This is how the Internet works:

Somebody in Kentucky finds one of my columns and asks to reprint it in a newsletter. Our email exchange begins a dialogue – in this case, on Buddhism, on-line spirituality, and how the world works – and in one of her exchanges, my email pal says, “I have a friend, Jim Ferguson, and this is Ferg’s Law:

When everything can go right, it will, and at the best possible moment.”

If that’s how computer networks work, that’s how life works too. Too many bugs or breakdowns or glitches can obscure the bigger picture, that a vast complex network pretty much works pretty much most of the time.

We are pulled in different directions by conflicting evidence. Jokes abound about differences between optimists and pessimists. But this is deeper than that. This is about the tentative conclusions on which we base the way we live our lives. If the evidence were simple, our decisions would be simple too.

This weekend I am in Iowa for a family funeral. It was funeral weather, overcast and cold. We walked through snow to a hole in the ground and stood shivering in the zero wind as final good-byes were said. I have attended dozens, no, hundreds of funerals, and always there is a desire for some sign from beyond the grave. And always there is silence, the answer to our questions is silence, and finally the silence becomes the question to which we must discover our own answers.

Do you ever get sick and tired of the negativity, the whining and complaining about the Internet, computer technology, and where the world is headed? Negativity is a mode of control, a way to try to make people, places, and things fit into a manageable box that we can sit on or manipulate.

I guess we need to live within safe boundaries.

I was diving once in an isolated bay on Maui, far beyond Kapalua, where tourists seldom venture. I was swimming out over the dark corrugated texture of the reef. Toward the mouth of the bay and the open ocean, curtains of blue and deeper blue shimmered in the distance. Suddenly the reef ended and the drop below me was hundreds of feet to a sand bottom. I felt the loss of safety represented by the reef but kept swimming. Then, beyond the curtains of deep blue something moved, something large and dark, so large I didn’t know what it was, and the next moment it was gone.

I turned and swam back toward the reef. Once I was over the coral again, fear of that unknown dark form disappeared. The reef represented the safe harbor we are always seeking, while the open water with its unknown possibilities was the invitation of life itself.

It is time to leave our comfortable rooms, the poet Rilke wrote, every corner of which we know, and venture forth into eternity.

Web sites work best that lead us by easy stages from accessible text or images into the complexity of information patterned beyond our comprehension. Our thinking too leads by degrees of precision from simple manageable truths to the highest level of insight.

When the Buddha became concerned that his teaching was at a depth most people would miss, he began salting his stories with “sandbox stuff,” the elementary truths we need to remember: Don’t hit. Be gentle and respectful. Don’t take other people’s stuff.

Murphy’s law is a true description of life at the lowest level of insight. Things that can go wrong usually do; the tendency to break down seems to be woven into the fabric of all of our projects and woven as well in stars that explode and galaxies that disintegrate. The myth of heat death articulated by physicists, our current high priests of cosmology, turns the silence of the grave into the silence of the universe.

Standing at the grave, I remember a friend, an artist named Jim. He called me from the hospital to say he was dying, but before I could visit, he checked out for a final European trip with his mother and sister. In a tourist hotel in London he lay down and died. They shipped his body back home for burial.

The following week I was discussing plans for a memorial service with his companion. Now, Jim always had long wild hair, shoulder-length hair, in keeping with his artist image. As I spoke with his companion, there suddenly emerged on the edge of my consciousness like a stained glass window brightening as the sun came out from behind a cloud Jim’s face, and it stayed there, unlike a memory, as the conversation continued. But for whatever reason, his hair was very short.

Then he faded, and moments later, his friend mentioned that – to please his mother’s conventional sensibility – he had cut off all his hair before leaving on that trip.

We can explain that event at any level of precision, but whatever our interpretation, something emerged in my consciousness that told a more precise truth than we usually know how to tell.

Negativity is a way to build a dark familiar reef under our swimming selves. The ultimate source of negativity is a lack of courage and a need to make the darkness safe, rather than risk the open water.

At the graveside – and we are always at the graveside — the powerful compression of grief tunes our awareness to what matters most. We surrender to the truth that is always there, but buried, our deep longing for forgiveness and mutual forbearance, our desire to surrender the need to be rigid or right. The readiness is everything, and during those moments of exquisite timing – tolled by a clock that ticks to a different rhythm – we know that when everything can go right, it will, at the best possible moment. We weep, and we embrace one another. The universe is gregarious and welcoming. We are built to live in space that is gateless, unbounded, free.

By Richard Thieme

Thanksgiving 2006 Part One

This final Islands in the Clickstream is an attempt to arrive at an expression of thanksgiving (a holiday in America last week) by a most orthogonal route.

First of all, I am keenly aware of gratitude toward people who manage some online lists in which I am allowed to participate. Some of these communities have come to really matter, especially those with a diverse makeup of unorthodox thinkers. Even when we never meet in the flesh, I feel closer to some of these colleagues than to my next-door neighbors.

One recent discussion of cybersecurity elicited this insight from a wise old silverback: “We keep making the same mistakes over and over (and over and over) again. Little disasters or big disasters, it seems to make no difference. We keep perpetuating the same stupidities.

“Some radical thinking is necessary to force long-term thinking and global optimization in Congress (hah!), corporations, and education. I keep writing articles on the subject, and they seem to fall on deaf ears—except among some out-of-the-box thinkers on this list.”

I will pick up on that statement in a minute.

Next:

In my work in sixteen years of professional ministry and subsequently as a consultant and speaker with all kinds of organizations, I came to the conclusion that three things were needed for organizations to be effective: mutuality, feedback, and accountability. The absence of any one skews behaviors in predictable directions.

Mutuality means cooperative or mutual endeavors, real teamwork; feedback means loops both inside and to the outside of the system (understanding that both are functions of how boundaries are arbitrarily defined) that are in proportion to the speed of the flow of information into and out of and within the system; accountability requires leadership and systemic attributes sustained and reinforced by that leadership to ensure that action happens, not just chatter.

It also happens that during times of rapid change, people become rigid, isolated, and fearful, and M F and A are antidotes to that condition.

This insight may sound trivial but I have not yet encountered anything in the real world to contradict it. The devil of course is in the details, the execution, how structures of M F and A are created, sustained, refreshed. That’s when insight turns into consulting. A lot depends on the organizational culture and how it inhibits or accelerates effectiveness. It also depends on the willingness of leaders to build the same kinds of structures into their personal and professional lives.

This is relevant to Thanksgiving because it is usually through feedback and accountability mediated by collegial structures that we come to those wonderful moments when our self-importance vanishes and we get, we really get, that what we don’t know is so much bigger than we are, and it is only through a matrix of collegiality, good will, and generosity of spirit that we are sustained in our endeavors and get anywhere at all.

And this, too, is relevant:

I read a diary this week that my father wrote in 1946. He was a metallurgist of some note and one of a small group of civilians who went to Europe shortly after the war to evaluate and make recommendations for the allocation of scrap metal. He traveled with a military escort from the beaches to Berlin. Thousands of displaced persons were everywhere, more thousands of bodies were decaying in the rubble or places like the subways in Berlin that the Russians had flooded, and the reek of death was everywhere. Germany and much of Europe was in ruins.

My father went to Dachau and saw Nazis imprisoned there, gazing into their eyes through bars, and he saw the bloodstained traps where blood drained when Jews and others were shot in groups before cremation. In Hitler’s bunker before it was cleaned up, he saw blood stains and broken furniture, and he was ashen when he toured the crematoriums and the fuller reality of the holocaust began to sink in.

The point of mentioning this is that no one he encountered from industrial leaders to military brass felt confident about the future. Standing in the rubble that was Germany and much of Europe, no one thought that rehabilitation would be easy and few had ideas about how to do it. The leaders he met were nervous because they were being criticized by pundits in America far from the scenes of devastation. They hoped Truman would step up but didn’t know if he would or could.

In Rome, he was warned not to leave the hotel without a military escort because people were being murdered on the streets for their clothing. There was disease everywhere, predatory bands of criminals and those seeking vengeance, and little and big civil wars threatened the continent. Hanging over all, of course, was the Soviet Union which appeared poised to march to the Atlantic. Everywhere he went, there was hunger, desperation, and chaos.

Only in retrospect can we see that we did the right thing, haltingly, and heroically, to recreate European civilization. The effort involved plenty of mutuality, feedback, and accountability, and the difference between Germany today and what my father described only 60 years ago is absolute.

Maybe there’s a lesson in this for us, too. On those lists where I find edification and all over the world, we’re talking about big issues in a complicated and often chaotic world. We’re struggling to arrive at sane policies and ways to execute them. So many on those lists express feelings of powerlessness as my colleague did above. But others might look at who some of those people are – esteemed veterans of the intelligence community with track records any sane human would envy, celebrated pioneers in computer security, intellectuals with long lists of significant achievements – and think that they of all people have their hands on some of the throttles of power. Yet all of us some of the time and some of us all of the time feel helpless to make much of a difference.

Maybe the difference we wish we could make is impossible to make. But maybe the little differences that we do and can make feed streams that in turn feed a bigger river.

I feel more powerless than any of them, but for good reason—I am. I filter and sift these streams of information from online conversations, diverse sources, friends, and documents by the thousands, reading and scanning and writing and thinking and speaking … and when someone out there remarks, as one did the other day, that I look like “an influencer,” I roar with laughter. I can’t influence my toast into darkening, is how it feels, most of the time. The only way to control the world, I do know deeply, is to allow things simply to take their course.

My father clearly felt that he was influencing policy on that trip, and he did. But he also dropped dead the year after he wrote that book, when I was 2 years old. The rest of the family, who might have shared anecdotes about him, died long ago too. That diary is all I have. I read his words sixty years later and boy, I wish I could talk to him!—about what he wrote. About all this.

His words reveal a difficult, brilliant man and I salute my genetic heritage like a good soldier. He was a Protestant German who became a Jew to marry my mother and bequeathed to me an unbridgeable gap between those two halves of himself. His death removed from my life a context which he would have embodied in the flesh, a model of one way to make sense of seeming contradictions. The reconciliation of opposites in our lives is always imperfect, but that very imperfection is a gift, leading us to accept our humanity—and the humanity of others. There are few answers but there is genuine relief in not having to puzzle it all out for ourselves. Community in and of itself is redemptive.

All of this is a way to say, I am grateful for online communities, grateful for flesh-time communities too, and grateful that others including my father wrote or said anything. Those words, for a few moments, before the paper on which they are printed or the storage medium holding their digital form, disintegrates, are sustaining. We are all suspended in space, building together the next section of a bridge across the chasm it is our destiny to traverse out of planks taken from behind. Images of the recent past, torn up and assembled in new configurations, offer good enough images of possibility and promise to keep us moving. Our shared words, the matrix of our mutuality, build a platform on which we somehow bootstrap ourselves against all odds, creating possibilities out of thin air.

Happy Thanksgiving, all. Thank you for providing mutuality and feedback and for keeping me accountable to what I have written in these Islands for a decade. Happy Thanksgiving above all to my buddy K who seems to feel powerless in proportion to the good works that he does, including maintaining some of those lists. He has learned, perhaps, that nothing is more thankless than creating a context in which others swim like fish, unaware of the water. No one gets an Oscar for remaining invisible and creating space, do they? But then, that’s what some think God has done with all of this, the universe, that is, with everything.

Thanksgiving 2006 Part Two

This two-part piece is the final issue of Islands in the Clickstream.

When the column began, in response to an invitation from a professional engineering association, the internet was known to a small group and “the digital revolution,” while in motion, was unfamiliar to most people.

Now the Internet and digital media have become commonplace and much of the transformation I explored in these columns has happened. The next wave of hackers, I suspect, will hack nano- and bio-technology and impact human identity even more profoundly than systems of information and communication.

So it is time to put Islands in the Clickstream to bed and move on to a second edition—tentatively titled, appropriately enough, The Second Edition. If you have a better suggestion for a name, please send it along.

I will continue to write occasional insight pieces on the social or psychological or spiritual or political aspects of our lives, particularly in relation to technology, religion, and science. I am particularly interested in how our colonization of the solar system and beyond will alter our physical, psychological, and social selves. I am eager to explore how encounters with other intelligent species will move from official ridicule and tabloid silliness to profoundly affect our understanding of our place in the universe. My liminal explorations might move even further off the page as I incorporate insights and observations from conversations and confessions more explicitly in my speculations.

There is nothing to lose, after all, by trusting our intuition, is there? by taking detours and being willing to poke our noses into dark holes?

I will transfer the Islands in the Clickstream email list to The Second Edition (and of course remove any who choose not to participate) and will probably work primarily through a blog. When 90% of our email is spam, it’s untenable to rely on mass-emailing. Direct publication will be intermittent.

Meanwhile … Christmas, Hanukah, Yule, and Kwanzaa are coming. The book, Islands in the Clickstream, is available signed by the author (i.e. me). If you would like to give the collection as a gift, email me with the name and address of the recipient and use Paypal to make a $20 payment to rthieme@thiemeworks.com. I will sign the book to your designated recipient. $20 includes postage to anywhere in the United States. If you want it sent to another country, add the cost of the flat rate to that country. Corporate discounts for larger orders are available.

As to speaking … because I have reinvented myself several times, I was asked to speak at Def Con last summer about How to Reinvent Ourselves, and if you’re interested in that or other speeches, my motto still is: Have Mouth, Will Travel. I recently spoke in the Netherlands for European security and intelligence professionals on Identity as Destiny, exploring the impact of transformational technologies on the practice of intelligence, and can adapt those insights for any audience interested in how the core context of our lives is changing. Other speeches explore the edges of spirituality, religious identity, diversity, and security in all its forms and guises. Three extended speaking trips to Australia this year have nurtured a love of that great country and three speaking trips are planned for New Zealand and Australia in 2007. I can’t wait to return.

I have been writing short fiction lately, publishing twenty stories recently in literary and science fiction magazines. There are now enough stories for a collection, so if you happen to be connected with an interested publisher, please let me know.

Recent fiction added to the web site at www.thiemeworks.com includes

“More Than a Dream,” an exploration of the encounter with the Other disguised as a “contact scenario,” published in Nth Degree. It can also be read at http://www.nthzine.com. I love this story which is a revision of one called “The Bridge” which I sent to John Updike many years ago when I was thinking of writing again. I asked if he thought it was worth it. He said it was, that I ought to keep writing. I still treasure that letter of encouragement which he took the time to write at a critical time.

“My Summer Vacation,” a story about coming of age in Chicago and coming to understand the “way things work” – something coming of age in Chicago is good at teaching – published in the Timber Creek Review.

“ZeroDay: Roswell,” a story told by a counter intelligence agent on his death bed, will be published soon in Porcupine and then posted to the site. This story is layered with ironic revelations and my guess is that readers will mistake what I know to be true for fiction and vice versa. Porcupine is a fine literary magazine which also published “Road Warrior.” Find it at http://www.porcupineliteraryarts.com/

“SETI Triumphant,” a scenario any writer who has been rejected millions of times will recognize, was published in the October issue of Analog Science Fiction. It was co-authored by my son “Aaron Ximm” and will be posted as soon as permission is granted. www.analogsf.com/

A non-fiction essay, “The Changing Context of Intelligence and Ethics: Enabling Technologies as Transformational Engines,” will be published in a special edition of the Defense Intelligence Journal on ethics in January 2007. Copies of the journal will be distributed at the Ethics and Intelligence Conference in Springfield VA as well as sent to subscribers to the journal. I am helping to organize that conference which will be on January 26-27 2007. For more information, see the web site of the International Intelligence Ethics Association at http://intelligence-ethics.org/.

This is the last issue of Islands in the Clickstream, an intermittent column written by Richard Thieme since 1996 exploring social and cultural dimensions of technology and the ultimate concerns of our lives.

Richard Thieme continues to speak professionally around the world addressing the issues that define us. His speeches illuminate the context of our lives, particularly how that context is altered by technological change. The content,
therefore, changes with the audience, but consistent themes are security, intelligence, leadership, diversity, life on the edges, what’s coming next, and the need to reinvent ourselves throughout our lives. His motto, Have Mouth, Will Travel, pretty much sums it up.

To subscribe to The Second Edition, the successor to Islands in the Clickstream, or to unsubscribe, email rthieme@thiemeworks.com and say which it is you want to do.

Islands in the Clickstream (c) Richard Thieme, 1996-2006. All rights reserved.

ThiemeWorks on the Web: http://www.thiemeworks.com
ThiemeWorks P. O. Box 170737 Milwaukee WI 53217-8061 414.351.2321

David MacMichael is a former CIA Analyst, US Marine and historian. He was a senior estimates officer with special responsibility for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the CIA’s National Intelligence Council from 1981 to 1983. He resigned from the CIA rather than falsify reports for political reasons and testified at the World Court on the illegalities of Iran-Contra. MacMichael started The Association of National Security Alumni, an organization to expose and curtail covert actions, and is a steering committee member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

He and Richard Thieme, an author and speaker, recently met at an Intelligence Ethics Conference that gathered nearly two hundred professionals from a broad spectrum of perspectives to discuss the impact of a career in intelligence on the moral and ethical life of the intelligence professional.

MacMichael discusses his background, ethical issues in intelligence, and the relevance of Iran-Contra to current national security issues. Interview with David MacMichael
by Richard Thieme

RT: David, intelligence is affected profoundly by technology, wouldn’t you agree?

DM: As a former history professor, I think of Diderot in the 18th century France. The Encyclopedia was really a technical manual that exposed what had previously been referred to as “the mysteries” of the craft guilds. Transforming mystery into knowledge became a basis for the industrial revolution. That kind of change is significant and impacts the issues we discussed at the conference about the ethical side of the intelligence system.

But … what has all that got to do with “intelligence?” I think of all the crazy science they did in MKULTRA and MKSEARCH and programs like that. How did that relate to gathering intelligence in order to inform policies?

You write that transformation imposed by global multi-national corporations that transcend national boundaries make the concept of nation states in conflict highly questionable. In the 19th and 20th centuries, conflicts were between nation states. But even so, you can go back through any historical atlas and look at the post-Roman empire and its like a kaleidoscope as you turn through the maps as the borders and shapes of geographical structures change.

RT: Maps in our minds are more permanent than territories represented by the maps. Now neuro-science is mapping regions of the brain as well.

DM: Yes, and that translates into control. Control is what programs like MK Ultra were about and that raises critical ethical issues.

I worked at Stanford with Harvey Weinstein a psychiatrist who headed student psychiatric services for the university. Harvey became a psychiatrist because his father was a victim of MKULTRA experimentation. His father deteriorated into depression and worse as a consequence of Ewen Cameron’s crazy science, but the family was told his father was going through this because he was not sufficiently cooperative with his treatment. That pushed Harvey into psychiatry. In the late seventies, after the revelations of the Church and Pike Committee hearings, he became aware of the real causes.

Why are those devastating techniques lumped in with intelligence at all? That goes to the more basic question of why are intelligence and covert operations lumped together? Intelligence is about information. The rule of thumb for covert operations is that there is 75% disinformation. The ethical issues are difficult to reconcile. One is based on truth and the other on its opposite.

RT: Friends in an intel agency complain of the hubris that blinds their colleagues to a sense of accountability toward the citizens who pay their salaries. Disinformation coming out of the agencies directed toward enemies can not be distinguished from disinformation directed toward the population. In addition, propaganda is impossible to protect from blowback because of network of the information systems we all inhabit. How do we seek the larger truth and articulate it in order to inform responsible policy discussions. Is it possible?

DM: Before the Neocons and their Machiavellian intellectual base, Walter Lippman made the same point: Matters of foreign affairs and international policy are too far beyond the ability of the populace to understand, he said, so they have to be conducted in secret and there must be no transparency.

RT: Tell me more about your background.

DM: I was not a professional intelligence officer. I had ten years in the US Marine Corps, resigned my commission in 1959, and earned advanced degrees in history. I taught for a few years and because of my military background and because I specialized in military history with a focus on Latin America I was contacted by SRI (Stanford Research Institute) which had a lot of DOD contracts. Counter insurgency was the new thing. In the Corps, I went to Special Forces School. We always prepare for the last war and the whole focus was to repeat the OSS experience in the event of war with the Soviet Union. Special Forces was created because the military never wanted to see anything like OSS again. The plan was, teams would go into eastern Europe to create insurgencies, but in a few years it became obvious that the insurgencies in the colonies of post-war allies had to be “countered” – so counter insurgency was developed. DOD was letting contracts like crazy. SRI hired me to go to Central America and do classified work. They had gotten a big contract from ARPA (later DARPA) for a counter insurgency center in Thailand. I worked for four years in the US Embassy and made contacts with the agency and the branch office of the station and when I returned to the USA I did contract work for them, later as a consultant.

They wanted outside people to head the Analytic Group at the National Intelligence Council to be responsible for writing national intelligence estimates. I was responsible for western hemisphere estimates the focus came to be the Contra war.

I was diligent. No matter who I talked to, who I pumped, I was unable to come up with anything in support of the main rationale for the Contra operation. I had serious problems with the characterization of the Sandinista government.

This tells you how the system actually works. This is relevant to what’s happening now. I was asked to do an estimate on the Sandinista government and I did an assessment and a projection which all came true but did not fit the policy makers’ desires. That’s why it resonates with the WMD controversy. My superiors backed me but William Casey (Director of the CIA) said no, this can not go out as a special estimate. It was published as an intelligence research memorandum and went into the file and that was that.

After two years with the analytic group, I could not continue. I did not want anything else in the agency. I traveled at my own expense in Central America and the more I learned the more clear it became that the operation was whacko. If I was going to speak out I had better do it because I knew of well developed US plans for an invasion of Nicaragua. I was well aware of what we had done elsewhere and if I was going to speak out it should be before the fact instead of after.

At the 1985 elections in Nicaragua, I was an observer; it was going to be verified as a fair and open election but right before the election this is how disinformation is fed to the press news was broken that Nicaragua was going to receive a big shipment of MIG aircraft.

RT: Was the relationship between the CIA and the media as subtle then as it is now?

DM: It was very subtle over that entire long period. The operational role of opinion control came directly out of the Second World War. It applies to any war time situation; war requires you to enlist the media to push in the best sense of the word war propaganda. This is what you want out, and you’re part of the war effort, you’re supporting your country, and in the Cold War, the same rationale was invoked. You have to understand that many people were involved who had been intellectually attracted to an alternative of what was seen as destructive and failed capitalism and were working with the Communist Party and were then disillusioned by events in eastern Europe. They believed they were supporting our country and you had to conceal their activity – now this is very powerful, this idea of being on the inside of that effort, it is so attractive, so powerful. A big threat to any who wanted to speak up was that you would lose access, and you want so much to be on the inside. This keeps many people in the intelligence system, besides the usual reasons like salary, pension, and the like. They’re afraid that if they speak up, they will lose their access.

You see this in hearings on whistle blowers. I know many of these people and what fractures a lot of them and makes them so upset is that when they raise concerns, not so much about policy but about the way it is carried out, they lose their security clearance. You have to understand how critical this is. It means everything to a person. Everything.

I know prominent whistle blowers who still deal with this after many years. “These were my colleagues,” they say. “These were my friends. But suddenly I am not a colleague or a friend.” It’s like the clubbiness of the Foreign Service; when you’re no longer welcome at certain parties or in certain houses, it’s a serious blow.

After I spoke out, I hired a good lawyer. I did not want to be prosecuted and go to jail. I reviewed the form I had signed with the agency. The story was going to go out and I gave my lawyer a magazine article I wanted to publish. I said everything I had to say plus things I was certain they would block. I said, take this to the publications review board at the agency – and it worked out exactly as I anticipated. They passed through what I believed was necessary for me to say, who I was, the critical evidence, and blocked out the other stuff which I was certain they would not let me say. Now I had a guideline for the rest of the eighties, for speaking and helping to organize the Association of National Security Alumni. I used that action as my guideline. Occasionally we checked – there was a lot of surveillance on me – and the word was, that son of a bitch keeps going right up to the line but he never goes over.

I was not heroic or seeking martyrdom and it seemed to work. I testified at the World Court which was an important event and had an impact on foreign policy. We evolved a growing community even then of former intelligence officers. We published our magazine Unclassified bimonthly for 5-6 years. It was a good magazine and attacked a lot of these issues and had a reasonable circulation. Lots of media people used it.

RT: Can you evaluate your impact?

DM: In terms of impact, timing is important. We broadened the conversation on the use of intelligence. The slogan I devised was: we are not opposed to intelligence but we are opposed to covert paramilitary operations which by definition are violations of international law. The timing was important because of the Iran-Contra hearings – but in fact, in terms of impact, it was discouraging to see how Congress dealt with it. It was the most significant constitutional scandal we had had and they pushed it under the rug. The facts cried out for impeachment. The emotional quality of words is important when you get involved at this level and impeachment is one of those words. The use of those words climaxed or I should say anti-climaxed with eleventh hour pardons from George Bush the First. It left a bad feeling, to say the least.

What was the use? What did it matter, everything we did?

My greatest disappointment was in 1988 when I was asked by the Dukakis campaign and the Democratic National Committee to make presentations on how to use this issue. I said, if you take on this issue in 1988 and say, if I’m elected, the Contra program is over, there are groups all over the country that will respond, but my God, the waffling! Oh well, they said, yes, but you know, and all that. The inability of people to grasp these particular nettles is one reason their campaigns deflate. Talk about impact, you can generate ten thousand letters to the editor but it does not have political impact. In those dreadful hearings, the expose went on and on – but for what?

RT: Was it worth it?

DM: You find yourself in this situation maybe once in a lifetime. You only come to the plate once and had better take your swings. I took my swings. That was my one ethical plus in a lifetime of unethical behavior.

RT: What drove all this, David? What compelled intelligent people to get so wild?

DM: Like so much in the intelligence system, it looked sexy to some people and above all, THE MONEY WAS THERE. That drives all of this. People will do what they can fund. The lines between organizations and proprietaries and contractors and agencies are very blurred and the money is more like a transmission belt than a revolving door. When I did contract work, I did some projects I was not all that proud of, some of the work was questionablelike various interrogation technologies that have been worked on for thirty years, measuring changes in the size of the pupil of the eye to see if someone’s lying – I tend to be dismissive of those efforts but when you’re looking for “capabilities and intentions,” there is a whole lot of road to look at and not a lot of rubber. The faintest skid marks are supposed to tell you significant things but interpreting the marks is not easy. Intelligence is divided into two parts: one is Tactical Intelligence and Related Activity (TIARA). TIARA is usually pretty good and you have the ability to know through surveillance or interceptions where various enemy units are, that’s what I used and looked at in the Marine Corps. That’s hard enough in the well-known fog of war. But when you take it to this other level where you’re fumbling with intentions, industrial capabilities, etc. it’s useful for discussion but is it really useful for immediate action and decision making? It’s questionable. The intelligence is several steps removed the real. So how useful is it? You have to understand that once the analytic side, not the operational side, is wedded to using these techniques, you’re like a tenured professor working in your area of specialty, you get enormous satisfaction from doing so, and you get funded. But how useful is it?

The only time I ever heard ethical issues raised in relationship to our work came when someone stood back and looked at what they were doing and said: what am I doing? what am I really doing?

The penetration in hard targets, the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and after 1949, China – that did not happen. In the fifties and sixties, at the height of the post-colonial period, the CIA turned its attention to Latin America and that’s where they had success because those targets are so soft, the societies are so corrupt, and the guys in the security agencies lined up – believe me – and said, sign me up! It’s a good payday. That’s where so many careers were made. I saw many of these operations going on in Africa, Latin America, and in Bangkok where I worked – this in itself is an “ethical issue.” You are persuading people to do this.

RT: In and of itself, you are saying, the nature of the work breaks ethical norms as we understand them in other contexts. It’s about control by nearly any means.

DM: Yes. My late colleague, a woman, served in the station in Lima Peru. A junior officer at the Chinese embassy requested a particular prostitute. So they got the cameras in there and filmed, that was always fun, but what ticked her off is that all the other officers at the station watched the films on a weekly basis but they wouldn’t let her watch.

After they had enough stuff on the guy, they arranged for an agency officer to storm in and see this guy, shrieking that this woman is his daughter and bad things will happen and they have these films and then they make the pitch. This guy did what any sensible person would do. He went to his superiors and told them what happened, this is what they asked, and he was on the next plane back to Beijing and went on with his career.

The point is, they’re always looking for things like that to trap people, and you rationalize it, you justify it, you say, this is my job and we’re obtaining information that we need, and if your skin isn’t thick enough to do it – then get a different job.

I was speaking recently with a historian at one of our intelligence agencies. I asked if there was a period of time we could discuss openly and he said he would talk about anything that happened up to the Second World War.

Since I was born in 1944, he was saying, in effect, that if we discussed anything that had happened in my lifetime, we would have radically different points of reference. His would include numerous details that I could never know. We might share a significant number of “facts” but we would contextualize them differently; we would index them, as it were, according to different heuristics. So we would know some of the same things but we would build the Bigger Picture in radically different ways. We would not, therefore, know the same “thing” at all. We would think, believe, and act according to different images of reality, using an index to arrange events in a seemingly shared historical matrix to produce different results.

Several generations have lived, now, since the beginning of the Cold War and the national security state to which it gave birth. We inhabit different histories according to our need to know compartmented facts, but that need is determined by others according to parameters that we also don’t know. Those who matured in this world, like fish in muddy waters, have never known real clarity, reality that wasn’t mediated by simulations, or the fuller truth.

This fragmented space which undermines meaningful civil discourse was conceived as a means to counter an enemy but expanding it for several generations has turned much of the civilian population into enemies too. Investigative journalists and terror suspects are pretty difficult to distinguish these days. The devouring monster of excessive secrecy swallows us all. Millions of secrets mean billions of different possible myths depending on how facts, guesses, and conjectures are linked into patterns. “Conspiracy theorists” are inevitable when ignorance darkens our efforts to connect the dots and the dots keep moving.

Daniel Moynihan wrote in 1998 of the deleterious effects of secrecy, but he was ignored. People with power know they mostly just have to wait it out or create distractions to take our short attention spans in other directions. Anyway, it was too late to unravel the tapestry; there is not just one Penelope, there are many, there are Penelope clones everywhere, and even if they all worked together, the tapestry is too vast to unravel. Too many people have a stake in keeping it together.

The men and women who set the national security state in motion mostly meant well but they set in motion a machine that relieves us of the burden of freedom by keeping from us the truths that would enable us to use our freedom. These men and women are self-appointed and unelected. The current scandal about circumventing FISA is the tip of the iceberg, an inevitable consequence of the world we built, and only time will tell if global warming will melt more polar ice and reveal more shipwrecks in the water.

But it’s deeper than that. Here’s an example.

When I was twenty years old, I was invited to take an honors seminar in writing at Northwestern University taught by Stephen Spender, an English poet and editor of Encounter, a magazine those of us inclined in a literary way all knew and read. It was a premiere journal of culture, the arts and politics.

Spender was a little dreamy, off-hand in how he ran that seminar. We read our stories aloud and listened to critiques. But we perked up when Spender spoke of politics, why it looked to intellectuals like himself in the thirties as if the world must choose between fascism and communism while the democracies were mired in depression, lacking will and resolve, spinning their wheels. He spoke from a left of center point of view and we listened; we had been imprinted, after all, by McCarthy, the Hollywood blacklist, and the House Un-American Activities Committee which held raucous hearings downtown.

What Spender never mentioned was that Encounter was a CIA operation from beginning to end. He would later claim he did not know, that he was a dupe of the right as he had been a quasi-dupe of the left a couple of decades earlier. In fact, the only ones who did not know were people who did not want to know that the CIA had appointed itself a Ministry of Culture to combat Communist ideology. The agency was directly responsible for publishing houses, thousands of books, periodicals in countries all over the world, the emergence of selected composers and the success of abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock. All those people and their products were ironically used as examples of the kinds of literature and art that a free society creates. Those not with the program like Steinbeck, writing of depression America and with sympathy for the poor, had to work a little harder. Doors did not open easily for them, and the covert cash flow did not carry them along like corks bobbing in a flood. (For a fascinating, fuller treatment of the subject, see The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders (The New Press: New York 1999).

Young impressionable people like me thought that literature and art were about telling the deepest, most complete truth we could. That was the theory we were taught, but in practice, we were deceived. The creative world in which we lived was influenced always and fabricated often by a covert political agenda funded secretly and administered by a few.

Apologists claim that these artists, some of them anyway, would have done the same work, so what was the harm? This essay is too short to illuminate all of the ways a contrived space compromises artists just as in the Soviet Union there were orthodoxies that constrained creativity. I will trust the reader to see why it is a problem to determine on a societal scale what literature and art is rewarded or punished.

Those who determine the paradigm of our thinking determine the questions that can be asked and then they do not have to worry about the answers.

Fronts, “proprietaries” and “think tanks” mask how money is laundered to hide a concealed design. In the fifties, the Geschickter Foundation funded covert medical research that included the use of chemicals and drugs to influence brain function, memory and behavior. A wing of Georgetown University Hospital was built and staffed with three CIA researchers as a “hospital safe house” (half the cost came from public funds because CIA involvement was not known.) Similarly, foundations like the Farfield Foundation, a “wholly owned” CIA proprietary, used channels like the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation to fund the cultural life of the United States and much of the rest of the world through books, broadcast media, newspapers and periodicals which like Encounter were not known agents of government propaganda. Current alliances among universities, corporations, and clandestine sources of funding continue to obscure the links between sources and research. Mass media outlets from internet sites to publishing houses continue to be conduits of covert action. But when this activity is focused on ourselves … what is being protected? And how is the enemy defined?

We can’t know what we don’t know. But when we forget that we invented a culture of secrecy on this scale, then live in it as if it is “real,” the sane will sound mad and the common-sense consensus believed by most will be in fact a tale told by an idiot but signifying, unfortunately, something.

As Nietzsche said, those who are seen dancing are thought to be insane by those who cannot hear the music.

The point I want to make is that my generation and the ones after it were unaware of the depth and extent of this designer society … yet still, after all these years, those who note its current manifestations are ignored, discredited, or ridiculed.

It is not a “conspiracy theory” to say what is obviously so; it is putting a name to the betrayal of our nation and its ideals by creating a culture of secrecy and covert action that has become the norm, wanting only enemies to name from time to time to justify itself.

But there is another, greater betrayal—the quiet betrayal of the freedom intrinsic to our humanity through our passive acceptance of this state of affairs. When we didn’t know, inactivity was excusable. But once we know, we betray ourselves by refusing to demand transparency and accountability in our affairs.

If the walls of secrecy collapsed, we like East Berliners who were suddenly free to wander into the west, would also move as in a dream, wondering with amazement at bright windows brimming with facts and truths. We would be uncertain at first how we had lived for so long without knowing what was real. But then, I am afraid … then, like concentration camp inmates who came out after liberation, walked in circles for a while, then went back in … we would return to the comfort and “security” of the only world we know.

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.

Richard Thieme speaks, writes and consults on the deeper implications of technology, religion and science. He will chair a working group on informed consent at The Intelligence Ethics Section of the Joint Services Conference on Professional Ethics January 27-28 2006 and shares responsibility for building the Intelligence Ethics Collection at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

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. Used with permission.

Related Web sites

American Civil Liberties Union www.aclu.org

Center for Bioethics www.bioethics.umn.edu

Human Rights Watch www.hrw.org

Richard Thieme www.thiemeworks.com

Torture is all the rage these days, getting plenty of ink in the liberal press, as if it’s something new. It’s not. We have been torturing one another
for centuries. Our intelligence professionals have perfected the means and the methods and have created opportunities for learning how to do it right. Torture, from beating, lacerating, lectrocuting, raping and breaking individuals in hell holes to quietly standing aside while genocide takes place, is ho hum. By treating it as something special, the discussion of appropriate policies governing torture has been distorted.

Hence this essay to right that wrong.
First of all, torture is widely practiced. We Americans developed a very good manual for torturing “leftist rebels,” i.e. anyone who opposes “free trade”
and organizes themselves enough to be a threat, and we trained people in how to do it. I spoke to someone recently who had wandered into torture training classes complete with chalk diagrams on the blackboard and arrows pointing out pressure points. I talked to an interrogator from Guantanamo who smiled and shook his head when presented with government statements about the humane
treatment of “enemy combatants.” So let’s stop talking about Abu Ghraib and related “atrocities,” as they are called by the leftwing media, as if they are anomalous. Atrocities are not anomalous. They’re as common as fumbles when the Packers are playing.

Secondly, despite a significant number of voices in the chorus proclaiming that torture is not a good interrogation technique (let’s face it, when the
electricity is coursing through your genitals and the man in the black hood asks if you want some more, you’ll say anything to staunch the juice; and the best interrogators say they prefer what is called the “Scharff method” after the sophisticated NAZI interrogator Hans Joachim Scharff who showed how empathy, understanding, and patience often turned the most recalcitrant
captive into a good source of information) despite all that, torture must be good for more than recreation because even those who say it’s ineffective continue to authorize, execute, and cover up its use.

Now, part of that may be the “fun factor.” Totally dominating another human being can be fun. One source explained that torture has long been practiced in other countries with Americans as coaches (to use the current uzzword), if not participants. He named a lot of countries where we did this, including El Salvador, Cambodia, Chile, Iran, South Vietnam, Guatemala, Argentina, Israel, and Egypt. We could double that list, at least, with countries in our own hemisphere (the Monroe Doctrine gives us permission to do that, and now the
Monroe Doctrine is applied to the world and beyond, we apply it to space all the way out to the asteroid belt). For some, torture is just work. But for others, torture is fun.

Take the Uzbeks, for example. One source with a long history in military intelligence said it was a novelty when the Uzbeks learned that one purpose of torture might be to elicit information.

But I digress. The point I want to make is that we have been engaged in torturing people directly or through proxies, here, there and everywhere, for so long, that torture ought to commend itself to all thinking individuals as an appropriate methodology for (1) getting the truth out of people quickly and efficiently, and (2)disciplining unruly children and adults alike, as is
when is.

I propose that we apply the lessons of torture in ways consistent with our actual practice, not with the cover stories we invent so the squeamish can sleep at night.

Torture should be used first in the basements of police stations, in prisons, and in schools, places where we have nearly total control over prisoners, inmates and students now. Torture has been in fact routinely practiced in many
of those places and when, for example, white police attach wires to a black man and let the good times flow, subsequent protestations are widely ignored.
So this extension of current practice would be a seamless splice.

Once the efficacy of torture in those environments has become clear to a desensitized population, it can be extended into homes and businesses where
discipline is a must but achieving it efficiently has been denied to
executives and parents.(Desensitization training is a must. When the CIA trained assassins for assignment to embassies where they would be ready at hand, they were compelled to watch hours of atrocities, their heads immobilized and eyelids propped open, until they no longer had an emotional
response to killings, mutilation and so on.)

Imagine that you ask your child what they’ve been looking at on the Internet and you get an unsatisfactory answer. Now all you can do is shut them up in a room with a computer, a television, a cell phone with conference calling, all the comforts of home. But if you could take them down to the basement and wire up the auto battery or break the little darling’s arm and hang them from it for a few days as we do in Iraq, can you imagine how quickly you would know what Junior was browsing?

Or imagine an executive faced with employees who threaten litigation on some politically correct mini-point of contention every time they’re told to work. Instead of having to listen to that smarty-pants voice, you just tie their
hands to opposing cubicles and shred that designer blouse with twenty or thirty bloody lashes like they do in Afghanistan. Do that a couple of times, making sure the rest of the crew has to watch, and you’ll have a hard-working corps of workers with the right attitude in no time.

The truth is, people are overly squeamish about torture. We need to ramp up public exposure to what we really do and get people used to the sounds and smells. Those pictures from Abu Ghraib were well-scrubbed. They only showed men being abused in mostly passive humiliating ways. Pictures of women being raped and the sounds of children being sodomized were locked away. Trials of low-level personnel were quick and quiet while responsible policy makers were ignored. For heaven’s sake, it required a trained physician going through autopsy reports to discover that “natural death” upon “natural death” was a cover for torturing people to death. That’s inexcusable. I think we Americans have stronger stomachs than that and the collusion between media and military to sanitize the truth is appropriate. If they can take it, hell, so can we!

You would be surprised how many people would enjoy it. Listen to the words of a medic who described his feelings while beating prisoners during 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.” (quoted from the
forthcoming book by Dr. Stephen Miles, Oath Betrayed: Military Medicine and the War on Terror).

The lessons of torture are matter-of-fact. Torture is widespread, obviously effective or we wouldn’t use it so much, and to many practitioners either a rationalized, neutral event or something they really like. Adapting torture to more general use in society would quickly pay dividends. Students would stop
mouthing off, employees would stop suing bosses, suspects would confess, and children would obey their parents.

I think it is high time we use torture whenever and wherever. Initial opposition will quickly drown in a sea of screams and resisters will learn that the fact of resistance marks them for the next session. We have the tools, we have the techniques, we have lacked only the will to do what works to straighten out our bent society once and for all.

I highly commend torture to everybody.

So this morning we are told they could not find a bunk for Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter jailed for keeping her sources confidential, and she had to sleep on the floor of her cell.

Meanwhile Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth Corporation returned to luxurious surroundings after being acquitted on all counts in his trial for fraud.

I keep getting more and more cynical, Jane Wagner said, and I still can’t keep up.

Some of us worry too much about this sort of thing. I needed to talk to a wiser head and get some perspective. It wasn’t just the controversy swirling around the jailing of reporters for not divulging confidential sources, it was lots of current affairs that led to a conversation with a veteran journalist who has handled plenty of hot topics in his time, relied on plenty of confidential sources over the years. But instead of talking about the constitutional issues, the risks reporters take when they promise confidentiality, he spoke of bigger problems with the culture in which he has worked for so many years.

The bigger issue is the difficulty of getting out the truth about anything at all. His investigative work often focuses on exotic defense technologies, controversial appropriations, behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Corporate executives who have reached the limit of their abilities to tolerate outrageous practices sometimes vent their frustration or alleviate guilt by telling him what’s happening. As a professional, of course, he never relies on a single source. But the difficulty of getting confirmation for their revelations often prevents stories from coming to light.

“When I bring things to the editors,” he said, “they want confirmation from inside the beltway. But those are precisely the people you can’t trust, so if you do get confirmation, it doesn’t confirm anything. So you get into this netherland where you have no idea what’s real and what isn’t.”

That reminded me of a claim a source once made that nuclear artillery were in Viet Nam during the war. I asked how something like that could be confirmed, if it were true, in light of what he said.

“Listen, I once had an extremely good source, a Commander, who said yes, they had nuclear artillery in Europe at a time when official policy was that we would not do that sort of thing. They repeatedly denied it, but he commanded a unit and if the enemy started to come over the line and we knew we couldn’t stop the invasion, we would use those weapons as a last ditch effort. It was not as if somebody said, oh crap let’s get some nukes over there—they had to be in place at the time, strictly a last ditch stop-gap measure in case they came at us like waves of Chinese troops did in Korea. Lying is OK now. ‘National Security’ has changed the rules.”

“And increased cynicism,” I said.

“The cost,” he agreed, “is a populace that no longer trusts the government, no matter what it does.”

“What if I tracked down the names of others in his unit at that time?”

He shook his head. “Even getting other names is not necessarily a good approach. That brings in other people who are not party to this at all and it can screw them too. Once you’ve named them it’s very easy to get to them if you’re in charge of keeping it quiet and say, hey, you need to deny it for the national good. Then they come out and deny it and everything you’ve written is suspect. The easiest thing to do nowadays is to kill a reporter’s reputation. Then you put him out of business forever.

“I had a story [about corporate malfeasance] that had solid evidence to go with it,” he recalled, “and I’ll never forget what my chief editor said when I brought it to him. It was absolutely the cold hard truth, I had it on tape and a list of names to back it up. He looked at it very carefully, then looked me in the eye and said, ‘To what end would we use this?’

“I said, Because it’s the right thing to do. It would expose a major corporation that is literally killing it’s own people for the bottom line. And he said, ‘I repeat, to what end would this be?’ I said I thought the shareholders would definitely appreciate it, but he shook his head and said no, all they want to do is make money. We never went with it. We never went with it. It wasn’t because they were a big advertiser or something like that but I think my boss had been down this road so many times, he knew that the payoff was not there, that it was basically martyrdom. He knew that if enough of the right things come out—remember Gary Webb—you get attacked by the Post and the Times and enough government officials or in this case corporate officials who say that is just blatantly untrue. Then they parade any number of people who say, I was at that same meeting and that didn’t happen. Then the newspaper is besmirched and they have no choice but to fire me because I did a bad job. He knew exactly what it was going to be.

“Who has that kind of power over the media? Look at the boards of directors. See how many companies have interlocking boards, the same people sitting on them, people who meet in the same clubs – that is the true elite of this country and they control an incredible number of things. Stuff like this goes on all the time. I am on the edge of one now, I know somebody who stumbled onto something big, but how can he get it published? Some of the people he would report on are on the boards of publishing companies.

“A free press is an illusion. You don’t have to co-opt a reporter any more; you don’t have to pay him or have him sign up. You just control him.

“When I chased down black budget projects, it was very frustrating. I would nail down stuff, I had good sources, management would back me—in one case, more than ten years ago, I discovered something that still has not come out, and I was told, we are putting our credibility on the line so we need to have a conference on this. We went over it and one of our guys said, you’re lying about this whole thing. There’s no way we can prove all this. That’s when I decided, it’s not worth it anymore. Is he co-opted? I don’t know. But now they think you need five independent sources to verify something and there’s no way that will ever happen. So they effectively corralled me on this issue and it was done by creating doubt. It was coming from my colleagues checking with their sources. But it was also made clear to me through what I call ‘taps on the shoulder’ that those other guys – the spooks – knew exactly what I was doing all the time. I did not use encrypted phones, everything was in the clear, and they knew all about it.

“I told a colleague about it and he said, you’re getting to the point where you’re dangerous to certain people. I said I could handle it, but he said –what’s your price? He asked about various members of my family, where they worked, where my kids went to college. Some of those places were sensitive to pressure. That’s your price, my colleague said. It’s not hard to arrange an infraction for one of your kids at any one of those schools and get them kicked out. You wouldn’t want that to happen to your child, would you?

“I shook my head. He was right. That was my price.

“People would call twenty minutes after a telephone call and know what I was talking about. Twenty minutes after a phone call, guys in suits showed up at the door of a woman who was typing tapes for her boss and demanded the tapes, twenty minutes after I was on the telephone talking about them with her. I know I sound paranoid, but … “

The conversation turned to the specifics of a situation we were both following and I mentioned that some of the details we believed were true had shown up in Hollywood thrillers. Over time, that tends to desensitize the population, doesn’t it?

“That’s entertainment,” he half-sang with a smile.

“Didn’t Joseph Goebels, the Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich, say entertainment is the best kind of propaganda?”

That set him off again.

“Listen, I did consulting once for a movie company and the president of the company said, I can tell your story on film and get away with it but you can’t tell the same story in a newspaper or magazine because if I find one fault with it you’ve lost credibility and the story has lost credibility. I’m just entertainment which removes the BS threshold. People are here to be entertained, not to be convinced. So I can feed you and the public anything I want and call it mind candy but I’m more effective at changing someone’s opinion than you are.”

I returned to the previous story, the one the editor had killed. What was the finale?

“The whole thing was so disarming – it was part of what I call my maturation process as a journalist, At some point you realize that you really can not change the world and the best you can do is just keep doing something that gets you paid. It’s not satisfying, but until you’re financially independent, I don’t know what else you can do.”

So it’s not just leaks and confidentiality. Judith Miller may be a subset of how one issue is chilling journalism but the chill on journalism is a subset of a larger societal reality, something so large it’s usually invisible. The chill wind blows from all directions.

“I have a friend who is a thirty year intel person,” he said. “When a conversation got about to where we are now, he said, got a dollar bill? He said, see the big eye on top of the pyramid? That’s the Illuminati. There always has been and always will be the equivalent of the Illuminati. They’re the power elite and you don’t know most of their names. They’re a group unto themselves and they have incredible power and will never be undone. He said, that’s why it’s on our dollar bill – they’re always watching, they always know what’s going on, and they will be running things. Do you really believe that, I asked? He smiled and said, I spent thirty years in the intel business. I was with the White House. Believe me, it’s true. I said, is it government? He said no, it’s well beyond government, government is just a piece of it.

“Things like that come up in conversation and you think it’s BS but then… you walk away and think about it … wonder about it … connect the dots ….”

I said he sounded like a “conspiracy theorist.” He said that when one describes human reality at sufficiently granular and macro levels simultaneously, one generally does.

“The best way to control people is to keep them just barely comfortable,” he said. “With jobs, a house, a car, a small percentage at the bottom in dire straits. You don’t have time to think about things.

“If you want to sleep nights, you just have to let go and know you can’t control it. The step past that is when you start thinking that not enough people care. That’s your problem,” he advised. “You still think more people should care. You took the boy out of the pulpit but you can’t take the pulpit out of the boy.”

He took the check and paid for my coffee.

“Sometimes, you know,” he said with a smile, getting up and stretching, “it’s not exactly a blessing having a mind like yours.”

[incidental details and the context of this conversation were changed to protect the relatively innocent]

Sharon Begley’s science column on Fridays in the Wall Street Journal is a constant delight. She frequently illuminates research that has profound implications for the future of human identity and behavior, often derived from biology or physics.

Biology, of course, is displacing computer technology as the sexy domain for mind-boggling inquiry. Several years ago I asked some technophiles at Def Con, the annual computer security conference, when we realized that information security was turning into risk management and box-checking compliance, what was next for unconventional techno-adventurers. They suggested “animal mods,” the alteration of our bodies with surgical implants, tattoos, and the like to make us resemble other species. The changes they discussed, however, were mostly cosmetic.

A few weeks ago, an email arrived from “a well known crank in a good position to know” who said this of MIT:

“The future is biology. Media Lab is dead. Weisner is dead. Dertouzos is dead. CS enrollment is falling fast. The new President is (1) female and (2) from neuroscience. NIH is the biggest funding source, not DoD, not NSF.”

In a recent short story I depict hackers who play with genes instead of computer networks. Gibby, the hero, gets rich by distributing “alter-genies,” open source kits that enable “code kiddiez” to create syntho-life in their basements. He makes money by selling the wrap-around digital environments that enhanced humans will use to enjoy newly-engineered sexual experiences.

That short story was barely ahead of life. If science fiction is the way a left-brain society dreams of the future, the dream came moments before I awakened to the Discovery DNA Explorer Kit for kids ten and older, an astonishingly useful tool available for only US$80. And in this month’s Wired, we are told that “the era of garage biology is upon us.”

Then Begley’s column on April 22 discussed studies indicating that the effect of a gene depends on the environment in which it is expressed. Tanks with and without fish elicit different traits in water fleas with the same DNA. Tanks with fish elicit the growth of armor in the form of helmets; tanks without fish do not.

Humans, too: not helmets, which our genes do not express, but plenty of other things.

Studies show, Begley wrote, that a gene associated with depression and suicide is likely to be expressed only in the presence of stressful events. A particular gene affecting cholesterol levels is likely to be expressed only if someone eats a diet high in fat. And rats (who are a lot like humans) do not express a gene for fretful neurotic behavior when their mothers nurture them a lot.

In short, the environment alters how genes are expressed as traits or behaviors. Our responses to life are not fixed and rigid but are characterized by plasticity. Genes define a wide range of options but are expressed only in relationship to specific stimuli. The potential becomes actual in response to specific triggers.

Now, let’s take the implications of this a little further. How do genes respond to conscious intentions? Probably the way the unconscious responds. Our unconscious minds do not distinguish inner and outer stimuli, do not separate what we think from what happens in the environment. It only knows what the machinery of perception delivers as an event, whether a mental event or a physical one, it’s all translated into chemical information and the unconscious responds as if it is “real.”

Some people spend a lot of time in therapy because they feel as guilty thinking of doing something as they do doing it. The unconscious does not distinguish a thought from an action.

This suggests that genes – which interface with the “self” at the unconscious level in a region we do not know how to describe – can be triggered by conscious intentions just as they are triggered by external realities. If water fleas had the consciousness of a yogi, they would be able to grow protective helmets even when fish were absent.

The implication is that we humans have the capacity to bootstrap ourselves into desired states of being by naming them and acting on them, so long as those states of being do not lie outside the possibilities latent in our genetic code. We can not grow wings and fly just by wishing we could, we can not dance in the air a la Castaneda’s Don Juan. But we can do more – so much more – than we generally think we can.

Much of what we choose to express in our lives is a function of our deepest intentions. The intentions have to be deep, however. This is not magic or wishful thinking. This is the exercise of freedom and power intrinsic to our humanity at the deepest possible level.

One of Begley’s earlier columns discussed how the intentional focus of a human being affects the brain, its neuroplastic ability to grow particular neurons in support of skills we choose to learn. Fingertips become more sensitive, for example, when we learn Braille.

But we have to pay attention. Monkeys stimulated on their arms grew neurons that made the area more sensitive unless they were distracted while being stimulated. Then, despite the stimulus, neurons did not grow.

Focusing awareness by a conscious act of intention makes things happen.

I think of stories told by a Viet Nam POW, how he and his fellow prisoners learned in isolation to be fluent in a language of tapped code, how they used their imaginations to replay life situations. One POW was a golfer who played a particular course in his head stroke by stroke. When he returned home, he had cut his handicap in half. The same happens when we practice the piano in our heads. The unconscious does not distinguish between “real” and “imaginary” piano playing. Our playing improves either way.

This is true for many of the abilities we have shut off behind a curtain by believing “that’s not me.” Self-definition limits the ability of our genes to come fully into play. This is also why no one can take away our power except by convincing us that we don’t have it so we never use it.

One friend recalls, for example, how his blind mentor at MIT trained himself to play audio tapes at accelerated speeds, reducing the time needed to understand an hour lecture to fifteen minutes. He also trained himself to listen to many conversations simultaneously and left faculty parties up-to-date with everyone’s research.

The ability to do that, latent and unexpressed within his field of genetically determined possibilities, was triggered not by his blindness but by his response to his blindness. Our real desires, if we genuinely intend to express them and they are within our genetic range, will be expressed. This is what it means, not to be supra-human, but to be human.

Now, Sharon Begley is a journalist who writes about science. She insists on evidence from scientific studies. “Consciousness,” she writes, “ is only now becoming a respectable subject of neuroscientific inquiry.” So I accept sole responsibility for this assertion, based on the evidence of a lifetime: spirituality is a domain of human experience that matters profoundly regardless of whether or not scientific research addresses it. It is nice when experiments support the value of meditation, the potency of prayer or the reality of non-local consciousness – it makes them more “real” in our materialistic world – but we don’t need experiments to know what we experience. The freedom and power we experience in the most real moments of our lives are self-validating.

A psychiatrist noticed that while some people transcend oppressive conditions in life, others are crushed by similar circumstances. He discovered that (1) at critical moments, someone had intervened positively in the lives of the former group and (2) they all read a great deal.

Interesting, isn’t it? Someone acted in a positive way at a crucial time AND they used imagination to transcend the physical and emotional constraints of their lives.

Spirituality is a metaphorical way of speaking about how consciousness works, how human life works best. “Spiritual tools” regardless of the traditions in which they are embedded are practices that create attitudes, attributes, and abilities that would otherwise not be elicited or called forth in our lives. “Spiritual discipline” is the use of those tools, practice of the practice. No religious tradition has a corner on the market but it is apparent that for many a religious narrative fused with a particular community is a kind of meta-tool that facilitates the use of all of the other tools. Belief in a naive way in the face value of the story lets one meditate or pray or act in a straight up way, as the tradition defines it. Otherwise you have to kind of talk yourself into using the tools, you come at them as it were through the back door. But clearly that works too. Spiritual tools are mean for eliciting self-transcendence which would otherwise remain latent and unexpressed in our genetic programs.

Whether formal or informal, we need some kind of community life with its loops of feedback and accountability to sustain ourselves on a spiritual path, a path of ongoing transformation. Others help us remember what we decided to practice and how. Once we have internalized the practice and made it habitual, use of the tools is reflexive. Then we transcend the boundaries of any community that must be defined by identifying labels or beliefs, we find community on the fly, as it comes, no longer requiring a secret handshake to ensure the bona fides of companions, knowing that any encounter is an opportunity for life-giving information or energy to flow.

For now, we limit community to our planet, our species. I don’t think that will be true at the end of this century.

The transformational process by which we bootstrap ourselves seems to be hardwired in our genes like the ability of water fleas to grow helmets. But it is not triggered unless something names it, trains it, and sustains it. I am suggesting that this might be something in the environment or it might be something in ourselves; the distinction is ultimately arbitrary.

Freedom can be defined in this context as the willingness to express the fullest range of our potential by choosing the situations that make it more likely that our best capabilities will be triggered. We do that by tending and nurturing probabilities, putting ourselves into situations that makes it more likely that we will be triggered the ways we want. Like creativity, we can’t control the process, but we can cultivate the circumstances in which it is likely to flower.

So attitudes and beliefs do matter. Our lives really are self-fulfilling prophecies.

The identity of organisms, human and other, is a hacker’s paradise of the twenty-first century. At first the varieties of human experience we invent will seem astonishing. Then they will become as commonplace as nuclear energy, as ho hum as colonizing the solar system. No doubt our designer progeny, looking to our monochromatic eyes like the colors of a rainbow, will consider us quaint, stuck as we seem to be in thinking that our lives are given, our options settled once and for all, our identities fixed like a photograph dripping in a dark room rather than a fluid digital canvas onto which to paint with a billion colors.

S. Eugene Poteat, President of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) is no fool. A senior CIA official for thirty years, now retired, Poteat was a scientific intelligence officer and program manager for special reconnaissance systems for the U-2, SR-71, and other reconnaissance vehicles. He received the CIA’s Medal of Merit and the NRO’s Meritorious Civilian Award.

As I say, no fool.

So I did a double take when I read Poteat’s words in the current edition of the Intelligencer, a Journal of U. S. Intelligence Studies. “Thirty years ago,” he wrote, “the Church and Pike Committees bought into the KGB perception management campaigns to discredit American intelligence and proceeded to limit the activities of the intelligence community …”Since the Church and Pike Committee hearings are probably not covered in high school history courses, let me remind younger readers that these were congressional committees convened to investigate egregious excesses by an intelligence community that had come to act with little or no external accountability.

The agency’s excesses included assassinations, coups d’etats, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements, covert action to influence the elections of friends and enemies alike, mind control experiments that sometimes led to murder, and other behaviors that caused lots of reasonable people to question the agency’s unlimited freedom to act without transparency or accountability. The excesses were not about how they gathered intelligence so policies could be set. The excesses were about policies devised and executed in a black box.

Poteat is saying that citizens concerned with that unrestrained behavior were deceived by the KGB.

So let me get my confession on the record: I was a victim of the KGB.

I naively bought into the notion that the wholesale use of journalists and media executives by the CIA, for example, written about by Carl Bernstein in Rolling Stone, was an impediment to a free press. I uncritically accepted the notion that administering chemicals, electric shocks, and prolonged isolation illegally to unwitting victims to test theories of behavior modification suggested that an agency that purportedly existed to “gather intelligence” was coloring a little outside the lines.

In the current climate of free-floating anxiety I would guess that Poteat’s revisionist characterization sounds right to a lot of people. Recent polls indicate that nearly half of those questioned believe the Bill of Rights should not extend to Moslems and a similar number think “the Bill of Rights goes too far.” It’s a no-brainer to substitute “terrorist dupe” for “Communist dupe” to designate people who object to egregious violations of civil and human rights in the name of fighting terror.

That’s the American mind-set in 2005. But it wasn’t always so. How did we get here?

During times of crisis or war, when liberties and constitutional rights come into conflict with the necessities of self-defense, it’s the liberties and rights that go. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and Japanese-Americans were herded into concentration camps during World War 2.

Those wars, however, were clearly defined wars and contrasted with periods of “peace.”

That distinction no longer applies. War and peace are indistinguishable. We live in a permanent state of war or preparation for war. As Orwell wrote, war is peace. Peace is war.

The wartime environment of World War 2 morphed seamlessly into a Cold War which lasted for 45 years. Levels of secrecy necessary during wartime (“loose lips sink ships”) were applied to a world no longer defined as Axis vs. Allies but as Communists vs. Free World. The Free World included American allies whose governments ranged from democratic to fascist. Alignment with American objectives was more important than ideology or behavior and we sponsored, trained, and supported death squads and counter-revolutionaries, training our proxies in assassination, torture, and sabotage.

That’s not speculation. That’s historical fact.

Several generations have now grown up in a bifurcated environment: above the line, information and media are manipulated to create a consensus, a reasonably coherent if fabricated narrative, for a population lacking access to the important facts. Below the line a variety of alternative interpretations are available in a compartmentalized way on a need-to-know basis and at various levels of clearance. We accept that multiple streams of alternative realities flow in layers and consider their flagrant contradictions a necessary consequence of national security. I’m not referring simply to secrecy and secrets but to the wholesale creation of varieties of historical narrative and their dissemination to serve varying interests. This is Babel squared, Babel at the level of conceptual thought, civil discourse and systems of belief, not merely different languages.

In addition, after World War 2 nuclear weapons made it impossible to fight a war to “total destruction” because of the “blowback” of assured mutual destruction. Wars like Korea or Viet Nam were fought within limits lest the confrontation escalate. So covert warfare waged by the CIA and other intelligence units became a preferred means of executing strategy. The CIA from the beginning was a covert military branch that helped to overthrow designated enemies or establish preferred governments in Iran, Greece, Italy, Guatemala, the Philippines, all early on. There were, of course, more to come.

A national security state predicated on a culture of secrecy, funded clandestinely and unaccountable to an electorate, inevitably evolved. During times of “democratic excesses” in the sixties, as the Bilderberg Conference called social action on behalf of greater equality and justice, a strategy of managing perception indeed evolved, a private and public partnership that continues to this day. Eisenhower called it the “military-industrial complex” when he left office and warned of its growing power.

He had no idea. What Ike feared, a tiny alien bursting out of the gut of the Cold War, is nothing compared to the monster with which we live.

In those bygone days, the FBI and CIA may not have officially shared information but they shared parallel strategies and they shared operational resources in the trenches where everything is murky. Distinctions between foreign and domestic enemies blurred. The FBI engaged in illegal surveillance and covert action like COINTELPRO which spied on domestic groups and destroyed political opponents through blackmail and other illegal means. Foreign entities that opposed our will were either Communists or allied with Communists; domestic activists who fought for change were … well, either Communists or allied with Communists.

It logically follows that citizens protesting the excesses of the CIA were not patriots who cared about the Constitution; they were victims of disinformation by the KGB.

After the Church and Pike Committees convened, congressional oversight of the intelligence community was allegedly tightened but oversight quickly evolved into partnership, protecting secrecy, mitigating transparency and accountability, and subverting any effort to restore a semblance of checks and balances. Nobody watches the watchers and the watchers and their partners profit.

Because the terrorist threat is defined vaguely, the conditions that justified an anti-Communist national security state are now used to justify an anti-terrorist national security state. Appropriate responses to a nebulous enemy range from invading nations unilaterally to gloves-off covert warfare that includes assassination and torture, The “war on drugs” in the nineties failed as a justification for the military machine so once terrorism was substituted for Communism it was dropped from propagandistic rhetoric, except when narco-terrorism is evoked as a subset of the terrorist threat. The war on drugs is “really,” we all know now, part of the war on terror.

People in power and authority, fused with the instruments of that power and authority, leveraging mass media concentrated in a dozen hands as a means of social control, can make terrorists of us all. It is simply a matter of naming and shaming, defining those who protest illegal and unconstitutional action as aiding or abetting terrorism or being terrorists themselves.

Unlike the seventies, however, new technologies serve as force multipliers for both state and non-state actors and amplify the power of the authorities to an exponential degree. The media filter continues to determine what is real for the American public and masks much of what happens away from our shores. As a CIA report said in October,1991:

The PAO (Public Affairs Office) [of the CIA] has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and TV network … this has helped turn some “intelligence failure” stories into “intelligence success” stories, and it has contributed to … countless others. In many instances we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold or even scrap stories.

I said in a recent interview with the Linux Journal, “The convergence of enabling technologies of intrusion, interception, and panoptic reach, combined with a sense of urgency about doing counter-terror and a clear mandate from the White House to do everything possible and seek forgiveness afterward rather than permission in advance has created a dire but often invisible set of threatening conditions.”

The enemy can be a splash of rhetoric on a blank page, a cloud of power obscuring morphing borders, anyone who colors outside the lines of a global military and economic network. The enemy must have significant organizational power; individuals and groups that are fragmented, weak or diffused are not a real threat. As during the Cold War, alignment distinguishes friend from foe, not ideology or behavior.

When assassination like outsourced torture is just another tool and trans-global supra-national entities and new technologies obliterate meaningful distinctions between foreign and domestic, then inevitably assassination will be used at home too when other strategies fail because “home” is not a place, home is where the heart is, wherever we find ourselves with a commitment, an investment, an interest. Although a presidential directive (PD 12333) officially prohibits assassination, it remained a viable option before 9/11 when, a reliable source tells me, the elimination of Saddam Hussein was officially authorized.

In the seventies, civil rights activists were disrupted, undermined and assassinated because they threatened the civil order with social revolution. Kennedy, Kennedy, King, Medgar Evers and Malcolm X all went down. The leadership of the viable left was decimated and the center shifted radically to the right, where it remains today.

Who on the right was assassinated? No one. After the leadership of the left was slaughtered, how did the world tilt? To the right. Yet even to suggest a pattern to those assassinations instead of believing them a collection of random acts as decreed by the thought police gets one branded a “conspiracy theorist,” a “fringe thinker,” or worse. It is not reaching a conclusion about conspiracy that gets one branded—merely raising the question in the face of suggestive evidence is sufficient.

COINTELPRO was not executed in isolation. J. Edgar Hoover’s hatred of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his rabid campaign to destroy him using FBI resources made Hoover at the least complicit in creating conditions that resulted in King’s murder.

Enabling communication and information technologies are today linked and mined to a degree unimaginable in the seventies. We don’t even have to intercept it all; we can make the information come to us. But those technologies are the platform of social control, not its ultimate end. They allow those in partnership with the state to focus their intentions more efficiently and at the same time conceal the lethality of their strategies.

A man like Gene Poteat certainly understands the consequences of habitual lying. He once told me how, as a radar expert at CIA, he was asked by John McCone, then CIA Director, to respond to Lyndon Johnson’s request for evaluation of an alleged attack in the Tonkin Gulf on American ships by North Vietnam. Poteat told McCone they could give him an answer in 48 hours but Johnson insisted on the next morning. Poteat said that was impossible. The next morning, without corroborating evidence, Johnson announced the attack and in effect declared war on North Vietnam. Subsequent analysis indicated that no attack took place.

Poteat asked McCone why Johnson did not let them do their job. “We could have discovered the truth,” he said.

Because the president didn’t want the truth, McCone said. He wanted to go to war.

So Poteat knows that secret action in a context that lacks accountability can lead to millions of deaths – without the KGB even getting involved.

In our time, the designated enemy is anyone who raises questions about the American Empire – its dynamics, its behaviors, its actions – and whose speech is likely to become actionable. Freedom of speech is a genius-level bleeder valve, restoring equilibrium to the body politic like a thermostat, tolerated so long as it is not a threat to those in power. If speech threatens to move people to action, however, people get whacked, both metaphorically and literally. In the 21st century, neutralization has a thousand means at its disposable.

Am I merely a victim of the KGB in the seventies and a global Islamist cabal today? I don’t think so. I fear I am a real victim, but of a state that has become its own god. And we are all victims of campaigns of disinformation.

“In many parts of the world,” Poteat concludes, “there is still a serious struggle to secure democracy and the rights of man.”

Amen, brother. Amen. But you seem unaware of the irony of those words in a world gone liquid and difficult to challenge, one in which it takes energy not to dismiss the cascading consequences of decades of covert extra-legal action, unilateral expansion, and empire building as if the world has no moral order, justice is one thing eating another, and words mean exclusively what we say they mean.

Those consequences in a moebius strip world where everything folds back into our own lives are not just “out there” but “in here,” in our souls, where the corrosive acid of self-deceit challenges the American belief that we are good or better or different. The cognitive dissonance increases and all the sex, scandals, and media events in the world may not be sufficient to distract the masses forever.

If our real history in all its many layers reveals who we are and how the world works in its ultimate reaches, let’s just say so. Then we can speak to ourselves as well as others with authenticity and integrity. We can stop pretending.

Yet … after such knowledge, what forgiveness? And what will we bequeath to our children if not a receipt for deceit, a model of habitual lying and might making right, democracy nothing but a cover story for doing what we do … because we can?

Words are used frequently today to mean exactly the opposite of what they mean.

So maybe we need to remind ourselves that sacrifice means … sacrifice.

To make a sacrifice means being willing to sacrifice ourselves. It means giving up our time, our energy, even our lives. It doesn’t have to be splashy. It can be as quiet as dedicating our lives to justice and truth and acts of compassion.

But it doesn’t mean sacrificing someone else. It means sacrificing ourselves. It means using ourselves all up. Mel Gibson had a hit showing images of Jesus being tortured to death and, say what you will about the movie, it certainly made the point that sacrifice means sacrifice.

Unfortunately many Christians take shelter in the comforting belief that because Jesus was murdered, they’re off the hook.

They tend to ignore less comforting words in the Christian scriptures that tell disciples they had better expect to endure what he endured, if their commitment has any meaning at all.

That’s not the free lunch many seem to want. Getting the goodies and sneaking through life without paying for them is “cheap grace,” as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it during World War II shortly before being executed for participating in a plot to kill Hitler.

Gary Webb, the courageous journalist who killed himself this week in Sacramento, is still very much on my mind. Speaking yesterday to his ex-wife intensified the pain of his loss.

He was never the same after they attacked him, she said. He never really recovered.

In other words, his decade-long assassination was in slo-mo, inch by slow inch. The courage and commitment that fueled his passion for justice and truth was battered over time by the refusal of establishment newspapers to acknowledge their mistakes or ever let him work again. Jayson Blair, Christopher Newton, Jack Kelley, and Janet Cooke could get work, but Gary Webb? Never.

And now, the New York Times, one of the papers that savaged Webb unfairly, reports that the Army National Guard has fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in the last two months and will offer new incentives, including enlistment bonuses of up to $15,000.

Now, I wouldn’t compare blood money like that to the sums we are told were paid to families of suicide bombers by “evil doers.” Who would suggest such a thing?

But I would note that the only cause we sincerely believe in is one for which we are willing to sacrifice ourselves or members of our families. Otherwise our noble words are nothing but lies.

The current war is noteworthy for the unanimity with which those ordering young people to fight and die in the Middle East refuse to go themselves or allow their children to go. The double-take by the congressman in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 comes to mind.

That is a Huge Hole at the heart of the rhetoric about this war and why we are fighting it. Politicians speak of sacrifice but never send their own to die and never go themselves.

Instead, they ask others to die for the Empire. And we see through it.

Do we wonder, then, why fewer people are enlisting, even for such a handsome bounty obviously intended as a signing bonus for the poor? Because the rich will never risk death for a pittance like that.

Why should they? The rich are doing quite well. The Wall Street Journal wrote this week of the pain of the super-wealthy who own merely hundred-foot yachts. They used to be real trophies but now they’re dwarfed by bigger boats. That’s because the rich have grown richer, much much richer, as the current administration has taken care of its “base.”

Well, someone has to get rich when times are good. That NY Times article also notes that the head of the National Guard Bureau, Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, said he needed $20 billion to replace arms and equipment destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan or left there for other units to use.

Twenty billion dollars means a lot of profit. That can buy some really big boats.

“We’re in a more difficult recruiting environment, period,” General Blum complained, noting that rising death tolls had an impact.

But don’t look for the sons and daughters of those beating the drums of war to volunteer anytime soon. Bonuses are up this year on Wall Street (“Honey, buy the Lexus,” said the headline), Paul Allen is building a 500-foot yacht the size of a small cruiser, and closely-held Bechtel continues to sacrifice itself for the good of the world.

Words used to have meanings. But propaganda sure works. And death by inches is just as effective as dioxin in the soup or a bullet in the head.