. But if you can see yourself vicariously tracing the footsteps of this enigmatic couple in order to under their relationship, so constitutive of the identity and energies of this uniquely American writer, then you will linger over those passages too. It is precisely the ephemeral nature of her observations – who she sees, the time of day, the smell and look and feel of places present to her and to us through her writing and only through her writing through which she attempts to divine the former essence of what was there, once, and is gone forever – that call attention to the ephemeral nature of our own memories, linked to the books or films that meant so much and which have become even more real to us than the places they depict.

What is needed now, of course, is someone who explores Judith Freeman’s life to understand her compelling need to understand the dynamics of this relationship, her obsessive pursuit of “Ray,” as she calls him; what is needed is someone who visits all the places Freeman lived, explores her relationship to friends, husbands, lovers, and her childhood history. That subjective biographical quest would in turn be imposed on hers, inviting alas another quest, one in search of Freeman’s biographer, and on and on, turtles all the way down, as they say, and perhaps that is the crux of this lovely, insightful, well-written book:  primary materials, no matter how abundant, never fully explain the mystery of the Other, and when that Other has affected us deeply, we always write as much about ourselves as the one we describe. Memories link, blur, and recede in infinite regress, pointing toward poetic or spiritual writing as the ultimate frame of the illusion of objectivity, an illusion we inherit from the twentieth century, too, and which in fact is the foundation of the detective story in the first place. We solve mysteries vicariously through these books, pretending that a scientific method is all we need, because we know deep in our hearts that we can never solve the real mysteries of life.  We are all searching for coherence and meaning and harmony in a symphony hall full of dead spaces, filling in the blanks with the contents of our lives.

Dana Press (The Dana Foundation: New York and Washington DC) 2006
Richard Thieme

“What we don’t know is so much bigger than we are.” — A Haitian Proverb

Oh, how I wish that reviewing a book like this were simple and straightforward! That would mean we live in a world of transparency, government accountability to citizens, easy access to sources, primary sources willing to go on the record, and data trails that lead readers to those same sources so everyone can see for themselves.

But alas, we do not live in such a world. “Mind Wars” is a broad but necessarily incomplete overview of neuroscience, nanotechnology and related areas applied to the arts of war, with an examination of ethical issues raised by this work, all considered in a historical context by a scholar who has researched the field.

The key to decoding the book, however, is on page 4 of the introduction. “I am no loose cannon,” writes Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph. D., the Emilie Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Professor and Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia. “I am deeply entrenched in the non-threatening, even boring, academic establishment. I’ve taught at major research universities, hold an endowed chair at an institution not known as a hotbed of radicalism …” and on the disclaimer goes, a plea to the reader to recognize that the author is no kook, no “conspiracy theorist,” but a respectable, conventional man.

Moreno sounds those notes again, on p. 107, for example, when he states that he has considerable “experience with government—on the staffs of presidential advisory committees, in [giving] congressional testimony, and so forth.”

Those qualifications define the subtext of this work and in many ways the subtext is the primary content. They also suggest one reason why the exploration of the frontiers of military research and development and the penetration of the military-industrial-academic-scientific-media complex is so difficult these days. Insiders know but can’t tell; outsiders can tell, but don’t often know, and when they do know, ridicule and other forms of disinformation can make what they know seem like fanciful speculation. So they err on the side of extreme caution.

Jonathan Moreno is qualified, without a doubt, to survey what is in the public domain about neuro-weapons and diverse applications of numerous branches of research that blur the distinctions between government, military, and medical, technological and scientific research, and he is also qualified to discuss the ethical implications of this research. So why does he need to insist that he is qualified? Because black budget (clandestinely funded) science and technology is so large a percentage of all scientific R&D and so hidden from public view that even to approach the subject is to enter a force field of distortion and paranoia. One might as well explore UFOs or time travel—domains of actual research, in fact, but which must be discussed with a wink or, as Moreno’s disclaimers indicate, the trumpeting of one’s credentials, above all credentials of character—respectability and conventionality—so that one is not marginalized by the mere fact that one has chosen to explore the domain.

Inevitably, researchers of exotic technologies experience a condition called “strangeness,” a kind of cognitive dissonance, and have to push against it to reestablish clear boundaries.

Why has this come about?

Because a national security state has evolved since World War 2 and is now the water in which we all swim. Moreno describes the history of that evolution and shows that a great deal of research, including research in the behavioral sciences, has been determined by a perception of military necessity. Access to the research is determined by the “need to know” and most readers of this book are “outsiders.” Moreno himself is an insider of sorts, having served as an expert for numerous government venues, but his credibility depends on continued access and access depends on behaving rightly. Saying the right things in the right way defines correct behavior; hence disclaimers that distance him from fringe thinkers without institutional support or structural authority, like this reviewer.

Steven H. Miles, M.D., the author of “Oath Betrayed/Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror,” states that he is often asked if he fears for his life because he discussed public documents, thirty five thousand pages of them, which reveal that medical complicity. That he is even asked such a question, Miles says, “is an epiphenomenon of being a torturing society. A torturing society is a society that is abraded by the process of dehumanization. In that process, we essentially create our own mirrored netherworlds.”

A mirrored netherworld is exactly what is signified by Moreno’s repeated insistence on credentials that ought to be obvious. His netherworld is a force field of distortion that attends any venture through the looking-glass of security clearances to explore areas that are exotic, dangerous, and mostly secret. That force field is an epiphenomenon of the national security state.

Moreno’s history of post-WW2 research begins with identifying the transformation of America into a “garrison state,” a nation that views the world as a dangerous place that requires the United States to project power everywhere in and increasingly out of the world to be secure. National Security Council document NSC-68, published in 1950, defined this strategy which is still pursued today. “It is mandatory that in building up our strength, we enlarge upon our technical superiority by an accelerated exploitation of the scientific potential of the United States and our allies,” the document states. Currently, academic research receives several billion dollars a year, with MIT receiving half a billion, the largest single share. Much of the research is dual use, with commercial as well as military applications, but would not have been funded were it not for the latter.

“Mind Wars” surveys current research that has come to light. I was not surprised by any of the details of this book, although someone with less of a fetish for the subject might well be.

Moreno asks what novel ethical questions are raised by the emergence of new applications for war which will alter human identity by modifying memory, cognition, and core physical, emotional and spiritual capabilities. The enhancement of cognitive processes such as memory, for example, raises questions about why we evolved as we have. We forget things for good reasons—it is not helpful to be tormented, and our brains would be overwhelmed if we remembered everything, including masses of irrelevant data. Near-total recall would pose new problems as would enhancement of affective processes related to religious experience—e.g., how many mystics do we need? Evolution of the species suggests that a few mystics per thousand are plenty. But if genetic, chemical, and technological enhancements can trigger mystical experiences, might too many people bliss out in ecstatic contemplation of the One? Would too many of us become mice pressing buttons connected to pleasure centers and die happily rather than eat? Would enhancements of memory and cognition give an unfair advantage to the children of the rich much as steroids give big-headed baseball players the ability to hit the long ball?

Moreno was hampered in his research because many scientists “clammed up” when asked about their work which means that we can only speculate about many of the projects. Their silence means that while we know we don’t know, we don’t know what we don’t know. Hence, cognitive dissonance.

That dissonance never left as I read this book. It’s what happens when I read the fiction of Philip K. Dick. Dick no longer reads like speculative science fiction smacking of paranoia because the landscape he describes is the world we now inhabit, a moebius-strip world in which distortions feed back into the perception of everyday life. The world we encounter in “Mind Wars” is like the world in Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly,” in which a policeman discovers that the subject he pursues is himself. In “Mind Wars,” Moreno is a participant in the world he describes as well as an objective observer; the edge of the glass curves and returns a distorted image.

His own emotions, for example, when he communicates the shock of certain discoveries, transform his feelings into subject matter the reader must consider. He communicates his surprise when he learned that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, participated in “a Harvard study aimed at psychic deconstruction by humiliating undergraduates and thereby causing them to experience severe stress.” (p. 69) Moreno does not simplistically attribute all of Kaczynski’s behaviors to this event, but he does speculate on the impact of “a psychological experiment that … involved psychological torment and humiliation that could have left deep scars” over a period of three years.

I had a similar reaction when I learned of a formative episode in the life of Donald Defreeze, a.k.a. Cinque, leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. DeFreeze and other members of the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst and subjected her to brainwashing using classical mind control techniques. It is seldom asked how DeFreeze learned to brainwash so effectively. Colin A. Ross, M.D. in “Bluebird,” a study of the deliberate creation of multiple personalities, notes that DeFreeze, while an inmate at Vacaville State Prison, was “a subject in an experimental behavior modification program run by Colston Westbrook, a CIA psychological warfare expert and advisor to the Korean CIA.” (Bluebird, p.212). Westbrook returned to the United States from working undercover in Viet Nam and “entered Vacaville State Prison under cover of the Black Cultural Association and there designed the seven-headed cobra logo of the SLA and gave DeFreeze his African name, Cinque.” (Bluebird, p. 212)

The accounts of both Kaczinski and DeFreeze suggest that their crimes might have been “blowback,” unintended consequences of covert intelligence operations that rebound on perpetrators.If those accounts were not public, however, and we speculated in that vein about DeFreeze and Kaczinski, it would be easy to dismiss our speculation as “conspiracy theories” or sloppy thinking. We know those two accounts are not the only experiments that might have backfired, but prudence suggests we not extrapolate from the known data, lest we be ridiculed. That’s what respectability in a world of strangeness requires. But in light of those accounts, it is not unreasonable to ask, what other rough beasts have slouched out of covert research to be born?

So there is often a disconnect between the history that we know and discussions of current research sanitized by willful innocence. This is crazy-making. I understand why Moreno does not want to be found on the wrong side of the looking glass. Yet Moreno wrote an excellent history of how “informed consent” evolved from the horrors of our own history. There is a parallax view of the stick of history which enters the water but seems to be discontinuous rather than a straight line. The distance of a historical account disinfects the moral dimension of events; we may be shocked when we read of the torturous experiments of Ewen Cameron and Sidney Gottleib, for example, doctors who participated in MKULTRA, a series of CIA experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shock, and sensory deprivation, but because those experiments ended in the seventies, they read like scripts for a horror movie instead of a daily newspaper.

Moreno’s discussion of ethical issues is similarly sanitized and sane, appropriate to the seminar room on a college campus, with its warmth, light, and comfortable chairs, but far from the trenches in which experiments takes place. His calls for accountability sound eminently reasonable but are theoretical and abstract because the details we need in order to explore ethical implications in a real historical context, one with flesh-and-blood men and women feeling real emotions, are hidden in darkness.

As a result, readers remain outsiders because we do not “need to know.” We learn afterward some of what has taken place, when details filter into the light of ordinary day, but the ethical imperatives of a quickened public conscience can not be applied retroactively. The secret deeds are already done.

The technology of hypersonic sound (HSS) illustrates how the worlds of scientific researchers and outsiders bifurcate, creating an epistemological divide when we outsiders try to understand what is happening on a basic level.Hypersonic sound is “a column of sound that does not spread out like conventional sound but stays locked like a sonic laser.” (p. 147). If you enter the column, you hear it, but outside it, you do not. HSS can be used to target individuals while ensuring that those around them hear nothing.

It does not take a devious mind to imagine a variety of uses for hypersonic sound, nor to imagine its misuse, even as a trivial amusement. Some accounts of HSS describe pedestrians on sunny days walking into a column of sound in which they hear a waterfall. Seconds later, the sound is gone. The demonstrator laughed, watching the non-consenting public try to puzzle out experiences for which they had no prior frame. More pernicious uses of the technology suggest themselves. At the siege of Waco, David Koresh of the Branch Davidians reported hearing voices in his head. He was crazy, we are told. But without the key pieces to the puzzle … how do we know?Moreno states that he has spoken for years with people who claim to have been targeted by this or similar technologies which put voices into their heads or use them unknowingly to test beam, particle and electromagnetic weapons. I have spoken to such people, too. Yes, hearing voices that are not there is a symptom of illness. But hearing a voice that no one else hears does not mean, now that we know about HSS, that the voices do not exist.

Enter strangeness once again. Moreno concludes that the claims of these people are not credible. But Moreno had already reviewed by that point in the discussion the abuse of medical and psychological testing by intelligence professionals in the past. We know about those earlier experiments only because CIA Director Richard Helm’s order in 1973 to destroy all documents related to MKULTRA were carried out—except for financial documents stored in obscure places. Had they known those boxes existed, they too would have been destroyed, but because they were overlooked, researchers could connect some dots, at least, and describe a maze of funding sources, dummy companies fronting for intelligence agencies, and significant numbers of respectable medical establishments funded in whole or in part by the CIA.

The parallax view.So here’s the dilemma: Secret experiments were carried out by well-intentioned patriots working under the cover of security who tortured non-consenting adults, then covered up the events. There was no transparency or outside accountability for what they did. The same kinds of people today authorize experiments and weapons testing, and in the absence of accountability, they too report only to themselves. The light from inside bends back at the surface and we see only a black hole.

Had Moreno spoken to victims of MKULTRA and related projects in the fifties or sixties, before those documents were discovered, had he heard people subjected to electroshock therapy or drugs or isolation who told him in horrendous detail what had been done to them, don’t you think he would have made the same statement? That the sane conventional respectable response by a man of the establishment would be that they were deluded?

So why are such claims today unworthy of investigation?

Because to conduct such investigations in the absence of transparency, accountability, and meaningful legislative oversight is to subject oneself to ridicule and career suicide.

An aside about hypersonic sound … John Alexander, the author of “Future War,” told me that a major motivation for developing hypersonic sound was to communicate with covert agents in dangerous places. Someone about to be taken down can not answer a cell phone call but can attend to a voice in the head that tells them to “get out now.”

Moreno doesn’t mention that application—not a serious flaw, but an indicator that one depends on one’s sources for this sort of research and many of Moreno’s sources are unnamed. Moreno has confidence in them, as I often do in mine, but without an objective way to evaluate what they say … How do we know?

That question is left on the table when we finish this book. “Mind Wars” surveys much of what has become public about military applications of brain and mind science and reviews the historical context. Ethical issues are articulated at length. But in the end, what we don’t know is still much larger than what we do know.

The national security state, with millions of classified documents and billions of dollars in black research, freezes the average citizen out of the loop. Like enemies, real and imagined, we do not “need to know.” Classification, of course, covers mistakes and malfeasance and protects political bases in addition to ensuring security. So we ought to feel uneasy when we finish this book. “Mind Wars” is not an antidote to “strangeness.” We can’t blame Dr. Moreno, who wants doors to continue to open, calls to be returned. But our dissonance persists. We don’t know what we don’t know, only that those who do know ask us to trust.

Trust, yes, but verify, as the old Cold Warrior said. If it was good enough for him, it ought to be good enough for us.

Works cited:

Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense
by Jonathan D. Moreno
Dana Press (The Dana Foundation: New York and Washington DC) 2006

Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror
by Steven H. Miles, M. D.
Random House: New York. 2006.

Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists
by Colin A. Ross, M.D.
Manitou Communications: Richardson Texas. 2000

Future War: Non-Lethal Weapons in Twenty-First-Century Warfare
by John B. Alexander
St. Martin’s Griffin: 2000.

This review (edited) was published on June 22, 2007 by the National Catholic Reporter (http://www.natcath.com/). Copyright 2007 The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Comapny.

The Swiss Cheese School of Investigative Reporting

There are many more holes here than substance. The book depicts the author’s journey, including a number of meetings with anonymous sources that lead to nothing newsworthy, and is not a coherent well-researched account of UFO phenomena or its many subsets (black budget research, disinformation deception and cover stories for classified research, aerospace technologies, immense amounts of UFO data from the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, research into metamaterials, nanotechnology and cloaking technologies, the psychology sociology and spirituality of UFO investigation and reporting, etc, etc.) so the reader who does not have a broad understanding of the field and its several subcultures will be left more confused and uninformed than when s/he began the book. I understand the publishing pressures to bring such an incomplete account into print and sell the TV and movie rights, in the hope that an X-files-like narrative may result, but the book does not even lend itself to that. Suggestions of conspiracy are light and fluffy, despite the evidence in the book itself for disinformation and intentional confusion on a meaningful scale – and for good reasons. This book shows why a domain that is nine tenths under the water lends itself to just about anybody and everybody saying anything and everything. The bad thing about that is that it might suggest to the uninformed that there is nothing worth investigating. These few dots are not connected to each other or to the many other dots that might suggest plausible and meaningful patterns – patterns that are not simply imposed on the data but are suggested by it as hypotheses worth exploring.

Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror

by Steven H. Miles, M. D. (Random House. New York. 2006)

Reviewed by Richard Thieme

ThiemeWorks

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We all come to big issues like torture and terror from our own biographies. We cannot be  dispassionate when compelled to reflect on horrific events that cause cognitive dissonance or worse. So let me begin this review with a conversation over a cup of coffee in Washington DC, earlier this year.

I met Steven Miles in a restaurant before this book was published. Miles is a soft-spoken physician from Minneapolis, MN, where he is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a faculty member of the Center for Bioethics. He looks and sounds quintessentially professorial, with a pleasant smile and an easy manner.

Yet our conversation was almost conspiratorial in tone, even though the 35,000 documents Miles consulted for this book were in the pubic domain, thanks to the ACLU and FOIA. Nothing we discussed was really a secret.  But Miles had had to discover the meaning of links between documents for himself, connecting the dots from document to document (the documents in were separate files, the connections between them not easily searchable by software.) He had to correlate the movements of military physicians with diverse places and events.

As he discussed his research, outrage and rage burned through Miles’ restrained demeanor.  He described how doctors had aided and abetted torture in Iraq, Guantanamo, and other places, some still hidden from view.

That our conversation about documents in the public domain in a public place should feel conspiratorial is a tip-off to what it does to us to enter the world of this book. We were not being paranoid—we were experiencing the impact of confronting what is being done in the name of the war on terror and in our name as Americans in a secret world.

Researchers like Miles often show the effects of “secondary trauma,” a therapist told me, alerting me to my own symptoms. Immersing oneself in this world results in predictable consequences. We become obsessed with the truth, an elusive quarry under any conditions, and our moral framework skews toward the binary. In the face of traumatic events, whether experienced first or second hand, evil seems easy to distinguish from good.

Whether it is a conversation in a restaurant or the experience of reading this book – that’s what can happen.

“I am often asked if my life is in danger, because of this research,” Miles told me. “That’s an epiphenomenon of being a torturing society. A torturing society is a society that is abraded by the process of dehumanization. In that process, we essentially create our own mirrored netherworlds.”

The distortion of our thinking, our behavior, our moral compass, as our society justifies, rationalizes, and  minimizes the impact of engaging in state torture is inevitable.

That is the deeper subtext of Miles’ book, which documents and illuminates how some doctors have kept prisoners alive as they are tortured and interrogated and have falsified death certificates to substitute natural causes for torture as the cause of death. Oath Betrayed shows how the oath sworn by doctors to do no harm is turned on its head in the name of fighting terror.

This book is a plea for justice, an attempt to reinforce the reasons why America rejected torture in the past as ineffective and inhumane for both practical and moral reasons. Miles believes that a society which allows discourse about such events will be affected for the better as consciences are quickened and resolve strengthened. The existence of this book is an act of hope and affirmation.

Miles also knows that discussing these issues does not expose him to the risks faced by colleagues in other countries, who have been tortured themselves or killed for speaking out. He knows that we still have relative freedom of speech. But for freedom of speech to be more than a bleeder valve, it must lead to action. In a society saturated with fictional and non-fictional accounts of violence and torture, we have been desensitized to the reality that Miles urges us to confront. It is not easy to read this book. Miles asks that we swim in the deeper waters of the moral, ethical and psychological consequences of our policies and practices, that we understand what it does to us to become a torturing society. Unlike screen violence, he does not do so to produce a vicarious shiver, but so that we will re-examine the thinking that led us to such practices in the first place.

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