[back] False Memory Syndrome
CIA CONNECTIONS TO THE MIND CONTROL CULTS
Excerpts from Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A. By Alex Constantine
Portland, OR : Feral House, 1995
Chapter Three THE FALSE MEMORY HOAX
Part I:
CIA CONNECTIONS TO THE MIND CONTROL CULTS
Swiss newspapers described the carnage inside the charred
farmhouse as a "wax museum of death." Within hours, 27 other
members of the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple were found
dead at chalets in Granges, Switzerland and Morin Heights,
Quebec. Luc Jouret, the Temple's grand master, the London Times
reported, "espoused a hybrid religion that owed more to Umberto
Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum than to any bible. His followers
called themselves 'knights of Christ.' The crusading codes of
the Knights Templar, the rose-and-cross symbolism of the
medieval Rosicrucian Order, Nazi occultism and new age mysticism
were joined together into a mumbo-jumbo mishmash that seemed
more designed for extracting money from disciples than saving
souls."
Jouret, born in the Belgian Congo in 1947, set out in
youth as a mystic with communist leanings, but his politics
apparently swung full circle. He has since been linked to a
clutch of neo-Nazis responsible for a string of bombings in
Canada. He told friends that he had once served with a unit of
Belgium paratroopers.
French-Canadian journalist Pierre Tourangeau investigated
the sect for two years. A few days after the mass murder, he
reported that the sect was financed by the proceeds of
gun-running to Europe and South America. Simultaneously, Radio
Canada announced that Jouret's Templars earned hundreds of
millions of dollars laundering the profits through the infamous
Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), closed by
authorities worldwide in 1991. Montreal's La Presse observed:
"each new piece of information only thickens the mystery"--but
the combination of international arms smuggling and BCCI
presented a familiar enough picture of CIA sedition. The
Manhattan D.A. who closed the American branch announced that 16
witnesses had died in the course of investigating the bank's
entanglements in covert operations of the CIA, arms smuggling to
Iraq, money laundering and child prostitution.
The average coffee table would crumple under the weighty
BCCI Book of the Dead. Journalist Danny Cassalaro and Vince
Foster appear in it--grim antecedents to the Solar Temple
killings. The cult's connection to BCCI (reported in Europe but
filtered from American newspaper accounts) fed speculation among
Canadian journalists that followers of Jouret were killed to bury
public disclosures of gun-running and money laundering.
But the fraternizing of America's national security elite
and the cults did not begin in Cheiry, Switzerland. Jouret's
Order of the Solar Temple was but the latest incarnation of mind
control operations organized and overseen by the CIA and
Department of Defense.
In a sense, we are in the same ethical
and moral dilemma as the physicists in the days
prior to the Manhattan Project. Those of us who
work in this field see a developing potential for
a nearly total control of human emotional status.
-- Dr. Wayne Evans
_U.S. Army Institute
of Environmental Medicine_
Scientists in the CIA's mind control fraternity lead
double lives. Many are highly respected, but if the truth were
known they would be deafened by the public outcry and drummed out
of their respective academic haunts.
Martin T. Orne, for example, a senior CIA/Navy
researcher, is based at the University of Pennsylvania's
Experimental Psychiatry Laboratory. He is also an original member
of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's advisory board, a
tightly-drawn coterie of psychiatrists, many with backgrounds in
CIA mind control experimentation in its myriad forms. The
Foundation is dedicated to denying the existence of cult mind
control and child abuse. It's primary pursuit is the castigation
of survivors and therapists for fabricating accusations of ritual
abuse.
Dismissing cult abuse as hysteria or false memory, a
common defense strategy, may relieve parents of preschool
children. In a small percentage of cult abuse cases it's possible
that children may be led to believe they've been victimized.
But the CIA and its cover organizations have a vested
interest in blowing smoke at the cult underground because the
worlds of CIA mind control and many cults merge inextricably. The
drum beat of "false accusations" from the media is taken up by
paid operatives like Dr. Orne and the False Memory Syndrome
Foundation to conceal the crimes of the Agency.
Orne's forays into hypno-programming were financed in the
1960s by the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA cover at Cornell
University and the underwriter of many of the formative mind
control experiments conducted in the U.S. and abroad, including
the gruesome brainwashing and remote mind control experiments of
D. Ewen Cameron at Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute. Research
specialties of the CIA's black psychiatrists included
electroshock lobotomies, drugging agents, incapacitants,
hypnosis, sleep deprivation and radio control of the brain, among
hundreds of sub-projects.
The secondary source of funding for Dr. Orne's work in
hypnotic suggestion and dissolution of memory is eerie in the
cult child abuse context. The voluminous files of John Marks in
Washington, D.C. (139 boxes obtained under FOIA, to be exact,
two-fifths of which document CIA interest in the occult) include
an Agency report itemizing a $30,000 grant to Orne from Human
Ecology, and another $30,000 from Boston's Scientific Engineering
Institute (SEI)--another CIA funding cover, founded by Edwin
Land of the Polaroid Corporation (and supervision of the U-2 spy
plane escapades). This was the year that the CIA's Office of
Research and Development (ORD) geared up a study of
parapsychology and the occult. The investigation, dubbed Project
OFTEN-CHICKWIT, gave rise to the establishment of a social
"laboratory" by SEI scientists at the University of South
Carolina--a college class in black witchcraft, demonology and
voodoo.
Dr. Orne, with SEI funding, marked out his own mind
control corner at the University of Pennsylvania in the early
1960s. He does not publicize his role as CIA psychiatrist. He
denies it, very plausibly. In a letter to Dr. Orne, Marks once
reminded him that he'd disavowed knowledge of his participation
in one mind-wrecking experimental sub-project. Orne later
recanted, admitting that he'd been aware of the true source of
funding all along.
Among psychiatrists in the CIA's mind control fraternity,
Orne ranks among the most venerable. He once boasted to Marks
that he was routinely briefed on all significant CIA behavior
modification experiments: "Why would they come to him," Martin
Cannon muses in The Controllers, which links UFO abductions to
secret military research veiled by screen memories of "alien"
abduction, "unless Orne had a high security clearance and worked
extensively with the intelligence services?"
To supplement his CIA income, the influential Dr. Orne
has been the donee of grants from the Office of Naval Research
and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. "I should like
to hear," Cannon says, "what innocent explanation, if any, the
Air Force has to offer to explain their interest in post-hypnotic
amnesia."
According to Army records, Orne's stomping grounds, Penn
U., was a bee-hive of secret experiments in the Vietnam War
period. The Pentagon and CIA--under the auspices of ORD's Steve
Aldrich, a doyen of occult and parapsychological studies--
conferred the Agency's most lucrative research award upon the
University of Pennsylvania to study the effects of 16
newly-concocted biochemical warfare agents on humans, including
choking, blistering and vomiting agents, toxins, poison gas and
incapacitating chemicals. The tests were abruptly halted in 1972
when the prison's medical lab burned to the ground.
Testimony before the 1977 Church Committee's probe of the
CIA hinted that, as of 1963, the scientific squalor of the CIA's
mind control regimen, code-named MKULTRA, had abandoned military
and academic laboratories, fearing exposure, and mushroomed in
cities across the country. Confirmation arrived in 1980 when
Joseph Holsinger, an aide to late Congressman Leo Ryan (who was
murdered by a death squad at Jonestown) exposed the formation of
eccentric religious cults by the CIA. Holsinger made the
allegation at a colloquium of psychologists in San Francisco on
"Psychosocial Implications of the Jonestown Phenomenon."
Holsinger maintained that a CIA rear-support base had been in
collusion with Jones to perform medical and mind control
experiments at People's Temple. The former Congressional aide
cited an essay he'd received in the mail, "The Penal Colony,"
written by a Berkeley psychologist. The author had emphasized:
Rather than terminating MKULTRA, THE CIA SHIFTED ITS PROGRAMS
FROM PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS TO PRIVATE CULT GROUPS, including the
People's Temple.
Jonestown had its grey eminence in Dr. Lawrence Laird
Layton of the University of California at Berkeley, formerly a
chemist for the Manhattan Project and head of the Army's chemical
warfare research division in the early 1950s. (Larry Layton, his
son, led the death squad that murdered Congressman Leo Ryan,
who'd arrived at Guyana to investigate the cult.) Michael Meiers,
author of Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?, scavenged for
information on the People's Temple for six years, concluding:
"The Jonestown experiment was conceived by Dr. Layton, staffed by
Dr. Layton and financed by Dr. Layton. It was as much his project
as it was Jim Jones'. Though it was essential for him to remain
in the background for security reasons, Dr. Layton maintained
contact with and even control of the experiment through his wife
and children." The African-American cult had at its core a
Caucasian inner-council, composed of Dr. Layton's family and
in-laws.
The press was blind to obvious CIA connections, but
survivors of the carnage in Guyana followed the leads and
maintained that Jim Jones was "an employee, servant, agent or
operative of the Central Intelligence Agency" from 1963--the
year the Agency turned to cult cut-outs to conceal MKULTRA mind
control activities--until 1978. In October 1981 the survivors of
Jonestown filed a $63 million lawsuit against Secretary of State
Cyrus Vance and Stansfield Turner, former director of the CIA,
currently a teacher at the University of Maryland and a director
of the Monsanto Corporation. The suit, filed in U.S. district
court in San Francisco, accused Turner of conspiring with Agency
operatives to "enhance the economic and political powers of James
Warren Jones," and of conducting "mind control and drug
experimentation" on the Temple flock.
The suit was dismissed four months later for "failure to
prosecute timely." All requests for an appeal were denied.
Ligatures of the CIA clung to the cults. Much of the
violence that has since exploded across the front pages was
incited by CIA academics at leading universities.
Small wonder, then, that Ted Goertzel, director of the
Forum for Policy Research at Rutgers, which maintains a symbiosis
with the CIA despite media exposure, should write that the most
susceptible victims of "cryptomnesia" (a synonym for false
memories) believe "in conspiracies, including the JFK
assassination, AIDS conspiracies, as well as the UFO cover-up."
The problem, Goertzel says, "may have its origins in early
childhood," and is accompanied by "feelings of anomie and anxiety
that make the individual more likely to construct false memories
out of information stored in the unconscious mind."
This side of gilded rationalizations, the CIA's links to
the cults are no manifestation of "cryptomnesia."
Like Jonestown, the Symbionese Liberation Army was a mind
control creation unleashed by the Agency. The late political
researcher Mae Brussell, whose study of The Firm commenced in
1963 after the assassination of John Kennedy, wrote in 1974 that
the rabid guerrilla band "consisted predominantly of CIA agents
and police informers." This unsavory group was, Brussell
insisted, "an extension of psychological experimentation
projects, connected to Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park."
(She went on to lament that "many of the current rash of
'senseless killings,' 'massacres,' and 'zombie-type murders' are
committed by individuals who have been in Army hospitals, mental
hospitals or prison hospitals, where their heads have been
literally taken over surgically to create terror in the
community.")
Evidence that the CIA conceived and directed the SLA was
obvious. The SLA leadership was trained by Colston Westbrook, a
Pennsylvania native. Westbrook was a veteran of the CIA's
murderous PHOENIX Program in South Vietnam, where he trained
terrorist cadres and death squads. In 1969 he took a job as an
administrator of Pacific Architects and Engineers, a CIA
proprietary in Southern California. Three of Westbrook's foot
soldiers, Emily and William Harris and Angela Atwood (a former
police intelligence informer), had been students of the College
of Foreign Affairs, a CIA cover at the University of Indiana.
Even the SLA symbol, a seven-headed cobra, had been adopted by
the OSS (America's wartime intelligence agency) and CIA to
designate precepts of brainwashing.
When the smoke cleared at SLA headquarters in L.A., Dr.
Martin Orne was called upon to examine Patricia Hearst in
preparation for trial. The government charged that she had
participated voluntarily in the SLA's gun-toting crime spree.
Orne's was a foregone conclusion--he sided with the government.
His opinion was shared by two other psychiatrists called to
appraise Ms. Hearst's state of mind, Robert Jay Lifton and Louis
Jolyon West. Dr. Lifton was a co-founder of the aforementioned
Human Ecology Fund. The CIA contractor that showered Orne with
research grants in the 1960s. Dr. West is one of the CIA's most
notorious mind control specialists, currently director of UCLA's
Neuropsychiatric Institute. It was West who brought a score of
mind control psychiatrists of the ultra-right political stripe to
the UCLA campus.
Drs. Orne, Lifton and West unanimously agreed that Patty
Hearst had been "persuasively coerced" to join the SLA. She had
been put through a grueling thought reform regimen. She'd been
isolated and sensory deprived, raped, humiliated, badgered,
politically indoctrinated with a surrealistic mutation of Third
World Marxism. Ms. Hearst was only allowed human companionship
when she exhibited signs of submission. Orne and his colleagues
assured that attention was narrowed to their psychologizing,
conveniently rendering evidence of CIA collusion extraneous to
consideration by the jury.
Another psychiatrist called to testify at the trial of
"Tania" surfaced with Dr. Orne in 1991 on the board of the False
Memory Syndrome Foundation. (The FMSF board is almost exclusively
composed of former CIA and military doctors currently employed by
major universities. None have backgrounds in ritual abuse--their
common interest is behavior modification. Dr. Margaret Singer, a
retired Berkeley Ph.D., studied repatriated prisoners-of-war
returning from the Korean War at the Walter Reed Army Institute
of Research in Maryland (1952-58).
Singer turned up in 1982 on the book jacket of Raven--
the CIA's code-name for Jim Jones--by San Francisco Examiner
reporters Tim Reiterman and John Jacobs, a thoroughly-researched
account of the People's Temple that completely side-steps CIA
involvement. Co-author John Jacobs was supposedly one of the
country's leading authorities on CIA mind control, a subject he
studied at length for a series published by the Washington Post.
Reiterman had been the Examiner reporter on the Patricia Hearst
beat. Yet both writers managed to avoid obvious intelligence
connections. Dr. Singer commended the book as "the definitive
psychohistory of Jim Jones." Raven, she opined, conveyed "the
essence of psychological and social processes that Jim Jones, the
ultimate manipulator, set in motion." The true "manipulators," of
course, were operatives of the CIA, and the public disinformation
gambit lauded by Dr. Singer was, according to Meiers, in tune
with "a concerted attempt to suppress information, stifle
investigations, censor writers and manipulate public
information."
The CIA and Pentagon have quietly organized and
influenced a long line of mind control cults, among them:
The Riverside Lodge of the Ordo Templis Orientis: Also
known as The Solar Lodge of the OTO, which followed the teachings
of cult messiah Aleister Crowley, whose fixed gaze on the astral
equinox resulted in instructions from his deities to form a
religious order. Crowley, high priest of the OTO and a British
intelligence agent, gave Winifred T. Smith a charter to open an
OTO lodge in Pasadena. The high priest of the lodge was Jack
Parsons, a rocket expert and founder of the California Institute
of Technology. Parsons, who took the oath of the anti-Christ in
1949, contributed to the design of the Pentagon under subsequent
CIA director John J. McCloy. He was killed in a still unexplained
laboratory explosion. There is a crater on the moon named after
him.
The OTO's Solar Lodge in San Bernardino was presided over
by Georgina "Jean" Brayton, the daughter of a ranking Air Force
officer in the 1960s. The cult subscribed to a grim, apocalyptic
view of the world, and like Charles Manson believed that race
wars would precipitate the Big Cataclysm. In the Faustian Los
Angeles underworld, the lodge was known for its indulgence in
sadomasochism, drug dealing, blood drinking, child molestation
and murder.
Candace Reos, a former member of the lodge, was deposed
by Riverside police in 1969. Reos said that Brayton controlled
the thinking of all cult members. One poor soul, she said, was
ordered to curb his sexual urges by cutting his wrists every time
he was aroused. Mrs. Reos told police, according to the report,
that when she became pregnant, Georgina was angry and told her
that she would have to condition herself to hate her child. Reos
told police that children of the cult's 43 adult members were
secluded from their parents and received "training" that took on
"very severe tones."
"There was a lot of spanking involved," she said, "a lot
of heavy criticism. There was a lot of enclosed in dark rooms."
The teachers, she added. "left welts."
If so ordered, adult cultists would beat their children.
According to a Riverside County Sheriff's report, a six
year-old child burned the group's school house to the ground. The
boy was punished by solitary confinement in a locked shipping
crate left in the desert, where the average temperature was 110
degrees, for two months. The boy was chained to a metal plate.
When police freed him, they were nauseated by the
suffocating stench of excrement. The child was smothered in flies
swarming from a tin-can toilet.
The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Movement: In 1985 the Portland
Oregonian published a 36-part, book-length series linking the
cult to opium trafficking, prostitution, money laundering, arson,
slave labor, mass poisonings, illegal wiretaps and the
stockpiling of guns and biochemical warfare weapons. The
year-long Oregonian investigation revealed cult ties to
CIA-trained mercenaries in El Salvador and the Far East.
Domestically, Rajneesh's secret police force worked with Agency
operatives.
Finders: On February 7, 1987 Customs agents raided a
child-porn ring in Tallahasee, Florida. Eight suspects and six
children were taken into custody. The children, according to a
Customs Department memo, behaved "like animals in a public park,"
and "were not aware of the function and purpose of telephones,
televisions and toilets."
The children told police that they were forced to live
outdoors and were given food only as a reward. A check on the
backgrounds of the adults turned up a police report, "specific in
describing 'bloody rituals' and sex orgies involving children,
and an as-yet unsolved murder." Customs agents searched a cult
safe house and discovered a computer room and documents recording
"high-tech" bank transfers, explosives, and a set of instructions
advising cult members on moving children through jurisdictions
around the country. One photographic album found in the house
featured the execution and disembowelment of goats, and
snapshots, according to a Customs report, of "adults and children
dressed in white sheets participating in a bloody ritual."
An American passport was found. The investigating agents
contacted the State Department and were advised to "terminate
further investigation."
They investigated anyway, reporting that "the CIA made
contact and admitted to owning the Finders ... as a front for a
domestic training organization, but that it had 'gone bad.'" The
late wife of Marion David Pettie, the cult's leader, had worked
for the Agency, and his son had been an employee of Air America,
the heroin-riddled CIA proprietary. Yet Pettie denied to a
reporter for U.S. News & World Report any connection to the Firm.
Police in Washington refused to comment. Officials of the CIA
dismissed as "hogwash" allegations of any connection to the
Finders cult.
MOVE: On May 13, 1985 MOVE's Philadelphia headquarters
was firebombed by local police. Not only did the fire consume the
cult's home--it devastated the entire neighborhood, leaving 11
dead and 250 homeless. The group was cofounded by Vince
Leapheart, aka John Africa, a Korean veteran. His intellectual
mentor and source of funding was Donald Glassey, a lecturer at
the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work. Glassey
was an admitted police "informant," but conducted himself like a
paid provocateur. He purchased weapons for the cult with cash
drawn from city coffers. John Africa, the cult's titular head,
claimed to be a messiah, and like Jim Jones to have Godly
"healing" powers and "total control" over his followers.
O.T.A.: The Order of the Temple of Astarte in Pasadena,
California is a "hermetic" occult organization that practices
"Magick in the Western Tradition." The cult is led by Fraters
Khenemel, a police officer, and Aleyin, a veteran Green Beret.
The cult's everyday language is unusual for a mystical order--
one group schedule is laden with words like "operation,"
"sixteen-thirty hours," and "travel orders." Demonology is among
the OTA's primary occult interests.
The police connection recalls the statement of Louis
Tackwood, the former LAPD provocateur whose revelations of secret
police subterfuge set off a political tempest in Los Angeles in
1973. "You don't know," he told journalist Donald Freed, "but
there's a devil worship cult in Pasadena. Actually in Altadena."
Tackwood alleged that the cultists were "on the LAPD payroll."
The CIA and Pentagon cooperate in the creation of cults.
To be sure, the Association of National Security Alumni, a public
interest veterans group opposed to covert operations, considers
it a "primary issue of concern" that the Department of Defense
has a "perceived role in satanic cult activities, which qualify
in and of themselves as very damaging exercises in mind control
and behavioral modification."
It is beginning to dawn on the psychiatric community at
large that the CIA's mind control clique is a menace reminiscent
of Nazi medical experimentation. In 1993, Dr. Corydon Hammond, a
professor at the University of Utah's School of Medicine,
conducted a seminar on federally-funded mind control experiments.
Topics covered by Hammond included brainwashing, post-hypnotic
programming and the induction of multiple personalities by the
CIA. Hammond contended that the cult underground has roots in
Nazi Germany, and that the CIA's cult mind control techniques
were based upon those of Nazi scientists recruited by the CIA for
Cold Warfare. (Researcher Lenny Lapon estimates in Mass Murderers
in White Coats that 5,000 Nazis resettled in the U.S. after WW
II.) Hammond was forced to drop this line of inquiry by
professional ridicule, especially from the CIA's False Memory
Syndrome Foundation, and a barrage of death threats. At a recent
regional conference on ritual child abuse, he regretted that he
could no longer speak on the theme of government mind control.
The psychological community is waking to the threat in
its ranks, to judge by APA surveys and personal communications
with ranking members of the mental health field, but the world at
large remains in the dark. The "mass hysteria" and "false memory"
bromides disseminated by the establishment press obscure federal
and academic connections to the mind control cults, which are
defended largely by organized pedophiles, cultists and hired guns
of psychiatry. An ambitious disinformation gambit has led the
world at large to side with cultists operating under federal
protection. As at Jonestown and Chiery, Switzerland, the
denouement of cult activity often ends in the destruction of all
witnesses. This cycle of abuse and murder can only be ended by
full public awareness of the federal mind control initiative.
Part: II
The CIA, THE FALSE MEMORY SYNDROME FOUNDATION AND THE POLITICS
OF RITUAL ABUSE
The conference session bears a passing resemblance to a
12-Step meeting. Assembled in a Portland religious retreat,
members of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), all
accused of child abuse, are encouraged to unload their anguish.
Only women take the stage (they leave reporters with a
sympathetic impression--men stigmatized by child abuse do not).
Pamela Freyd, a Foundation founder, assures these victims of
pernicious therapies they are not alone. The Foundation's office
in Philadelphia, she says, takes 60 calls on a typical day from
distraught adults hounded by their own confused children, rogue
therapists and sensation-seeking pack journalists.
The number of dues-paying members (each contributes $100
a year) varies according to the source. The group reported in
January 1993 that 1,200 families had made contact in its first
year of operation. The same month, the San Jose Mercury News
declared flatly that "nearly 3,000 families" from across the
country had been recruited. The FMSF now claims 5,000 families.
Time magazine raised the figure to "7,000 individuals and
families who have sought assistance."
The Foundation's distinctive handling of statistics is
incessant. In April of this year the FMSF claimed 12,000 families
have been strained by false child abuse allegations. A month
later, the figure dropped to "9,500 U.S. families." Yet the
Foundation prides itself on accuracy. One FMSF newsletter advises
members to insist the media "report accurate information. The
rumors and misinformation surrounding the false accusations based
on recovery of repressed memories are shocking." The same author
regrets that "65% of accusations of abuse are now
unsubstantiated, a whopping jump from 35% in 1976." This figure,
once gleefully disseminated by such pedophile defense groups as
NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) and VOCAL
(Victims of Child Abuse Laws) was debunked years ago. It was
fabricated by Douglas Besherov of the American Enterprise
Institute, a hard right-wing propaganda factory fueled by the
Olin Foundation, a CIA funding cover. (Christian conservatives
are often accused of propagating ritual abuse "hysteria," yet in
the 1992 presidential election the para-conservative wing of the
Republican Party slipped into its platform a strategy to put an
end to investigations of child abuse.)
The FMSF selectively ignores child abuse data that
disagrees with their own. Judith Herman, author of Trauma and
Recovery, reported in the Harvard Mental Health Letter that false
abuse allegations by children "are rare, in the range of 2-8% of
reported cases. False retractions of true complaints are far more
common, especially when the victim is not sufficiently protected
after disclosure and therefore succumbs to intimidation by the
perpetrator or other family members who feel that they must
preserve secrecy."
Other statistics shunned by the False Memory Syndrome
Foundation include a survey presented at a 1992 psychiatric
conference that found that a full 88% of all therapists in a
large sampling consider ritual child abuse to be a very real
social problem with devastating emotional effects. Another: In
1990 the State University of New York at Buffalo polled a
national sampling of clinical psychologists on ritual abuse.
About 800 psychologists--a third of the poll--were aware of
treating at least one case. Only 5% of all child abuse cases ever
enter the courtroom--half of these end with the child in the
custody of the abusive parent..
The recovered memory debate was discussed at a 1993
conference on multiple personality disorder. Richard Lowenstein,
a psychiatrist from the University of Maryland Medical School,
argued that the Foundation is "media-directed, dedicated to
putting out disinformation."
Other conference participants contemplated funding
sources and "possible CIA connections."
The Devil Denuded
The CIA, in fact, has several designates on the FMSF
advisory board. They have in common backgrounds in mind control
experimentation. Their very presence on the board, and their
peculiar backgrounds, reveal some heavily obscured facts about
ritual child abuse.
Martin T. Orne, a senior CIA researcher, is an original
board member of the Foundation, and a psychiatrist at the
University of Pennsylvania's Experimental Psychiatry Lab in
Philadelphia. In 1962 his forays into hypno-programming (the
elicitation of "anti-social" behavior, dissolving memory and
other mind-subduing techniques) were financed by a CIA front at
Cornell University. He was also funded by Boston's Scientific
Engineering Institute, another front, and a clearinghouse for the
Agency's investigation of the occult.
The CIA and Pentagon have formed a partnership in the
creation of cults. To be sure, the Association of National
Security Alumni, a public interest veterans group opposed to
clandestine ops, considers it a "primary issue of concern" that
the Department of Defense has a "perceived role in satanic cult
activities, which qualify in and of themselves as very damaging
exercises in mind control."
The smoothing over of the national security state's cult
connections is handled by academic "experts."
A forerunner of the Foundation is based in Buffalo, New
York, the Committee for Scientific Examination of Religion, best
known for the publication of Satanism in America: How the Devil
Got More Than His Due, widely considered to be a legitimate
study. The authors turn up their noses to ritual abuse,
dismissing the hundreds of reports around the country as mass
"hysteria." Cult researcher Carl Raschke reported in a March,
1991 article that he coincidentally met Hudson Frew, a Satanism
in America co-author, at a Berkeley bookstore. "Frew was wearing
a five-pointed star, or pentagram, the symbol of witchcraft and
earth magic," Raschke says. Shawn Carlson, a contributor to the
book, is identified by the media as a "physicist." Yet he runs
the Gaia Press in El Cerrito, California, a New Age publishing
house with an emphasis on witchcraft and occultic lore. Carlson
is also a "scientific and technical consultant" to the Committee
for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal" (a
promoter of the "false memory" theory of ritual abuse and UFO
abductions), publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer.
The FMS Foundation is no less eccentric. Within two years
of its founding, it was clear that the Foundation leadership was
far from disinterested on the workings of childhood memory, and
concealed a secret sexual and political agenda.
FMSF founder Ralph Underwager, director of the Institute
of Psychological Therapies in Minnesota, was forced to resign in
1993. Underwager (a former Lutheran pastor) and his wife Hollida
Wakefield publish a journal, Issues in Child Abuse Allegations,
written by and for child abuse "skeptics." His departure from the
False Memory Syndrome Foundation was hastened by a remark in an
interview, appearing in an Amsterdam journal for pedophiles, that
it was "God's Will" adults engage in sex with children. (His wife
Hollida remained on the Foundation's board after he left.) As it
happens, holy dispensation for pedophiles is the exact credo of
the Children of God cult. It was fitting, then, when Underwager
filed an affidavit on behalf of cult members tried in France in
1992, insisting that the accused were positively "not guilty of
abuse upon children." In the interview, he prevailed upon
pedophiles everywhere to shed stigmatization as "wicked and
reprehensible" users of children.
In keeping with the Foundation's creative use of
statistics, Dr. Underwager told a group of British reporters in
1994 that "scientific evidence" proved 60% of all women molested
as children believed the experience was "good for them."
Dr. Underwager invariably sides with the defense. His
grandiloquent orations have graced courtrooms around the world,
often by satellite. Defense lawyers for Woody Allen turned to
him, he boasts, when Mia Farrow accused her estranged husband of
molesting their seven year-old daughter. Underwager is a virtual
icon to the Irish Catholic lobby in Dublin, which raised its
hoary hackles against a child abuse prevention program in the
Irish Republic. He was, until his advocacy of pedophila tarnished
an otherwise glittering reputation, widely quoted in the press,
dismissing ritual child abuse as a hysterical aberration.
He is the world's foremost authority on false memory, but
in the courtroom he is repeatedly exposed as a charlatan. In
1988, a trial court decision in New York State held that Dr.
Underwager was "not qualified to render any opinion as to whether
or not (the victim) was sexually molested." In 1990 his testimony
on memory was ruled improper "in the absence of any evidence that
the results of Underwager's work had been accepted in the
scientific community." And In Minnesota a judge ruled that
Underwager's theories on "learned memory" were the same as
"having an expert tell the jury that (the victim) was not telling
the truth."
Peter and Pamela Freyd, executive directors of the
Foundation, joined forces with Underwager in 1991, and their
story is equally wretched. Jennifer Freyd, their daughter, a
professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, openly
leveled accusations of abuse against her parents at an August
1993 mental health conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
"My family of origin was troubled in many observable
ways, " she said. "I refer to the things that were never
'forgotten' and 'recovered,' but to things that we all knew
about." She gave her father's alcoholism as an example. "During
my childhood, my father sometimes discussed his own experiences
of being sexually abused as an 11 year-old boy, and called
himself a 'kept boy.'" Peter Freyd graduated to male prostitution
as an adolescent.
At the age of 13, Jennifer Freyd composed a poem about
her father's nocturnal visits:
I am caught in a web,
A web of deep, deep terror.
she wrote. The diaries of her youth chronicle the "reactions and
feelings (guilt, shame and terror) of a troubled girl and young
woman. My parents oscillated between denying these symptoms and
feelings ... to using knowledge of these same symptoms and
feelings to discredit me."
"My father," she says, "told various people that I was
brain damaged." The accusation was unlikely. At the time,
Jennifer Freyd was a graduate student on a National Science
Foundation fellowship. She has taught at Cornell and received
numerous research awards. The "brain damage" apologia did not
wash. Her mother suggested that Jennifer's memories were
"confabulations," and faulted therapeutic intervention. Pamela
Freyd turned to her own psychiatrist, Dr. Harold Lief, currently
an advisory board member of the Foundation, to diagnose Jennifer.
"He explained to me that he did not believe I was
abused," Jennifer recalls. Dr. Lief's diagnosis was based on his
belief that Peter Freyd's fantasies were strictly "homoerotic."
Of course, his daughter furrows a brow at the assumption that
homoerotic fantasies or a heterosexual marriage exclude the
possibility of child molestation. Lief's skewed logic is a
trademark of the Foundation.
He is a close colleague of the CIA's Martin Orne. Dr.
Lief, a former major in the Army medical corps, joined the
University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1968, the peak of
federally-funded behavioral modification experiments at
Holmesburg Prison. Dr. Orne consulted with him on several studies
in hypnotic programming. His academic writing reveals a peculiar
range of professional interests, including "Orgasm in the
Postoperative Transsexual" for Archives of Sexual Behavior, and
an exploration of the possibility of life after death for a
journal on mental diseases edited by Foundation fellow Paul
McHugh. Lief is a director of the Center for Sexuality and
Religion, past president of the Sex Information and Education
Council.
And an original board member of the False Memory Syndrome
Foundation. Two others, Jon Baron from Penn U. and Ray Hyman (an
executive editor of the aforementioned Skeptical Inquirer), a
professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, resigned
from the board after Jennifer Freyd went public with her account
of childhood abuse, and the facetious attempts of her parents and
their therapist to discredit her. They were replaced by David
Dinges, co-director--with the ubiquitous Martin Orne--of the
Unit for Experimental Psychiatry at the University of
Pennsylvania.
"At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered
'false,'" Jennifer says, "and my alcoholic father's memory is
considered rational and sane." She does not, after all, remember
impossible abuses: "I remember incest in my father's house....
My first memories came when I was at home a few hours after my
second session with my therapist, a licensed clinical
psychologist working within an established group in a large and
respected medical clinic.
"During that second visit to my therapist's office, I
expressed great anxiety about the upcoming holiday visit from my
parents. My therapist asked about half way into the session,
whether I had ever been sexually abused. I was immediately thrown
into a strange state. No one had ever asked me such a question. I
responded, 'no, but...' I went home and within a few hours I was
shaking uncontrollably, overwhelmed with intense and terrible
flashbacks." Jennifer asks herself why her parents are believed.
"In the end, is it precisely because I was abused that I am to be
discredited despite my personal and professional success?"
Pamela Freyd published an open letter defending her
husband in Ralph Underwager's Issues in Child Abuse Accusations
in 1991. It was reprinted in Confabulations, a book published a
year later. Laced with lubricious sentiment, the book bemoans the
"destruction of families" brought on by false child abuse
accusations, and maligns "cult-like" support groups and
feminists, or "lesbian cults." Executive director Freyd often
refers to the feminist groups that have taken up the cause of
child abuse survivors as "lesbians," after the bizarre Dr.
Underwager, who claims, "these women may be jealous that males
are able to love each other, be comrades, friends, be close,
intimate."
Pamela Freyd's account of the family history, Jennifer
insists, is patently false. In an electronic message from her
father, he openly acknowledged that in his version of the story
"fictional elements were deliberately inserted."
"'Fictional' is rather an astounding choice of words,"
Jennifer observed at the Ann Arbor conference. The article
written by her parents contends that Jennifer was denied tenure
at another university due to a lack of published research. "In
fact," Jennifer counters, "I moved to the University of Oregon in
1987, just four years after receiving my Ph.D. to accept a
tenured position as associate professor in the psychology
department, one of the world's best psychology departments.... My
mother sent the Jane Doe article to my colleagues during my
promotion year--that is, the year my case for promotion to full
professor was being considered. I was absolutely mortified to
learn of this violation of my privacy and this violation of
truth."
Manipulative tactics are another Foundation imprimatur.
Lana Alexander, editor of a newsletter for survivors of child
sexual abuse, observes that "many people view the false memory
syndrome theory as a calculated defense strategy developed by
perpetrators and the lawyers and expert witnesses who defend
them."
A legitimizing barrage of stories in the press has shaped
public opinion and warmed the clime for defense attorneys. The
concept of false memory serves the same purpose as Holocaust
denial. It shapes opinion. Unconscionable crimes are obstructed,
the accused is endowed with the status of martyr, the victim
reviled.
The emphasis on image is obvious in "How Do We Know We
are Not Representing Pedophiles," an article written for the
February 29, 1992 FMS Foundation Newsletter by Pamela Freyd. In
it, she derides the suggestion that many members of the group
could be molesters because "we are a good-looking bunch of
people, greying hair, well dressed, healthy, smiling; just about
every person who has attended is someone you would surely find
interesting and want to count as a friend."
Friendly Fire
People forget things. Horrible things.
Here at the Foundation someone had a repressed
memory, or what would be called a false memory,
that she had been sexually abused.
--Pamela Freyd
FMS Foundation Founder
The debate's bloodiest stage is the courtroom. The hired
guns of Martin Orne's circle of psychiatrists are constantly
called upon to blow smoke at the jury's gallery to conceal CIA
mind control operations. This branch of the psychiatric community
is steeped in the programming of serial killers, political
assassins and experiments on involuntary subjects. Agency
psychiatrists on the witness stand direct the press away from the
CIA, and the prosecution to a predetermined end. Martin Orne's
high-toned psychologizing in the Hillside Strangler case, for
example, is a strategy adopted by the FMS foundation to stifle
the cries of mind control survivors.
Orne's influence contributed to the outcome of a
high-profile abuse case, the $8 million lawsuit filed by Gary
Ramona of Napa, California against child therapist Marche
Isabella and psychiatrist Richard Rose. Ramona charged that his
daughter Holly's therapists elicited from her flashbacks of
sexual molestation that never occurred, decimating his marriage
and career as a vice president at Robert Mondavi wineries. His
wife and employer, note, immediately believed Holly's
accusations. In May of 1994 Ramona received a $500,000 jury
award. He hailed the decision as a "tremendous victory."
Nevertheless, Holly Ramona still maintains that she was
sexually abused by her father, though no criminal charges have
been filed. Holly first confronted her father with the
allegations on March 15, 1990, with her mother and Isabella
present. She filed a civil action against him in Los Angeles
County, but before it went to trial her father's suit got
underway in Napa.
The suit turned on the use of sodium amytal to resurrect
buried memories. Holly Ramona exhibited telltale symptoms of
abuse--fear of gynecological examinations, a phobia of pointy
teeth, like her father's--and asked to be treated with sodium
amytal. Dr. Rose wrote in his notes that under the influence of
the drug, Holly "remembered specific details of sexual
molestation." But Orne, who has pioneered in the use of sodium
amytal in hypnosis research, cautioned in a court brief that the
drug is "not useful in ascertaining 'truth.' The patient becomes
receptive to suggestions due to the context and to the comments
of the interviewers."
Yet the jury foreman stated for the record that Isabella
and Rose did not implant false memories of abuse, as Holly's
father had complained, but were negligent in reinforcing the
memories as Holly described them under the influence of the
barbiturate. The court considered it irrelevant whether Holly
actually suffered abuse, narrowing the legal focus instead to the
chemical evocation of Holly's recollections and her therapist's
leading questions.
Left hanging was the question of Ramona's guilt or
innocence, not exactly an irrelevant issue. Orne offered no
opinion. The "tremendous victory" in Napa, given these facts,
begins to look like a manipulation of the court system,
especially the use of "expert" testimony.
The therapists did not, contrary to most press reports,
bear the full brunt of blame. The jury found that Ramona himself
bore 5% of the blame for what happened to him, Holly's therapists
55%, and 45% was borne by the girl's mother and the Robert
Mondavi winery.
But the 55% solution is diluted by Holly's memories.
Contrary to the impression left by the press, her past has not
been explained away. "I wouldn't be here if there was a question
in my mind," she testified in Napa.
False memory had no clinical history or symptomology
(repressed memory has both), but the concept had held up in
court.
All that remained was to provide a scientific
explanation. The Foundation had spread the word that a "syndrome"
was winding through society and "destroying families." But what
is the origin of false (not inaccurate or clouded or fragmented)
memories? What are the symptoms? It remained to supply a
cognitive model for false memories of ritual molestation.
One of the most prolific and quotable popularizers of
false memory is Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and
law at the University of Washington in Seattle, and an advisory
board member of the Foundation. Her dual academic interests have
fueled suspicions that the organization is more committed to
defending perpetrators than ferreting out the facts. Loftus
testified in over 150 criminal cases prior to joining the
Foundation, always on behalf of defendants. In 1991 she published
a professional autobiography, Witness for the Defense, a study of
eight criminal trials in which she appeared as an expert witness.
In her book, Loftus--billed as "the expert who puts memory on
trial"--conceded that her critics deem her research "unproven in
real-life situations," and her courtroom dissertations "premature
and highly prejudicial."
One book reviewer for the New York Times grumbled: "Her
testimony would be less controversial if she could distinguish
between the innocent and the guilty and reserve her help for the
former."
Elizabeth Loftus has two criteria for taking the stand.
The first is when eyewitness identification is the sole or
primary evidence against the defendant. Secondly, the accused
must act innocent--she regrets testifying on behalf of Ted Bundy
because the serial killer once smiled at the prosecutor, which
she regards as an expression of guilt--and defense attorneys
must believe it.
Loftus stood at the Harvard Medical School podium in May,
1994 to inform a conference on false memory of her research, "in
which false memories about childhood events were created in 24
men and women ages 18 to 63." Dr. Loftus reported that the
parents of volunteers "cooperated to produce a list of events
that had supposedly taken place in the volunteer's early life."
Three of the events actually took place. But one, a shopping
trip, never happened. Some of the volunteers had memories,
implanted by suggestion, of wandering lost on the fictitious
shopping expedition.
Karen Olio, the author of scores of articles on sexual
abuse, complains that Loftus's memory studies "examine only the
possibility of implanting a single memory with which most people
could easily identify (being lost in a mall, awakened by a noise
in the night). The possibility of 'implanting' terrifying and
shameful memories that differ markedly from an individual's
experience, such as memories of childhood abuse in individuals
who do not have a trauma history," remains to be proven."
Psychiatrist John Briere of the University of Southern
California has found that nearly two-thirds of all ritual abuse
survivors report episodic or complete amnesia at some point after
it occurred. The younger the child, the more violent the abuse,
the more likely that memory lapses occurred. these findings have
been duplicated at the University of California at San Francisco
by psychiatrist Lenore Terr, who concluded that children
subjected to repeated abuse were more likely to repress memories
of it than victims of a single traumatic event.
Clinical psychologist Catherine Gould has treated scores
of ritually abused children at her office in Encino, California.
At the September 1993 National Conference on Crimes Against
Children in Washington, D.C., Gould objected that the studies of
Elizabeth Loftus ignore past research on trauma and its influence
on memory.
"My concern about Elizabeth Loftus," Gould said, "is that
she has stated in print, and correctly so, that her data tells us
nothing about the nature of memory of traumatic events. And yet
she has failed to protest the misapplication of her findings by
groups who are involved in discrediting the accounts survivors
are giving of their traumatic history. I believe that Dr. Loftus,
like other psychologists, has an ethical responsibility to do
everything possible to ensure that her research findings are
interpreted and applied accurately, and are not manipulated to
serve the political agenda of groups like the False Memory
Syndrome Foundation. I question whether she has met this ethical
responsibility."
Some psychologists accuse Loftus of faking her research
data.
Her study did not live up to its promise. But now that
she had "proven" that a false memory could be implanted, friends
of the Foundation at the Harvard conference announced they'd
identified the neurological and cognitive causes of disorder.
Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychologist and conference organizer,
claimed that the "confabulator" selects a fragment of a real
memory, "but confuses its true context, and draws on other bits
of experience to construct a story that makes sense of it." Dr.
Morris Moscovitch, a neuro-psychologist at the University of
Toronto, claimed that "brain damage" could also evoke false
memories. He noted that mental patients with frontal lobe defects
frequently confuse imaginary stories with actual memories.
A superficially plausible revelation was provided by
Cornell psychologist Stephen Ceci, who reported on five studies
of 574 preschool children. After 10 weeks of repeated
questioning, 58% of them concocted a false account for at least
one fictitious event.
But like the studies of Elizabeth Loftus, Ceci did not
attempt to explain the supposed amnesiac effect of severe trauma
on children and adults alike (veterans of WW II and Vietnam have
been known to "forget" atrocities of war). Besides, the average
preschooler is bound to invent at least one fantasy in 10 long
weeks of repetitive questioning. Toddlers aren't known for their
consummate adherence to objective reality. An invisible playmate
and the Cat in the Hat are not "false memories."
The research results presented at the Harvard conference
were not exactly staggering. All that had been proven was that
children forget, become confused and make things up.
Seattle therapist James Cronin, one of the Foundation's
harshest critics, believes that the false memory concept is
promoted by "fact and artifice" to a public conditioned to the
fragmentation of knowledge, intellectual charades, elitism and
the sterile abstractions that often pass for university education
and expertise. The so-called experts now jumping on the side of
false memory and therapist 'bias' are opportunists."
Yet the New York Times hailed the Harvard conference as
"epic." The conference had given a gracious "scientific nod to
the frailty of memory." Victims of aggravated child abuse had
nothing to celebrate, but the Times reporter was ecstatic. At
long last, scientists everywhere had arrived at "a consensus on
the mental mechanisms that can foster false memories." A
consensus? Actually, the "consensus" of psychologists, at least
the 88% mentioned earlier--only a vast majority--believe it to
be a very real scourge.
The Times story is typical of the scorn the press has
shown ritual abuse victims and their therapists.
Sixty Minutes, for example, publicly exonerated Kelly
Michaels, a day-care worker in New Jersey, of charges that she
sexually molested dozens of youngsters in 1984. Michaels was
sentenced to 47 years in prison for sodomizing the children in
her care with kitchen implements, among related charges. Her
conviction was overturned in March 1993 when the state appeals
court ruled that Michaels had not had a fair trial.
But in its rush to present Michaels as a blushing
innocent, the Sixty Minutes research department somehow
overlooked a May 1991 New York Times story on the abuse trial,
and the testimony of four Essex County corrections officers who
witnessed Miss Michaels and her father kissing and "fondling" one
another during jail visitations. Jerry Vitiello, a jailer, said
that "he saw Ms. Michaels use his tongue when kissing his
daughter, rub her buttocks and put his hand on her breasts."
Similar incestuous liaisons were detailed in the courtroom by
three women working in the jail. The bizarre sexual antics of
Kelly Michaels--damningly chronicled in Nap Time by Lisa
Manshel in 1990--was nixed from the one-sided Sixty Minutes
account, which made her out to be grist for the meat grinder of
wrong-headed child abuse laws.
The Forgettable "Remembering Satan"
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation made its collective
debut in "Remembering Satan," a two-part story by Lawrence Wright
in the New Yorker for April and May 1993. The story (republished
in 1994 in book form) concerns a ritual abuse trial in Olympia,
Washington that culminated with a 20-year prison sentence for
Thurston County Sheriff Paul Ingram, chairman of the local
Republican Party. Ingram has since filed motions to withdraw his
guilty plea, a move rejected by an appellate court in 1992. Also
charged, but not convicted, were Jim Rabie, a lobbyist with the
Washington State Law Enforcement Association and a former police
detective assigned to child abuse cases, and Ray Risch, an
employee of the State Patrol's body-and-fender shop. Wright's
conclusion, however, is based on the opinions of False Memory
Syndrome Foundation psychiatrists: that accusations made by
Ingram's two daughters, and his own confession to police, were
fantasies misinterpreted by Ingram himself and his daughters as
actual memories.
Wright fumigates any question of abuse with false memory
theory. Among the authorities consulted by Wright was Foundation
board member Paul McHugh, director of the department of
psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins. Like
Margaret Singer, he is a veteran of the Walter Reed Army
Institute of Research (1961-64) and moves in political circles.
For three years (1986-89), McHugh was chairman of the
bio-psychology study section of the National Institutes of
Health, and a former member of the Maryland Governor's Advisory
Commission.
McHugh is an unshakable skeptic of repressed memories. He
told Wright that "most severe traumas are not blocked out by
children but are remembered all too well." Most, in fact, are.
But McHugh's own professional opinion leaves open the possibility
that some severe traumas are repressed.
He cites as an example the children of chowchilla,
California, who were kidnapped in a school bus and buried alive.
McHugh claims they remembered the horror "all too well." Not
exactly. In fact, the FBI's subsequent use of investigative
hypnosis was largely the result of the Chowchilla children's
failure of memory. After their release, none of the children had
a clear recollection of the kidnappers, could not identify them--
and neither did the bus driver, Ed Ray, who managed to recite the
license-plate number of the abductor's van under hypnosis.
Wright's defense of Ingram turns on the opinion of
Richard Ofshe, a Berkeley psychologist, reputed mind control
expert and friend of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Ofshe
has written, Wright explains, "extensively about how the
thought-control techniques developed in Communist china, the
Soviet Union and North Korea had come to be employed and refined
by various religious cults in the United States." Pointing to
mind control in Communist countries is a favorite tactic of the
American mind control fraternity to divert attention from the
highly sophisticated techniques employed in "Democratic"
countries (often in the form of experimentation on unknowing
subjects). This historical revision is a fine example of "mirror
imaging," the CIA technique of vilifying others, and ignoring the
Agency's own role in the formation and control of mind control
cults. Ofshe has not been directly linked to the CIA, but his
work parrots the writings of UCLA'S Louis Jolyon West and other
psychiatrists with Agency credentials.
Wright somehow failed to mention that Ofshe is sharply at
odds with much of the American Psychological Association. He has
filed a suit, with Margaret Singer, for $30 million against the
APA for engaging in a "onspiracy" to "destroy" their reputations
and prevent them from testifying in the courtroom. Both Ms.
Singer and Richard Ofshe derive a significant part of their
income as consultants and expert witnesses on behalf of accused
child abusers. Their complaint, filed under federal racketeering
laws--tripling any financial damages--claims that members of
the APA set out with "repeated lies" to "discredit them and
impair their careers."
The Association flatly denied the charges. Two courts
quickly dismissed the case. The APA released a statement to the
press stating that the organization had merely advised members
against testifying in court on the subject of brainwashing with
"persuasive coercion" (a concept, after all, pushed during the
Korean war by the CIA to justify barbaric mind control
experimentation on American citizens), and had in no way
conspired to impair the careers of Ofshe, Singer or anyone else.
Many in Ofshe's own profession believe him to be a
world-class opportunist. He is a constant in newspaper interviews
and on the talk show circuit, where he claims there is "no
evidence" to support ritual abuse allegations. His categorical
denial ignore's Ingram's own confession and a number of jury
decisions across the country. And then there are, to cite one
documented example of evidence from the glut that Ofshe ignores,
the tunnels beneath the McMartin preschool, the most
widely-publicized case. And a raid on the Children of God
compound in Argentina in 1993 turned up videos of ritual abuse
and child pornography. Evidence does exist--Ofshe simply refuses
to acknowledge the fact. A cult specialist with Ofshe's
credentials would surely explore the abundance of evidence if he
was a legitimate psychologist. Instead, he chirps a categorical
"no evidence," perfectly aware that most mental health
professionals will see through him. A credulous public will not.
On the December 3, 1993 Rolanda talk show, a woman was
interviewed who'd had flashback memories of abuse before
consulting with a therapist. Dr. Ofshe appeared on the program,
his silver beard groomed, looking every inch the authority.
Rolanda asked Ofshe if "a terrible childhood memory, as bad as
child abuse, (can) actually be repressed."
"There is absolutely no reason to think that that is
true," Ofshe told her. "And it's not just what I say--this is
the sum and substance of everything science knows about how
memory works." This, of course, is a transparent lie. Ofshe
dismissed repressed memories of abuse as the reigning
"psychological quackery of the 20th century."
Dr. Daniel Lutzker, a psychologist at the Milton Erickson
Institute, was sitting in the audience--turning crimson with
rage at Ofshe's misrepresentations of the psychology of trauma.
He stood up and argued that sex abuse can indeed begat buried
recollections. "Repressed memories," Lutzker countered, "are not
only important, they are the cornerstone of most psychotherapies.
the fact is that the more awful the experience, the more likely
it is to be repressed!"
Ofshe responded that there was "no evidence" so support
such "nonsense."
Grimacing with disbelief, Lutzker said that Ofshe
wouldn't make such outrageous comments if he bothered to pick up
"any basic textbook on psychotherapy."
"Your making it up!" Ofshe spat. Lutzker stared at him in
disbelief.
But the crowning contradiction to Ofshe's "expert"
opinions appeared in a September 1994 L.A. Weekly article on
alien abductions (another phenomenon said by the Foundation to
breed "false memories").
"There are a lot of not particularly well-certified
people out there," Dr. Ofshe told Gardetta, "using very powerful
techniques on people. Visualizing this kind of stuff under
hypnosis--abduction, Satan cults, sexual abuse--is the closest
thing that anyone can experience short of the experience itself.
That's why it's so traumatic to the individuals undergoing
hypno-therapy, and why the hypno-therapist today can be seen as a
new form of sexual predator."
But one morning, shortly thereafter, Gardetta awoke to
find a triangular rash on the palm of his left hand.
"It didn't surprise me," Gardetta wrote. "Things around
the house--which sits on a hilltop in a semi-rural area--had
been getting weird. A jet-wash noise buzzed some afternoons
around the house, its origin impossible to discern. Lights were
turning themselves on, and the alarm system's motion sensor was
tripping itself every morning between 5 and 6. One early evening,
small footsteps crossed the roof. I ran outside to find the
electrical wires leading to a nearby telephone pole swaying in
the windless dusk."
The mysterious federal mind control fraternity had struck
again, leaving behind more memories to be denounced by the
"skeptics" of the FMS Foundation--the CIA's answer to the Flat
Earth Society.
[END]
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