Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[undead]

David Icke on the EU:



Delusion? Mythology? Racial bias?

[crikkett]

That said, it's a virtue that people are free to leave if they don't like being there.

Except when they are forced by a judge or some other authority to attend. This is extra bad for everyone because the people who are forced to go there will often tempt others to go get high if they don't have any interest in recovery. Unfortunately it seems that a lot of time all the mandatory attendees get stuck together (especially in juvenile "rehabilitation" and detention) and it becomes a place to meet other drug addicts and make connections.

Totally agree. There's really just about nothing the juvenile justice system does that isn't inexcusably bad for everyone, most of the time. I mean, that's something of a hyperbolic overstatement, obviously. But in light of how consequential the responsibilities with which its charged are, it's just an atrocious reflection on society how carelessly/cruelly it routinely goes about meeting them.

There are some segments of the juvenile rehab sector that are exponentially, inconceivably, and about many more than a gazillion times worse than that, too. But I very much hope you weren't subjected to them. And....I think I'm at risk of straying pretty close to the boundary that divides "acceptably off-topic" from the other kind. So I'll just leave it at that.

There's a tiny bit of hope at the bottom of the box. I volunteer with a charity that helps to fund something called 'wrap-around therapy'. This therapy treats not only troubled juveniles but their families as well. There's nothing more practical than helping people be better parents.

I don't know enough about it to find real papers on the subject for you. What I've been told about this is that teams of social workers and therapists develop individualized treatments (as well as provide some financial support) for families based on need. The child's mental, physical and emotional health are supported. They're encouraged to get involved in their community. Education is a priority. In California, most kids are referred to the program through their schools.

Of course, of course, of course, budget cuts are gutting the program.

The problem is really that there aren't more accessible alternatives.

The problem I see is that alternatives simply aren't a priority. Jails are still being funded, while alternatives are not.

[American Dream]

Some more on Syd Barrett, from here: http://visupview.blogspot.com/2011/04/s ... -dawn.html

In 1965 London became Swinging London in no small part due to arrival of one of Tim Leary's old Millbrook cronies, Michael Hollingshead.




Leary's Millbrook collective, financed by the infamous CIA-linked Mellon banking clan, is highly suspect as I've already briefly chronicledhere.

"The Millbrook clan not only had their sights set on America; their aspirations were international in scope. In September 1965 Michael Hollingshead returned to his native London armed with hundreds of copies of the updated Book of the Dead and five thousand doses of LSD (which he procured from Czech government laboratories in Prague). Hollingshead felt there was very little understanding of LSD in England, but he intended to change that. He proceeded to establish the World Psychedelic Center in the fashionable Kings Road district of London, attracting the likes of Jo Berke (a psychiatrist working with R.D. Laing), the writer and philosopher Alexander Trocchi, multimedia artist Ian Sommerville, filmmaker Roman Polanski, and numerous musicians including Donovan, Peter and Gordon, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, and the Rolling Stones."
(Acid Dreams, Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, pg. 115)

Virtually over night English groups such as the Beatles, Donovan, and even the Rolling Stones (in addition to their American counterparts such as the Byrds) would begin to supplement their blues and folk origins with explorations of sound under the influence of this new drug. This new kind of music would be dubbed psychedelic, and it would become all the rage as the world headed toward the 'Summer of Love.' And in the heart of London there was one band that seemed to capture the Technicolor zeitgeist of times better than any other outfit: the Pink Floyd.

In general there is not a lot of reliable information concerning Tavistock out there. According to Wikipedia, Tavistock was primarily concerned with the treating of trauma at its foundation:

"The Tavistock Clinic was founded in 1920 by Dr. Hugh Crichton-Miller, a psychiatrist who developed psychological treatments for shell-shocked soldiers during and after the First World War. The clinic's first patient was, however, a child. Its clinical services were always, therefore, for both children and adults. From its foundation it was also clear that offering free treatment to all who need it meant that the Tavistock Clinic needed to offer training to staff who could eventually help people across the UK. The clinical staff were also researchers. These principles remain to this day.

"Following its founding the Tavistock Clinic continued its interest in preventative psychiatry, and developed expertise in group relations (including army officer selection), social psychiatry and action research. Its staff, who were still mainly unpaid honorary psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers were concerned about leadership within the armed forces. The staff prepared to treat the civilian population who might be traumatised by a further world war, which would bring bombing of cities, evacuation of children and the shock of bereavement."

Much of the conspiracy lore surround Tavistock derives from John Coleman, an individual who claims to be a former MI6 agent working from classified material that he saw while at Her Majesty's Service. Perhaps some researchers have validated Coleman's MI6 claims, but I have yet to see anything reliable, and this puts all of Coleman's conspiratorial writings in doubt. Coleman may well be a former MI6 man, but his work has always struck me as disinformation so I will not delve to deeply into his theories concerning Tavistock here. A sample should suffice:

"From its modest but vitally important beginning at Wellington House, the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations expanded rapidly to become the world's premier top-secret 'brainwashing institute.' How this rapid progression was accomplished needs to be explained.

"The modern science of mass manipulation of public opinion was born at Wellington House, London, the lusty infant being midwifed by Lord Northcliffe and Lord Rothmere.

"The British monarchy, Lord Rothschild, and the Rockefellers were responsible for funding the venture. The papers I was privileged to examine showed that the purpose of those at Wellington House was to effect a change of opinion of the British people who were adamantly opposed to war with Germany, a formidable task that was accomplished by 'opinion making' through polling."
(The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, pg. 2)

Regardless of Coleman's creditability (or lack therefore of), Tavistock has had an enormous influence in the field of mental health. Former Tavistock man John Rawlings Rees would go on to found, and become president and director of, the World Federation of Mental Health, for instance.




During his breakdown, Syd Barrett would seemingly avoid a former Tavistock psychologist R.D. Laing. From the Guardian:

"In the spring of 1968, Roger Waters had talked to the hip psychiatrist RD Laing. He had even driven Barrett to an appointment: 'Syd wouldn't get out. What can you do?' In the intervening months, however, Barrett became less hostile to the idea of treatment. So Gale placed a call to Laing and Po booked a cab. But with the taxi-meter ticking outside, Barrett refused to leave the flat."

Syd himself famously appeared at the Wish sessions in a most disheveled state:

"In June 1975, while Pink Floyd were recording the album Wish You Were Here at London's Abbey Road studios, a portly, shaven-haired man arrived and stood quietly at the back, watching...

"At first, they didn't recognise the man, whose head and eyebrows were shaved and who was apparently trying to clean his teeth by holding the brush still and jumping up and down.

"But this was the 'crazy diamond' himself: Syd Barrett, the subject of the song. He was the most famous 'acid casualty' of his generation, and the writer of much of the original material of the group, from which he had been ejected because of his drug-induced eccentricities."

And now it seems I should address Syd's mental health. The general view, as readers may have gathered from this article, is that Syd was reduced to kind of walking vegetable after the excesses of the 1960s. Yet the man was only briefly institutionalized and generally managed to take care of himself after he dropped out of the spotlight in the early 1970s. Close family members such as his sister Rosemary claim that Syd managed to live a relatively normal life:

"From 1981, when he returned from London to the suburbs of his native Cambridge, resumed the name Roger and set up home in his mother’s modest semi, he made faltering but significant progress.

"Rosemary is adamant that he neither suffered from mental illness nor received treatment for it at any time since they resumed regular contact 25 years ago. At first he did spend some time in a private “home for lost souls” — Greenwoods in Essex — but she says there was no formal therapy programme there. (“And besides, he didn’t mix, because he was very content to be basket weaving and making things.”) Later he agreed to some sessions with a psychiatrist at Fulbourn psychiatric hospital, Cambridge, but neither medication nor therapy was considered appropriate...

"Barrett lived in the semi with his mother until her death in 1991 and then remained there alone. “So much of his life was boringly normal,” said Rosemary. 'He looked after himself and the house and garden. He went shopping for basics on his bike — always passing the time of day with the local shopkeepers — and he went to DIY stores like B&Q for wood, which he brought home to make things for the house and garden.

“'Actually, he was a hopeless handyman, he was always laughing at his attempts, but he enjoyed it. Then there was his cooking. Like everyone who lives on their own, he sometimes found that boring but he became good at curries.

“'That’s why he avoided contact with journalists and fans. He simply couldn’t understand the interest in something that had happened so long ago and he wasn’t willing to interrupt his own musings for their sake. After a while he and I stopped discussing the times he was bothered. We both knew what we thought and we simply had nothing more to add. It became easiest to pretend those incidents never happened and just blank them out.

“'Roger may have been a bit selfish — or rather self-absorbed — but when people called him a recluse they were really only projecting their own disappointment. He knew what they wanted but he wasn’t willing to give it to them.'"



I find it most interesting that Syd became Roger again once he finally escaped from the London scene so much of his life had revolved around. Based on hints Barrett himself dropped, he seemed to have viewed 'Syd' as something other than himself (Roger). Consider this encounter from the early 80s recounted by Tim Willis:

"When the DJ Nicky Horne doorstepped him in the 80s, Barrett said, 'Syd can't talk to you now.'"

Roger became 'Syd' at the age of 14 and never looked back until the Pink Floyd days were long over. He would hardly be the only rock star to adopt a new persona for the profession, as I mentioned before while discussing Tool.

Then there's Roger's seemingly fanatical avoidance of his former life. Many have assumed that Roger simply didn't remember those days (which doesn't seem to be the case) or that they were to painful for him to relive (entirely possible).

But what if Roger was hiding, or trying to escape, from something? His behavior in a way almost reminds me of the Emperor Claudius as depicted in Graves' I, Claudius. Here, Claudius plays up his physical deformities and the perception that he is retarded in order to avoid being murdered by his power hungry family. Roger, despite living in relative stability, seems to have greatly played up his mental problems when in the presence of fans, and especially journalists. This would possibly explain how Syd could be fully functional on the one hand, but instigate encounters such as the one journalist Tim Willis experienced when going to interview Barrett at his home:

"So I walk up the concrete path of his grey pebble-dashed semi, try the bell and discover that it's disconnected. At the front of the house, all the curtains are open. The side passage is closed to prying eyes by a high gate. I knock on the front door and, after a minute or two, look through the downstairs bay window. Where you might expect a television and a three-piece suite, Barrett has constructed a bare, white-walled workshop. Pushed against the window is a tattered pink sofa. On the hardboard tops, toolboxes are neatly stacked, flexes coiled, pens put away in a white mug.

"Then, a sound in the hall. Has he come in from the back garden? Perhaps it needs mowing, like the front lawn - although, judging by the mound of weeds by the path, he's been tidying the beds today.

"I knock again, and hear three heavy steps. The door flies open and he's standing there. He's stark naked except for a small, tight pair of bright-blue Y-fronts; bouncing, like the books say he always did, on the balls of his feet."




This would be in keeping with the deceptively lucid manner Roger used throughout his career -remember how he avoided the Tavistock psychologist R.D. Laing at the height of his breakdown? Did Roger even have a 'breakdown' as it is commonly understood, or did he start becoming aware of what he was being used for?

And finally, was the Roger of Cambridge a recluse, or a man that truly understood the cost his freedom came at?

[American Dream]

http://www.themuse.ca/articles/50112


There are hundreds, if not thousands, of records about clinical LSD experiments in Canada.


Dropping acid

Visiting prof speaks about clinical use of LSD in 1950s Saskatchewan

By Tim O’Brien

Most of us associate Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD)—a.k.a. acid—with recreational use, namely “dropping acid.” In Canada, LSD is deemed a controlled substance under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, but the drug had a clinical use in Canada many decades ago.

Erika Dyck, professor of the history of medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, recently presented a lecture in St. John’s about the use of LSD in Saskatchewan clinics and hospitals as a window into the minds of patients who had mental illnesses.

The lecture, entitled Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD Experimentation and the Post-Second World War Pharmacological Revolution, was given on Nov. 18 at the Health and Sciences Centre as part of the Dr. Nigel Rusted Lectureship in Medical Humanities.

Dyck has been researching clinical LSD use for about 10 years, starting when she was a PhD student. She spent some time in Toronto searching through archives, trying to find records of LSD experiments in Canada.

“I found that there were reams of records about LSD experiments that had taken place in Saskatchewan,” said Dyck. “I found hundreds, if not thousands, of records about LSD experiments that had taken place in Canada.”

“What I was interested in was what, if any, therapeutic properties or potentials this drug may have had, and why psychiatrists and some physicians became interested in using LSD as clinical therapy or as a therapeutic tool.”

LSD was synthesized in the lab by Swiss biochemist Albert Hoffman in 1938.

“He thought [that] maybe this drug would have some therapeutic value; maybe this drug would have some insights into the human mind, and [that], in fact, we should study it,” said Dyck.

Hoffman subsequently encouraged the drug to be freely available to any qualified clinical researcher who had access to the drug.

“LSD takes a different path, partly because, I think, it wasn’t patented and there wasn’t a specific use that was assigned to it early on,” said Dyck. “By the early 1950s, Saskatchewan put itself on the map for LSD experiments.”

She noted the early beginnings of LSD use in clinics, namely by Sidney Katz—journalist for MacLean’s magazine—, who took LSD in a Saskatchewan clinic in 1953 and was observed by psychiatrists and psychologists. He subsequently gave a lengthy account of his experiences with LSD.

“This idea that Katz talks about is something that captured the attention of the psychiatrists and psychologists that were working with him at that time.”
“Most of the medical staff working with this drug also took it themselves. In fact, they felt, at that time, that the ethics of the situation demanded it; that if you were going to give a patient a substance, you should know the effects first hand. Therefore, it was unethical to give someone else something unless you had taken it yourself.”

“Through those experiences—in combination with ones like Katz’s—they felt that LSD gave them insights into what they thought their schizophrenic patients were trying to communicate to them. Maybe, therefore, this drug might be a window into madness or schizophrenia, in particular.”

“It wasn’t that the patients themselves should take the drug, but that people working with the patient should do so in order to better understand them.”

According to Dyck, the main institutions involved with this practice were the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital at Weyburn and the University Hospital in Saskatoon. Other clinics that were involved were the psychiatric wing in Regina—known as the Munroe Wing—, the Department of Psychology at the University of Regina, and the Saskatchewan Schizophrenia Research Group.

Dyck also talked about the history of LSD use for members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Step two of AA’s twelve step program is to believe that there is a power greater than us that can restore us to sanity, and Dyck talked of AA members having particular problems in overcoming this step.

LSD researchers thought that there was a spiritual component in the experience of using the drug. “Maybe LSD could get people to start thinking about spirituality in whichever way they imagined. AA [then] starting referring people to LSD clinics.”

She referred to the work of Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer, two psychiatrists who sought for medicinal use of hallucinogenic drugs in Saskatchewan, such as LSD for alcoholism. She gave many written accounts of patients who took LSD—providing their experiences—and went on to discuss the importance that the drug had in the 1960s with the counter-culture, when media attention increased.

For more information, visit http://rartsandscience.usask.ca/history ... nebio.html

[crikkett]

Did Roger even have a 'breakdown' as it is commonly understood, or did he start becoming aware of what he was being used for?

What was he being used for?

[American Dream]

Did Roger even have a 'breakdown' as it is commonly understood, or did he start becoming aware of what he was being used for?

What was he being used for?

The author's thesis is that Syd Barrett was being manipulated by spooky/masonic conspiratorial forces as a sort of pied piper for certain emerging cultural trends- and that he chose not to fulfill this role...

[crikkett]

Did Roger even have a 'breakdown' as it is commonly understood, or did he start becoming aware of what he was being used for?

What was he being used for?

The author's thesis is that Syd Barrett was being manipulated by spooky/masonic conspiratorial forces as a sort of pied piper for certain emerging cultural trends- and that he chose not to fulfill this role...

OK thanks.
(Thinking about it, others ended up dead: Joplin, Hendrix, Lennon, Morrison... perhaps Barrett wanted to live)

[American Dream]

Syd Barrett Visits His Accountant

[American Dream]

French village went insane after CIA spiked its bread with LSD

By Cory Doctorow Mar 11 2010



For 50 years, residents of the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit have tried to understand the "cursed bread" incident, a moment of terrifying mass insanity and hallucinations that left at least five dead and dozens in asylums. Now the mystery is solved: the CIA secretly spiked the bread from the bakery with enormous quantities of LSD as part of its cold war mind-control experiments, at least according to recently uncovered documents. The allegation originates with H P Albarelli Jr., an investigative journalist who uncovered the documents while researching his forthcoming book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments.

One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: "I am a plane", before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets...

Scientists at Fort Detrick told him that agents had sprayed LSD into the air and also contaminated "local foot products".

Mr Albarelli said the real "smoking gun" was a White House document sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses. It contained the names of a number of French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the "Pont St. Esprit incident." In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Mr Albarelli claims, the US army also drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between 1953 and 1965.

French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment

[American Dream]

MAY BE TRIGGERING TO MK SURVIVORS

Well worth review...

The CIA's Shocking Experiments on Children Exposed -- Drugging, Electroshocks and Brainwashing

By H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Jeffrey S. Kaye, TruthOut.org
Posted on August 12, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/147834/th ... ainwashing

Bobby is seven years old, but this is not the first time he has been subjected to electroshock. It's his third time. In all, over the next year, Bobby will experience eight electroshock sessions. Placed on the examining table, he is held down by two male attendants while the physician places a solution on his temples. Bobby struggles with the two men holding him down, but his efforts are useless. He cries out and tries to pull away. One of the attendants tries to force a thick wedge of rubber into his mouth. He turns his head sharply away and cries out, "Let me go, please. I don't want to be here. Please, let me go." Bobby's physician looks irritated and she tells him, "Come on now, Bobby, try to act like a big boy and be still and relax." Bobby turns his head away from the woman and opens his mouth for the wedge that will prevent him from biting through his tongue. He begins to cry silently, his small shoulders shaking and he stiffens his body against what he knows is coming.

Mary is only five years old. She sits on a small, straight-backed chair, moving her legs back and forth, humming the same four notes over and over and over. Her head, framed in a tangled mass of golden curls, moves up and down with each note. For the first three years of her life, Mary was thought to be a mostly normal child. Then, after she began behaving oddly, she had been handed off to a foster family. Her father and mother didn't want her any longer. She had become too strange for her father, whose alcoholism clouded any awareness of his young daughter. Mary's mother had never wanted her anyway and was happy to have her placed in another home. When the LSD Mary has been given begins to have its effects, she stops moving her head and legs and sits staring at the wall. She doesn't move at all. After about ten minutes, she looks at the nearby physician observing her, and says, "God isn't coming back today. He's too busy. He won't be back here for weeks."

From early 1940 to 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a highly respected child neuropsychiatrist practicing at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, experimented extensively with electroshock therapy on children who had been diagnosed with "autistic schizophrenia." In all, it has been reported that Bender administered electroconvulsive therapy to at least 100 children ranging in age from three years old to 12 years, with some reports indicating the total may be twice that number. One source reports that, inclusive of Bender's work, electroconvulsive treatment was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital from 1942 to 1956, and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children's Service from 1956 to 1969. Bender was a confident and dogmatic woman, who bristled at criticism, oftentimes refused to acknowledge reality even when it stood starkly before her.

Despite publicly claiming good results with electroshock treatment, privately Bender said she was seriously disappointed in the aftereffects and results shown by the subject children. Indeed, the condition of some of the children appeared to have only worsened. One six-year-old boy, after being shocked several times, went from being a shy, withdrawn child to acting increasingly aggressive and violent. Another child, a seven-year-old girl, following five electroshock sessions had become nearly catatonic.

Years later, another of Bender's young patients who became overly aggressive after about 20 treatments, now grown, was convicted in court as a "multiple murderer." Others, in adulthood, reportedly were in and of trouble and prison for a battery of petty and violent crimes. A 1954 scientific study of about 50 of Bender's young electroshock patients, conducted by two psychologists, found that nearly all were worse off after the "therapy" and that some had become suicidal after treatment. One of the children studied in 1954 was the son of well-known writer Jacqueline Susann, author of the bestselling novel "Valley of the Dolls." Susann's son, Guy, was diagnosed with autism shortly after birth and, when he was three years old, Dr. Bender convinced Susann and her husband that Guy could be successfully treated with electroshock therapy. Guy returned home from Bender's care a nearly lifeless child. Susann later told people that Bender had "destroyed" her son. Guy has been confined to institutions since his treatment.

To their credit, some of Dr. Bender's colleagues considered her use of electroshock on children "scandalous," but few colleagues spoke out against her, a situation still today common among those in the medical profession. Said Dr. Leon Eisenberg, a widely respected physician and true pioneer in the study of autistic children, "[Lauretta Bender] claimed that some of these children recovered [because of her use of shock treatment]. I once wrote a paper in which I referred to several studies by [Dr. E. R.] Clardy. He was at Rockwin State Hospital - the back up to Bellevue - and he described the arrival of these children. He considered them psychotic and perhaps worse off then before the treatment." (This writer could find no case where any of Bender's colleagues spoke out against her decidedly racist viewpoints. Bender made it quite clear that she felt that African-Americans were best characterized by their "capacity for laziness" and "ability to dance," both features, Bender claimed, of the "specific brain impulses" of African-Americans.)

About the same time Dr. Bender was conducting her electroshock experiments, she was also widely experimenting on autistic and schizophrenic children with what she termed other "treatment endeavors." These included use of a wide array of psycho-pharmaceutical agents, several provided to her by the Sandoz Chemical Co. in Basel, Switzerland, as well as Metrazol, sub-shock insulin therapy, amphetamines and anticonvulsants. Metrazol was a trade name for pentylenetetrazol, a drug used as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant. High doses cause convulsions, as discovered in 1934 by the Hungarian-American neurologist and psychiatrist Ladislas J. Meduna.

Metrazol had been used in convulsive therapy, but was never considered to be effective, and side effects such as seizures were difficult to avoid. The medical records of several patients who were confined at Vermont State Hospital, a public mental facility, reveal that Metrazol was administered to them by CIA contractor Dr. Robert Hyde on numerous occasions in order "to address overly aggressive behavior." One of these patients, Karen Wetmore, received the drug on a number of occasions for no discernible medical reason. During the same ten-year period in which Metrazol was used by the Vermont State Hospital, patient deaths skyrocketed. In 1982, the FDA revoked its approval of Metrazol.

Here it should be noted that, during the cold war years, CIA and Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) interrogators, working as part of projects Bluebird and Artichoke, sometimes injected large amounts of Metrazol into selected enemy or Communist agents for the purposes of severely frightening other suspected agents, by forcing them to observe the procedure. The almost immediate effects of Metrazol are shocking for many to witness: subjects will shake violently, twisting and turning. They typically arch, jerk and contort their bodies and grimace in pain. With Metrazol, as with electroshock, bone fractures - including broken necks and backs - and joint dislocations are not uncommon, unless strong sedatives are administered beforehand.

A November 1936 Time magazine article seriously questioned the benefits of Metrazol, citing "irreversible shock" as a "great danger." The article described a typical Metrazol injection as such: "A patient receives no food for four or five hours. Then about five cubic centimeters of the drug [Metrazol] are injected into his veins. In about half-a-minute he coughs, casts terrified glances around the room, twitches violently, utters a horse wail, freezes into rigidity with his mouth wide open, arms and legs stiff as boards. Then he goes into convulsions. In one or two minutes the convulsions are over and he gradually passes into a coma, which lasts about an hour. After a series of shocks, his mind may be swept clean of delusions.... A patient is seldom given more than 20 injections and if no improvement is noted after ten treatments, he is usually given up as hopeless."

The Army, the CIA and Metrazol

Army CIC interrogators working with the CIA at prisoner of war camps and safe house locations in post-war Germany on occasion used Metrazol, morphine, heroin and LSD on incarcerated subjects. According to former CIC officer Miles Hunt, several "safe houses and holding areas outside of Frankfurt near Oberursel" - a former Nazi interrogation center taken over by the US - were operated by a "special unit run by Capt. Malcolm S. Hilty, Maj. Mose Hart and Capt. Herbert Sensenig. The unit was especially notorious in its applications of interrogation methods [including the use of electroshock and Metrazol, mescaline, amphetamines and other drugs]." Said Hunt: "The unit took great pride in their nicknames, the 'Rough Boys' and the 'Kraut Gauntlet,' and didn't hold back with any drug or technique ... you name it, they used it." Added Hunt, "Sensenig was really disappointed when it was found that nothing had to be used on [former Reichsmarschall] Herman Goering, who was processed through the camp. Goering needed no inducement to talk."

Eventually, CIC interrogators working in Germany would be assisted in their use of interrogation drugs by several "former" Nazi scientists recruited by the CIA and US State Department as part of Project Paperclip. By early 1952, the CIC's Rough Boys would routinely use Metrazol during interrogations, as well as LSD, mescaline and conventional electroshock units.

Metrazol-like drugs are still used in interrogations today. According to reports from several former noncommissioned Army officers, who served on rendition-related security details in Turkey, Pakistan and Romania, drugs that produce effects quite similar to Metrazol are still used in 2010 by the Pentagon and CIA on enemy combatants and rendered subjects held at the many "black sites" maintained across the globe. Observed one former officer recently, "They would twist up like a pretzel, in unbelievable shapes and jerk and shake like crazy, their eyes nearly popping out of their heads."

In 2008, at the behest of US Sens. Carl Levin, Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel and in reaction to a March 2008 article in The Washington Post, the Pentagon initiated an Inspector General Report on the use of "mind-altering substances by DoD [Department of Defense] Personnel during Interrogations of Detainees and/or Prisoners Captured during the War on Terror." It is not known if the investigation has been completed. Among the more famous recent cases of the use of drugs upon prisoners concerns one-time alleged "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla, who had originally been accused of wanting to set off a "dirty bomb." The charge was later forced, but Padilla was held in solitary confinement for many months and forced to take LSD or other powerful drugs while held in the Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina.

The government has gone to great efforts to keep the public uninformed as regards use of drugs on prisoners. In an article by Carol Rosenberg for McClatchy News in July 2010, Rosenberg reported that, when covering the Guantanamo military commissions trials, when the question of "what psychotropic drugs were given another accused 9/11 conspirator, Ramzi bin al Shibh, the courtroom censor hits a white noise button so reporters viewing from a glass booth can't hear the names of the drugs. Under current Navy instructions for the use of human subjects in research, the undersecretary of the Navy is described as the authority in charge of research concerning "consciousness-altering drugs or mind-control techniques," while at the same time is also responsible for "inherently controversial topics" that might attract media interest or "challenge by interest groups."

Dr. Bender Discovers LSD

In 1955 and1956, Dr. Bender began hearing glowing accounts about the potential of LSD for producing remarkable results in children suffering mental disorders, including autism and schizophrenia. Bender's earlier work with electroshock therapy had brought her into contact with several other prominent physicians who, at the time, were covert contractors with the CIA's MK/ULTRA and Artichoke projects. Primary among these physicians were Drs. Harold A. Abramson, Paul Hoch, James B. Cattell, Joel Elkes, Max Fink, Harris Isbell and Alfred Hubbard. Some of these names may be familiar to readers. Dr. Abramson, a noted allergist who surreptitiously worked for both the US Army and CIA since the late 1940s, was the physician Frank Olson was taken to see, shortly before his murder in New York City in November 1953. About a year earlier, Drs. Hoch and Cattell were responsible for injecting unwitting New York State Psychiatric Institute patient Harold Blauer with a massive dose of mescaline that killed him. Dr. Elkes was one of the earliest physicians in Europe to experiment with LSD, having requested samples of the drug from Sandoz Chemical Co. in 1949. Elkes was a close associate of Dr. Abraham Wikler, who worked closely with Dr. Harris Isbell at the now-closed Lexington, Kentucky, prison farm, where hundreds of already drug-addicted inmates were given heroin in exchange for their participation in LSD and mescaline experiments underwritten by the CIA and Pentagon. Elkes worked closely with the CIA, Pentagon and Britain's MI6 on drug experiments in England and the United States.

Dr. Fink, who was greatly admired by Bender, is considered the godfather of electroshock therapy in the United States. In the early 1950s and beyond, Fink was a fully cleared CIA Project Artichoke consultant. In 1951, CIA officials under the direction of Paul Gaynor and Morse Allen of the agency's Security Research Service (SRS) that oversaw Artichoke, worked closely with Fink in New York City in efforts to thoroughly explore the merits of electroshock techniques for interrogations. The CIA was especially interested in the use of standard electroshock machines in producing amnesia, inducing subjects to talk and making subjects more prone to hypnotic control. According to one CIA document, Fink told officials "an individual could gradually be reduced through the use to electroshock treatment to the vegetable level."

In addition to Fink, Bender also greatly admired the work of Dr. Lothar B. Kalinowsky, a psychiatrist who also consulted closely with the CIA on electroshock matters. Kalinowsky, who was part Jewish and had fled Germany in 1933, was Fink's close friend and, like Fink, was widely recognized as an expert on electroconvulsive therapy. Kalinowsky met with the CIA's Allen and Gaynor frequently and sometimes was accompanied by Dr. Fink at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where he worked closely with Dr. Hoch.

While it is clear from Dr. Bender's papers that she also considered the early LSD work of "Dr." Alfred M. Hubbard in Vancouver, Canada, to be "very substantial and beneficial," it is important to state here that Hubbard was not a physician nor did he have any formal medical training. Hubbard, a jovial character who sometimes worked with the FBI and CIA, was a strong proponent of the use of LSD. Despite the fact that he had no medical credentials and once served time in prison for smuggling, he hoodwinked the Sandoz Chemical Co. into supplying him such ample amounts of LSD that he dispersed so widely and abundantly that he earned the title "The Johnny Appleseed of LSD." Hubbard's use of LSD in allegedly curing alcoholism is still cited today. How Hubbard so easily passed as a physician is unknown. Even a 1961 paper published by New York Medical College, Department of Psychiatry, and authored by Dr. A.M. Freedman, cited Hubbard's LSD work with "children, primarily delinquents" to have been 85% successful."

Other physicians whom Dr. Bender consulted about the effects of LSD on children were Drs. Ronald A. Sandison, Thomas M. Ling and John Buckman. These three worked in England at both the Chelsea Clinic in London and Potwick Hospital in Worcestershire, outside of London. Sandison is credited with having been the first person to bring LSD into England, this in 1952 after he met Albert Hofmann in Basle, Switzerland, at the Sandoz Chemical laboratories. Hofmann handed Sandison a box of around 600 ampules, each containing 100 micrograms of LSD. Back in England, Sandison shared his psychedelic bounty with associates Drs. Ling and Buckman. Before the year was out, Sandison also turned Hubbard on to LSD, guiding Hubbard through his first trip. Sandison also began a new treatment program at the Gothic-looking Potwick facility that he dubbed Psycholytic Therapy. His program's patients were mostly schizophrenics. In 1958, an LSD treatment unit was established at Potwick. Over the years, it has been reported that the CIA, MI6 and the Macy Foundation secretly helped finance the unit. Dr. Elkes helped by raising about $75,000 for the unit's operation. For the next ten years the unit administered over 15,000 doses of LSD to about 900 patients.

Drs. Buckman and Ling worked closely with Sandison in the Potwick unit. In 1963, Buckman and Ling wrote in a publication, describing "good examples" of the use of LSD in psycholytic psychotherapy: "The patients' experiences under LSD have not supported Marx's dictum that Religion is the opium of the people but rather that there is a deep basic belief in a Supreme Being, whether the religion background be Christian, Jewish or Hindu."

Dr. Buckman also worked at London's Chelsea Clinic, often times treating adults and sometimes children. Buckman believed strongly that "frigidity" in women could be treated successfully with LSD. In 1967, he said of LSD: "Many therapists believe that a transcendental experience - a feeling that it is a good world and one is a part of it - is a curative experience in itself." According to several informed sources in the London, for years MI6, the British intelligence service and the CIA closely monitored the LSD work conducted by Sandison, Ling and Buckman.

Two Sisters, LSD and Dr. Buckman

Marion McGill, today an attorney and college professor in the western United States and her sister, Trudy, were sent in 1960 by their parents to be interviewed by Drs. Ling and Buckman at the Chelsea Clinic in London. At the time, Marion was 13 years old and her sister was 15. Marion says that both her mother and father were "quite taken with the benefits of LSD and thought that we would also benefit from the drug." Both parents had undergone a series of ten LSD "treatments" at the Chelsea clinic. Marion goes on:

"As a 13-year old at the time, my decision-making capacity was very limited. I was, by nature, fairly compliant and docile, rather eager to please my parents. I understood nothing of what was being suggested for me and my 15 year-old sister - namely that we participate in some sort of 'research' that both our parents had also participated in. Whether the word 'experiment' was used, I don't recall. The term 'LSD' was vaguely familiar, however, because my parents were 'taking' this drug as a form of 'quick therapy' - their term for it - that had been recommended by my uncle, a psychiatrist at a well known east coast medical school. Both parents needed therapy, in my view. While highly successful professionally, my father was a tightly wound, rather angry and insecure man, an accomplished academic, but an 'industrial strength narcissist,' as I later called him. My mother was a submissive, obedient, Catholic woman without much identity of her own, other than being a doctor's wife.

"My sister and I, however, were about as 'normal' as any two teenagers could be. We were at the top of our classes in school; both of us had lots of friends, participated in extra curricular activities. We didn't need 'therapy.' We were told we would get a day off from school after each overnight stay at the clinic for this LSD. It was perhaps the prospect of a day off from Catholic girls' school that persuaded us to do it. I wasn't aware of making a 'decision.' The purpose of this program was never explained. There were to be 10 sessions - once a week for 10 weeks. I believe they started in January 1960.

"The experiences at the clinic where the LSD was administered were quite strange. There was a brief 'interview' by Dr. John Buckman, asking banal questions about health issues (none), but providing no information about what to expect from the LSD. There was no mention, for example, of hallucinations or perceptual distortions or anything frightening. I was not informed of any persistent effects, such as nightmares. Certainly the possibility of lasting damage was not mentioned. The word 'experiment' was not used. There was, in other words, no informed consent whatsoever. I was not told that I could refuse to participate, that I could quit at any time (as provided in the Nuremberg Code). Since I was below the age of consent, my parents would have been the ones to agree to this. Indeed, they were the ones to suggest that we be used in these experiments. It would not otherwise have happened. But my parents would never discuss this in later years and never explained why they did it.

"During the 10 sessions, each of which involved an injection, my sister and I were kept in separate bedrooms, darkened rooms, usually with someone present in the room, but I don't know who the person was. Occasionally, my mother was also present. At times, I was so frightened by the hallucinations that I screamed and tried to escape from the room. I remember once actually reaching the hallway and being forcibly put back into the bedroom by my mother. I saw a wild array of images - nightmarish visions, occasionally provoking hysterical laughter, followed immediately by wracking sobs. I had no idea what was happening to me. It was terrifying.

"There was no effort to counsel us during or after each of these sessions. There was no 'debriefing,' no explanation of what was happening or why this was being done to us. Why I did not refuse to participate after I first experienced it, I don't know. But as an adult and later as a professional medical ethicist, I recognized this lack of resistance as a function of childhood itself. Most children who are victims of parental abuse do not know how to resist. They fear rejection by parents more than they fear the abuse, it seems. The 'power differential' is huge between parents and children and the dependence on parents is virtually absolute. We were also, living in London at the time, away from our friends. My sister and I had been told not to talk about what we were doing. We were Catholics, obedient to parents, etc. Our father was a doctor, after all - it was hard to grasp that he would do harm to us or that our mother would. Children just don't think this way initially. A child's dependency usually means trusting one's parents or caregivers.

"Although each individual session was often terrifying, any lasting effects of the LSD unfolded gradually. In the weeks immediately following the final session, I experienced frequent nightmares - visions of crawling insects, horrible masks, etc. I couldn't sleep. I was afraid to shut my eyes. I became afraid of the dark. My parents were dismissive and unsympathetic. Their attitude was, in some ways, more disturbing to me than the experiments themselves because it meant that my parents had known full well that the experience would very likely be frightening - and hadn't cared.

"I discovered that my parents were dishonest and unfeeling in ways that I could not comprehend. They told my sister and me never to talk about the LSD experiences, never to disclose what had happened in London. This further ruptured our relationship with them, a relationship that was, by then, permanently damaged. I was still dependent on them, however and so was my sister.

"Two years after these experiments, during her freshman year in college, my sister suffered a nervous breakdown. I don't know the extent to which the LSD may have precipitated this. But my parents' response to what was probably a mild breakdown from which my sister could have recovered, was coercive and drastic. She had been asking questions about the LSD at this time. She was angry about it. We both were. We talked about it together, but I was afraid to confront our parents. My sister was not. The angrier she became, the more she was 'diagnosed' as a 'psychiatric' case and the more medication she was given. To this day, my sister is heavily medicated. She never fully recovered from that first episode.

"Our parents responded to my sister's anger in a way that frightened me further. I also felt tremendous guilt for not being able to prevent the horrors that my sister endured. Once she was 'classified' as a psychiatric patient, she was lost. Everything that was done to her in the name of 'treatment' seemed to me to be a form of ongoing abuse and torture.

"The fact that our father was a prominent, internationally known and widely respected physician - and his brother, who had introduced us to this LSD horror, was a prominent, internationally known and widely respected psychiatrist - made it impossible to expose them or go against them. Their reputations were more important to them than the health and well being of my sister.

"My own response was simply to leave home. I never trusted my parents again after the London LSD experience. I discovered many other ways in which my father and my uncle lied, covered up, dissembled and eventually threatened me, in order to keep this story from being told.

"On a positive note, the experience informed my career choices in both human rights and medical ethics, but it also made me alert to the ways in which academic medicine was - and is - corrupted by the drug industry itself and by the continuing abuse of human subjects to further the development of drugs as weapons - both for interrogation potential and also, more subtle behavior control on a massive scale. My own experience also sensitized me to the special vulnerability of children and teenagers in the medical environment.

"Even when I subsequently confronted my father with the evidence that LSD had been tested by the CIA for use as a military weapon in the 1950s and 1960s, he dismissed his participation by saying that it was an 'enlightening experience, like visiting an art gallery.' When I pointed out that this was not my experience as a child, he dismissed it, including the presumption that I must be a 'conspiracy theorist' to propose such a thing. At the age of 91, he finally admitted that it had perhaps not been a very good idea to subject my sister and me to LSD.

"Dr. Buckman and Ling were knowing participants in ongoing intelligence-based work with mind altering drugs. I 'met' Buckman in London when I was 13, but encountered him again years later at the university medical school in the United States where he was on the faculty.

"I went to see Dr. Buckman in his office. I asked him what he thought about the ethics of using children in an LSD experiment. At first, he didn't seem to realize who I was. I identified myself as one of his 'subjects' and gave him my business card as a Medical Ethicist and lawyer. He was clearly shocked, stood up, refused to talk to me and told me to leave his office. Shortly thereafter, I received a phone call from my father. His brother, the psychiatrist and colleague of Dr. Buckman, had been alerted to my impromptu visit. Subsequently, both my uncle and my father threatened me, saying they would make sure I lost my university faculty position if I disclosed anything publicly about the LSD experiments in London.

"'You will never work in bioethics again,' they said.

"The response of all these men to the threat of disclosure indicates their lack of ethical scruples, their lack of empathy, their own pathology. I don't know what the exact term would be, but I suspect there is a form of psychological 'doubling' at work - the sort of thing that was described in [Robert Jay] Lifton's book, The Nazi Doctors who were able to ignore their Hippocratic oath to 'first, do no harm,' and to inflict unimaginable horrors on their fellow human beings.

"The loss of my sister has been a life long source of sorrow for me. I attribute it to the LSD and its cover up, whether the chemicals themselves 'caused' her disintegration or not. In law this is called a 'contributing cause.' I learned that people cover up the most awful things, not just within a family but within communities, within universities, within 'polite society.' There is probably no absolute barrier that will prevent these things from being done, but they have to be exposed and called out for what they are, whenever they occur."

Dr. Bender's LSD Experiments on Children

Shortly after deciding to initiate her own LSD experiments on children, Bender attended a conference sponsored by a CIA front group, the Josiah Macy Foundation. The conference focused on LSD research and featured Dr. Harold A. Abramson as a presenter. In 1960, Abramson conducted his own LSD experiments on a group of six children ranging in age from five to 14 years of age. A few short months after the Macy Foundation conference, Dr. Bender was notified that her planned LSD experiments would be partially and surreptitiously funded by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (SIHE), another CIA front group then located in Forest Hills, New York. The Society, headed by James L. Monroe, a former US Air Force officer who had worked on top-secret psychological warfare and propaganda projects, oversaw about 55 top-secret experiments underwritten by the CIA. These projects involved LSD, ESP, black magic, astrology, psychological warfare, media manipulation, and other subjects. Apparently, Bender's work with children and LSD raised some concerns at the CIA's Technical Services Division (TSD). A 1961 TSD memo written to Monroe questioned the "operational benefits of Dr. Bender's work as related to children and LSD," and requested to be kept "closely appraised of the possible links between Dr. Bender's project and those being conducted under separate MK/ULTRA funding at designated prisons in New York and elsewhere."

In 1960, Dr. Bender launched her first experiments with LSD and children. They were conducted within the Children's Unit, Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, New York. The LSD she used was supplied by Dr. Rudolph P. Bircher of the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company. (Dr. Bircher also provided Bender with UML-491, also a Sandoz-produced product, very much like LSD but sometimes "dreamier" in effect and longer lasting.) Her initial group of young subjects consisted of 14 children diagnosed schizophrenic, all under the age of 11. (Because diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, autism, and other disorders have changed over the decades, one cannot assess what actual conditions these children really had.) There were 11 boys and three girls, ranging in age from six to ten years old.

Jean Marie is almost seven years old. She came here nearly a year ago after her parents abandoned her to the care of an aunt who had no interest in raising her. Marie, who prefers to be called Jean, is shy, withdrawn, and distrustful of most adults she encounters. There are reports she may have been sexually molested by her uncle ... Despite her withdrawn nature she smiles easily, and enjoys the company of other children. After receiving LSD on three occasions earlier this month, Marie ceased smiling at all and lost any interest in others her age ... In the past week, she seems to have become easily agitated and has lost any interest in reading, something she seemed to very much enjoy before treatment.

In a published report on her 196 LSD experiments with 14 "autistic schizophrenic" children, Bender states she initially gave each of the children 25 mcg. of LSD "intramuscularly while under continuous observation." She writes: "The two oldest boys, over ten years, near or in early puberty, reacted with disturbed anxious behavior. The oldest and most disturbed received Amytal sodium 150 mg. intramuscularly and returned to his usual behavior." Both boys were then excluded from the experiment.

The 12 remaining children were then given injections of 25 mcg. of LSD and then days later were each given 100 mcg. of LSD once a week. Bender's report states: "Then it was increased gradually to twice and three times a week as no untoward side-effects were noticed.... Finally, it was given daily and this continued for six weeks until the time of this report."

Bender's findings and conclusions concerning her LSD experiments indicated she found the use of the drug promising. Bender reported: "In general, they [the children] were happier; their mood was 'high' in the hours following the ingestion of the drug ... they have become more spontaneously playful with balls and balloons ... their color is rosy rather than blue or pale and they have gained weight." Bender concluded: "The use of these drugs [LSD, UML-401, UML-491] ... will give us more knowledge about both the basic schizophrenic process and the defensive autism in children and also about the reaction of these dilysergic acid derivatives as central and autonomic nervous system stimulants and serotonin antagonists. Hopefully these drugs will also contribute to our efforts to find better therapeutic agents for early childhood schizophrenia."

In an article published in 1970, Dr. Bender reported on the results of LSD dosing upon "two adolescent boys who were mildly schizophrenic." She reported that the boys experienced perceptual distortions. They thought the researchers were making faces at them, that their pencils were becoming "rubbery," and one boy reported the other boy's face had turned green. The boys began to complain that they were being experimented upon. Even so, Bender and her associate continued the two male adolescents on a regimen of 150 mcg. per day, in divided doses, of LSD. While one of the boys supposedly "benefited very much," Bender reported that he later returned to the hospital as "a disturbed adult schizophrenic." The other boy kept complaining that he was being experimented upon and they stopped giving him LSD, not because of the drug's effects itself, Bender explained, but "because of the boy's attitude towards it," which she attributed to "his own psychopathology."

Dr. Bender's LSD experiments continued into the late 1960s and, during that time, continued to include multiple experiments on children with UML-401, a little known LSD-type drug provided to her by the Sandoz Company, as well as UML-491, also a Sandoz product. Bender's reports on her LSD experiments give no indication of whether the parents or legal guardians of the subject children were aware of, or consented to, the experiments. Without doubt, parents or guardians were never informed that the CIA underwrote Bender's work. Over the years, there have been multiple reports that many of Bender's subject children were either "wards of the State" or orphans, but the available literature on the experiments reveals nothing on this. The same literature makes it obvious that the children had been confined to the Creedmoor State Hospital for long periods of time and that many, if discharged, needed "suitable homes or placements in the community." There is also no evidence that any follow-up studies were conducted on any of the children experimented upon by Dr. Bender. Today, Dr. Bender is best known and highly regarded in some circles as the creator of the Bender-Gestalt Test, which measures motor skills in children.

On Bender's use of LSD on children, Dr. Leon Eisenberg said years later: "She did all sorts of things. Lauretta Bender reached success in her career long before randomized controlled trials had even been heard of. She didn't see the need for trials of drugs because she was convinced she knew what worked." (See: "A History of Autism: Conversations with the Pioneers" by Adam Feinstein, Wiley-Blanchard, 2010.) Many other physicians speaking privately were far less diplomatic in condemning Bender's LSD work, but, still today, many are reluctant to criticize her, and, remarkably, many of the aging stalwarts of the arguable "virtues" and "potential" of LSD continue to cite her work with children as groundbreaking science.

Today, nearly 60 years beyond the horrors of Dr. Bender's CIA-sponsored experiments on children, few people are aware that they were conducted. For most people, regardless of their awareness of the experiments, it is difficult to fathom how intelligent, highly educated physicians and scientists could partake in such brutal, uncaring, unethical and illegal experiments on children. What was the basis of their motivation? Was it the quest for some sort of elusive medical grail? Was it for economic gain? Or was it simply the result of a misguided search for knowledge that appeared so infinitely important that any sense of compassion and respect for human rights and dignity was cast aside in the name of a higher goal or good - a search at times so exhilarating with the sense that one is at the precipice of a momentous discovery that any semblance of respect for humankind was thrown aside?

One can easily come to any and all these conclusions simply by reading the professional papers of such scientists and researchers. Not once do any of these papers express concern for the subjects at hand or denote any pangs of conscience at violating any oaths, codes and statutes regarding patient rights, human rights or human dignity. That America's most shameful period of human experimentation, the years 1950 through to about 1979, came on the heels of the making and adoption of the Nuremberg Codes only adds to the shame and hypocrisy. Today, human experimentation is still aggressively conducted by US government-sponsored and employed physicians and scientists regardless of those codes, which came directly out of the shocking madness of the Nazi era. That government-sponsored experimentation still occurs makes a mockery of any governmental efforts, however valid, to protect people from science run amok - and a nation that uses its young, its children, for such pursuits is a nation whose commitment to human rights and democratic principles should be seriously questioned and challenged.


(The names Marion McGill and that of her sister Trudy, are pseudonyms. Marion is a highly respected attorney and college professor, who asked that her real name not be used in this article. All other names in this article are real.)

H.P. Albarelli Jr. is the author of "A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments," (TrineDay, 2010). His book documents and details numerous CIA and military sponsored unwitting human experiments. He is a founding member of the North American Truth and Accountability Commission on Human Experimentation.

Jeff Kaye is a psychologist in San Francisco and an expert on current torture and rendition techniques and developments. He writes on torture and other subjects for Firedoglake and Truthout web sites.

[Elvis]

Just began to delve into this thread, terrific stuff.

a critical account of some horrific practices attributed to "Jetsunma", aka "Catherine Burroughs", aka "Alyce Zeoli":

<< Bad Karma, by Will Blythe

Ten years ago, when Jetsunma became the first woman in the Western
world recognized as a reincarnated lama, she was hailed as a
thoroughly modern Buddha. Hollywood came calling. But now, some
followers accuse her of physical abuse and unbridled greed. Has she
become a holy terror?

Say this much for Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo as she lingers backstage at the
Let Freedom Ring rally: she may be at least 300 or so in reincarnated
lama years, but her hair doesn't show it. Not on this brilliant fall
afternoon in Lafayette Square, just across from the White House. This
is a good thing, as aging can be hard, even for a Buddhist, and human
years, Jetsunma, now 48, has traveled a few miles down the crumbling
highway of middle age. Just because it's recalling to understand the
ephemerality of all phenomena and the inevitability of suffering
doesn't mean you're immune to a mirror. As Jetsunma herself has
announced in one of her videotaped teachings, "when it's a good
hair day, that always makes a difference." Her followers can relate
to such a sentiment: it makes Jetsunma more "real," not like some
other worldly bean pole ascetic who's never maxed out the credit card.
"In response to those who find such vanity in a guru a tad unsettling,
I ask: in what sutra is it written that a Buddhist teacher can't liven
up her hair with a few classy highlights?"

Onstage, finishing his speech against the Chinese occupation of Tibet,
Richard Gere is enjoying a superb hair day himself. How can a man's
hair be so beautiful? The cut is a masterpiece of precision that
comes across as conspicuously casual, like a rich man wearing loafers
with no socks. The hair itself is a silver that positively radiates
blessedness. And he's spiritual, too, and genuine, they say! Nothing
derails his compassion. Hecklers bounce off his aura like birds off a
pane of glass. "No one here would hurt a mosquito," he declares at
one point with fetching certainty.

"Nice coat," a Buddhist yells from the crowd, unable to stomach the
irony of Gere's handsome leather jacket. Picky, picky. The audience
turns on the naysayer, as it he's the un-cool one who made a sentient
being suffer. And maybe he did, maybe he hurt Richard's feelings.

Jetsunma, meanwhile, is still waiting on the far side of backstage
rope, the outsiders side. For the moment, she seems like an autograph
seeker, the suburban fan of the '70s rock star, say, James Taylor.
She pats her hair into place. She sips from a bottle of Deer Park
spring water. She pops a certs into her mouth and makes a goofy face
at one of her nuns. The nun, her hair buzzed as closely as a fighter
pilot's, smiles back. A small band of followers from Jetsunma's own
temple about 30 miles northwest of D.C. in Poolesville, Maryland,
huddles around. Her longtime student Wib Middleton stands up beside
her like a spouse, communicating anxiously on a walkie-talkie.
In 1988, he quit a sales job and came to work for her after she had
assured him that he would be dead of a heart attack within two years
if he didn't.

Then the crowd roils, a galvanic, shark feeding register of celebrity
in the vicinity, and Wib's walkie-talkie crackles to life. Mr. Gere
is leaving the area! That's when the reason for Jetsunma's
nervousness becomes instantly clear -- she's here on a mission, she
hopes to share a little cinematic space with the actor. She needs her
aura buffed by a righteous Hollywood celebrity. A crew shooting a
documentary about Jetsunma materializes, forcing their way next to the
ropes.

"Richard, it's Jetsunma!" The men shout urgently. "Richard, over
here, it's Jetsunma!" She leans across the rope toward Richard, who
is whipping through the excited crowd, a pretty blond commanding his
ear. Jetsunma extends a white prayer scarf toward him, a traditional
Tibetan show of respect. Her red nail polish gleams. She craning,
stretching, about to tip over on her modish boots. She and Richard
have met before, she's told her followers, in this very lifetime, on
at least a couple of the occasions. Gere is said to have asked her
how many thousands of years old she was. Cute, huh? But not this
time.

He swoops by, briefly grazing her hand and the white scarf. "Hi, how
ya doing," he says, without breaking stride. And then he's gone. The
sound man says, "he didn't recognize her." It's a mortifying moments.
Jetsunma put on a pair of blue tainted sunglasses. Is she crying?
Has she heard the rumor circulating through the Buddhist community
that Gere has been warned away from her? The nuns and lay women from
the temple rally around her, cooing and clucking, the pep club
consoling the homecoming Queen after she's been jilted by the King.

But there's something indomitable about Jetsunma. She's shrugged off
far worse than snubs. She accepts the condolences, takes a swig of
water, and heads toward the White House to join the protesters. When
the camera goes back on, she begins to chant.

The Buddhist scriptures teach that we live in a world of samsara, of
appearances. The entire universe is smoke and mirrors. This isn't
news for Jetsunma. She's a Brooklyn girl, she's come down a hard road
to get this far, and she's known forever about the difference between
appearance and reality.

In the world of appearances, particularly that veil of illusion we
call the media, Jetsunma is doing very well indeed. She is the
spiritual director and resident lama of Kunzang Palyul Choling -- KPC
(translation: "Fully Awakened Dharma Continent of Absolute Clear
Light"), a Tibetan Buddhist Temple in the Nyingma tradition that she
set up in Poolesville. She has 200 or so followers, some of whom have
been attached her since the early '80s. In addition, she presides
over one of the largest Nyingma contingents of monastics in America --
34 nuns and monks, at last count.

In 1987, she was recognized as a tulku -- the rebirth of an
enlightened being -- by Penor Rinpoche, the supreme head of the
Nyingmas (or "ancient ones"), who within his tradition is as revered
as the Dalai Lama. So far, Jetsunma is the only female tulku --
literally, "emanation body of the Buddha" -- yet found in the West.

After a highly publicized enthronement in 1988 at the Poolesville
Temple (Jetsunma sat on an *actual* red wooden throne), the press went
guru-gaga. Features appeared in People, the Washington Post, the New
York Times, and on TV news magazines. The tulku was a broad! Her
chants were gender-inclusive! It was all so post patriarchal, so
politically enlightened! This bodhisattva liked red meat, red wine,
and red lipstick. She loved to dish with the gals about deep hair
conditioners and makeup and nice clothes. She was down-to-earth, even
a little bawdy, none of the scrawny, delicate navel-gazer about
Jetsunma.

"I just hate the whole prostration thing," she told her students,
referring to the way they would bow down before her, Tibetan-style, as
a sign of reverence. "It's takes me forever to get through a room.
If I have to go to the bathroom it's really intense. I have to put on
a blond wig so you won't recognize me." Imagine the pope or the Dalai
Lama talking this way. Imagine them in blond wigs.

"I'm a regular person," she told journalist Martha Sherril. "You could
explain your life to me, and I could understand. This isn't common
with other lamas." Sherril subsequently signed a deal with Random
House to write a book about Jetsunma.

Byron Pickett, the director of the documentary in progress, regards
her as a Buddhist populist: "She's not like Pema Chodron, who only has
two robes," he says, referring to a renowned (and simply clothed)
Buddhist teacher and author in Nova Scotia. "Pema is from the same
background as Peter Matthiessen -- you know, moneyed families on the
East Coast. Jetsunma is the opposite. She's bringing people to
Buddhism who have never been there before -- there's a lot of blue
collar people at KPC."

Now, in the ultimate sign that re-incarnation can be one hell of a
career move (talk about a real comeback), Hollywood has come to
prostrate itself at Jetsunma's carefully pedicured toes. Denise De
Novi, a producer at Warner Bros., recently signed a reputed $200,000
development deal with the lama, eager to make "The Buddha from
Brooklyn," a warm, uplifting, all-American story about what happens
when a feisty Babe from the boroughs find out from Tibetan holy men
that she's -- get outta here! -- a more than 300-year-old enlightened
being. Word is, Susan Sarandon will play Jetsunma. Soon, if all goes
well, her outsize image will be injected into multiplexes across the
land -- why, it's Moonstruck meets Gandhi! First, Jetsunma was
enthroned by the Tibetans; now, on the cusp of the millennium, it's
time for her glittering coronation by American pop culture.

Or is it? For there are unsettling rumors arising from Poolesville,
tales at shocking odds with kooky, feel-good narrative about class and
karma taking shape in Hollywood. From many sources connected with the
Temple -- several insistent on anonymity for fear of reprisal -- come
reports of beatings administered to monks and nuns by Jetsunma, a
shady, even illegal financial dealings, of psychic abuse and
manipulation eerily reminiscent of the early days of Johnstown.

When it became known that Tenzin Chophak, a recently enthroned tulku
and a translator for Penor Rinpoche, was talking openly to me about
KPC, his electronic mailbox filled with anonymous hate messages and
death threats, among them: "you better watch your back." "Testicular
cancer will befall you, and in a hurry, I hope." " You will burn in
vajra hell for many kalpas for what you are doing."

I, too, was warned, by a former Temple member who, while retaining a
fondness for Jetsunma, blamed her for the near collapse of his
marriage. "She will fuck you royally," he said. "She has these
people who think she's God. They might come burn your house down, put
a bomb in your car. Or they'll put a hex on you and you'll have bad
dreams for ten years." This is not the normal Buddhist policy for
interactive with the press. It's a religion that emphasizes
compassion and kindness to all beings, even journalists.

The questions of the screen writers of Jetsunma's biopic will now need
to consider concern the actual crux of her story. Is she the fully
enlightened leader of a Buddhist sangha, as the community that
practices the Dharma (Buddhist teachings) is known? Or the tyrannical
head of the New Age cult incorporating elements of Buddhism as window
dressing? Isn't she a compassionate, nurturing teacher? Or
ferocious, self-promoting huckster? If you disagree with her, will
you reap bad karma? Is the Buddha from Brooklyn really a Buddha at
all.

"All it is not well in Mudville, or shall we say, Poolesville," says
Lama Surya Das, the American born teacher of Tibetan Buddhism and
author of _Awakening of the Buddha Within_.

On even basic points, accounts differ. Jetsunma Akron Norbu Lhamo was
born Alyce Zeoli 48 years ago into an unhappy Jewish-Catholic home --
or so she says. (Another source asserts that her maiden name was
Alice Parker.) She grew up in Brooklyn, played stick ball, loved
Motown. Everyone agrees both parents drank to excess; her stepfather
beat Alice and her siblings unmercifully, threw hammers and saws at
them, even burned them with cigarettes.

At 17, she bolted from home, did a year of junior college in Florida,
got married a couple of times, had two sons. She ended up in the
mountains of North Carolina, where, in her 20s, a series of dreams let
her to concoct her own meditation practices. "I'm dedicated on each
part by body," she has said. "I found out later this is just like the
Tibetan practice called chod." At 30, some mysterious, "breakthrough"
spiritual event occurred. "It didn't hang out a shingle," she said,
"but after that people began to come to me."

Among them was Michael Burroughs, the man who would become her third
husband. "I fell for her hook, line, and sinker," Burroughs told me.
"From the very get-go, she had charisma. I mean, this lady could sell
milk back to the cows. I always had the feeling of not quite
belonging, in she made me feel like I had a place, home."

She seems to have been effect on others, as well. As former follower
and Buddhist monk Richard Dykeman, put it, "people would do anything
to get next to her mothering essence." It was as if she could give to
others what she hadn't received herself. Perhaps her brutal home life
had been a gift, the violent memories pressed by the heavyweight of
suffering until they crystalized the diamond of compassion. And if
you have the power to help others, certainly you must be healed
yourself, right?

In the early '80s, she attended a reunion with her brothers and
sisters, where everyone Frank and laughed and joked about the abuse
they had all endured. "When we went home," Burroughs says, "she
spent many nights crying, saying, 'please tell me I am not one of
them.'"

She and Burroughs wedded in July 1982 and moved to the suburbs north
of Washington DC, where they formed in informal church that was into
flying saucers, crystals, Native American rites, and other esoteric
spiritual disciplines. She attracted a flock of lost souls yearning
for community, their spiritual aspirations unsatisfied by organized
religion. "I was a seeker," says Wib Middleton, who with his wife
Jane has been part of Jetsunma's inner Circle since the early '80s and
now serves as her spokesman. (Jetsunma and declined to be interviewed
for this article.) "I was looking for something," Middleton says, and
when he looked into her eyes and saw all that "love and compassion, I
knew that I had found it."

Calling herself Catherine Burroughs (she took the names to signal not
just a change in matrimonial status but a new persona as well), she
started to gain a reputation as a channeller of the occult. She would
close her eyes and, in a quavery, high-pitched voice, pipe through the
spirits of various old Testament prophets, among them Jeremiah and
Elijah.

One day, a being inhabiting Catherine commanded Michael to read his
wife notes he had taken during a college class in Buddhism. "She
needs each do this," the voice said, adding poignantly, "she's not
very educated." Not long afterward, Catherine began channelling of
"Ms. Buddha." There was only one catch: her husband eventually
learned that she'd been faking the Oracle. "At first, when she told
me, I didn't believe her," Burroughs says. The "I mean, it's really,
really embarrassing."

In any event, Catherine quickly picked up the Buddhist lingo, enough
to parrot it back at Penor Rinpoche, who was visiting Washington in
the summer of 1985. During his trip, he wanted to meet her
congregation because they had bought so many carpets from the business
manager of his monastery in India, a venture that helped underwrite
his monks and Tibetan refugees. At a cook out in the backyard of her
Kensington, Maryland, home, where a bemused coterie of Tibetan
monastics was served grilled hot dogs, Catherine was ready. She
talked eloquently of emptiness, of compassion, and, perhaps most
importantly, of her spontaneous recognition of Penor Rinpoche has her
long-lost teacher. When she had greeted him at the airport earlier in
his visit, she had burst into tears. "I fell like I had met my mind,"
she later said.

Catherine seemed strangely familiar to the old Tibetan Lama, too.
He recognized her as a likely tulku and considered her followers
"baby Buddhists" who had unwittingly been in buying the tenets of
Buddhism along with more fashion fair from the spiritual supermarket.
In division right out of Gone the Wind, Penor Rinpoche foresaw the
group buying a mansion with white columns. Within the year, the
fledgling Buddhists located their dream house on the outskirts of
Poolesville, on a 72 acre tract in the middle of horse country.
Formerly owned by a Republican Party fund-raiser, the house -- now
containing a temple, offices, a solarium, and a gift shop selling
books such as Reverse the Aging Process In Your Face -- gives off the
slightly depressing vibe of a faux plantation mansion. With prayer
flags flapping on the lawn and the dharma wheel on the roof, it looks
as if Tibetan monks won the Civil War.

The rapid transition from the free-form experiments of the New Age to
the traditional practices of the Nyingma school were disorienting to
many of Catherine's longtime followers. "When I heard that we were
Buddhists, I was shocked," Middleton says. "We didn't like
organized religion. There was a whole new decorum necessary with a
tulku in our midst."

In 1987, at a Rinpoche invited Michael Catherine to his monastery and
in India, and there confirmed that she was the re-incarnation of a
17th century Tibetan woman with miraculous powers named Ahkon Norbu
Lhamo. Burroughs himself came up with the title Jetsunma, and
honorific meaning "very venerated."

"How'd she get that title?" Penor Rinpoche asked them, grinning.
"That's a better title than mine."

Jetsunma, however, was crushed that she wasn't recognized as someone
more famous! An ordained member of the temple who wandered by her
private quarters one day overheard the newly appointed tulku "going
bonkers." "Nobody's ever heard of this person!" She screamed at
Burroughs. Jetsunma demanded that another past life be found for her,
and Burroughs and Kusum Lingpa, Tibetan Lama, obliged. Before long,
she was proudly proclaiming that she was also the rebirth of Mandrawa,
the consort of a famous eighth century Tibetan guru, Padmasambhava.

Even with the titular aggravations, she quickly cottoned to her new
life as a tulku. "I said Terry India, 'Catherine, can you hand me a
toothbrush?' Or a comb, or whatever was," Burroughs recalls. She
said, 'don't call me Catherine. I am now Jetsunma.'"

Yes, she is. Judging from the accounts of disillusioned followers,
the crown Jetsunma wore during her enthronement may have gone to her
head in more ways than one. In recognizing her as a tulku, the
Tibetans appear to have confirmed a sense of destiny and entitlement
that she had nursed within herself for decades. In ministering to her
followers ravenous needs, she had risen far above them. Her cries to
Michael Burroughs that night many years ago had been resounding
answered: no, she wasn't like them!

The corollary to that revelation is: and nobody was quite like her
anymore, either.

Jetsunma expects KPC members to trust her with their children, their
money, their marriages, and their lives -- both this life and the ones
to come. "Who's the one sitting up here?" She tells them, according
to one Temple insider. "It's your karma to be here. You're clueless."
In 1996, Jetsunma's devoted main attendant, Alana, through whom she
often speaks, announced at a meeting that "ideally, your devotion for
Jetsunma will reach the point where when you see her come down the
road and cut the head off a sweet, innocent, little child, your only
thought will be, oh, what a lucky child."

These expectations of devotion are clearly reflected in Jetsunma's
financial arrangements with KPC. "It's all about money," says Bob
Denmark, a former temple member who works as a CPA in just this year
had a close look at the Temple's financial records. "They are running
a serious deficit. Jetsunma is getting paid $10,000 a month, and her
followers paid not only that but all of her lodging, her income, and
self-employment taxes. They pay her families health insurance, and
for her pool to be cleaned. She's netting $200,000, after taxes. And
on top of that, people give her money and gifts outside of what's
going through the books." He cites a jade necklace said to be worth
well over $200,000 that an older Chinese member of the sangha dreamed
he should donate to temple. Instead of being used to help retire the
property's debt, the necklace went to Jetsunma, passed onto her by the
nuns and monks to increase the temple's karmic merit.

"I can understand how it's hard for people outside to understand how
much she needs," would Middleton says. "But her salary is
commensurate to anybody who's the head of a large organization."

No financial sacrifice, however, is deemed to too large for the
faithful. While tithing is not cutomary in Tibetan Buddhism, KPC
members have been asked to donate $350 a month. In exchange for
additional -- and what one former member terms "enormous" -- sums,
Jetsunma offers to appear in the bardo, the realm of between death and
rebirth, to escort the deceased parents of her students toward a
fortunate re-incarnation. "I should get as much as Penor Rinpoche for
this!" She has angrily declared.

Although Tibetan Buddhism emphasizes the care of its nuns and monks,
the ordained were required to pay at least $300 a month for their rims
KPC, only to be kicked out when Jetsunma decided she wanted the
monastery for herself, according to a former resident. She requested,
however, that the ordained continue paying rent on their old rooms.
"Nobody could pay double," says the source. But we all felt guilty
about it."

"It always comes back to this: Give more money, get more merit," says
Bob Denmark. And audio tape backs up his story: on it, members can be
heard being encouraged empty their pension funds into Ladyworks, a
hair care business Jetsunma started in 1993, of which she is the sole
shareholder. Any profits would go to her; any losses would be
deducted from her taxes. If temple members lent money, they were
told, they would get good karma; if they GAVE money, they would get
even better karma.

An advisory board consisting mostly of new members worried that her
exorbitant income was endangering KPC's nonprofit status. "She was
clearing as much as the CEO of the major company," says Denmark.
"In a nonprofit organization, like a church, people aren't supposed to
be benefiting personally." The amount of Jetsunma's compensation, in
addition to her linking of the Temple's business with that of
Ladyworks, could invite IRS scrutiny.

Jetsunma's partisans tended to engage in magical thinking when it came
to her potential tax problems. The IRS couldn't touch her, they
claimed. As proof, they cited the miraculous time that she been
stopped by the cops for speeding and hadn't been given a ticket!

Matters came to head this past spring, when an internal task force
suggested that Jetsunma's salary might be cut in half. Jetsunma, who
was on retreat in Sedona, Arizona (as she is now), delivered her
response through Alana. "If you want to cut my salary," she had her
tell the community, "it's going to force me into bankruptcy. Or, I can
get a part-time job, if you want your lama doing that. Or I'll just
leave."

The threat worked. At a meeting to discuss the matter, a temple
member stood up and declared: "how dare you! I'd rather pull out my
left kidney than cut her salary."

Individual initiative, then, is not looked on with loving kindness
at KPC. Express the slightest doubt about Jetsunma or one of her
schemes, or diverge even the slightest bit from the way she has
prescribed, and you pay a severe price. Either directly, or through
her nuns, especially Alana, she threatens apostates with insanity,
death from cancer, and absolute isolation. She promises them they're
bound for vajra hell. And sometimes, says ex KPC monk Richard
Dykeman, who still says he owes Jetsunma his life for helping him come
to terms with an abusive childhood, she'd vows to die herself if she
doesn't get what she wants. He says, "she'd tell people, 'I had a
dream, and I'm going to die.' I finally said, 'Then tell the phony
bitch to die.'"

Dissenting spouses were often excoriated as "demons", especially if
Jetsunma fancied the other half of the couple. "She'll tell a
husband, 'we've been together in past lives, and now you're karma has
ripened and we're together again,'" says Dykeman, who counseled one
such couple in 1991. Another marriage barely survived Jetsunma's
so-called "mix and match" propensities when the wife left KPC and
Jetsunma tried to set up the husband with another woman. "I bought a
ticket on the Titanic," the husband says, while still expressing
affection for his former lama. "I like her, but she's damaged."

In the fall of 1992, the year of Jetsunma and Michael's divorce,
sources say members of KPC made an effigy of Michael, with a banana
to represent his penis, which is soon-to-be ex-wife smashed. His old
colleagues read grievances to the dummy, and then took it outside
where one member ran over it with a car. Another urinated on what was
left.

That expression of rage was mild, however, compared to what took place
on Feb. 2, 1996, after Jetsunma discovered that an nun and a monk had
spent the night together, although they hadn't actually had sex.
According to an eyewitness, whose story is corroborated by other
sources, guilty parties were driven to another nuns house, on state
Hill Road, and Poolesville. The two offenders were seated in chairs
the setup underneath a bright light, mimicking an interrogation scene
from the movies. The 30 or so other nuns and monks present had been
told to bring snacks as religious offerings.

In her usual capacity as Jetsunma's right hand nun, Alana announced to
the faithful: "Everyone, remember, what you're about to see is nothing
more than compassionate activity." Jetsunma then stormed into the
room, launching herself at the 6 ft. 4, two-hundred fifty pound monk,
smacking him above the ears hard enough to knock a pair of wrap around
glasses off his head. "You fool!" She screamed. She then attacked
the nun and struck her twice on the forehead, all the while granting
that the two were destroying dharma in the West, as well as shortening
Jetsunma's current life span. The spectators, it can be presumed,
were munching away on their snacks.

Within months of the assault, the nun and the monk had quit the temple
and had gone into hiding. In the late summer of 1996, Jetsunma was
arrested by the Maryland state police on charges of assault, but
the state declined to prosecute -- on the grounds, said the same
eyewitness, that Jetsunma's "religious status" would make for
difficult case. With the case file destroyed (as his customary after
a year), the state confirms only the arrest.

Although Wib Middleton prefers not to use the term assault, he does
not deny that the incident took place. Instead, he acknowledges that
"there are times when everything seems paradoxical." But "it's not
unusual," he says, "for a teacher not to get strong with a student."
He cites as historical precedents the first Ahkon Lhamo: "She was wild
and woolly," he says with an affectionate laugh, as if he sees exactly
who Jetsunma inherited her qualities from. He's like a parent talking
about an unruly child. "Ahkon Lhamo spent three decades in a cave,"
he says proudly. "People would line up for beatings. Afterward their
diseases would be healed."

Through every scrape, Jetsunma has consistently claimed to the sangha
that she has the full and enthusiastic support of Penor Rinpoche, the
Nyingma leader. Not so, say several inside sources. Tenzin Chophak
translated in October 1996 a letter that demanded that she stop
calling herself a Buddha and asked that she be more accessible to her
nuns and monks. They should be her first priority, Penor Rinpoche
insisted. He also begged Jetsunma not to use so much paint on her face,
a phrase Tenzin Chophak rendered as "please tone down your personal
parts."

"Penor Rinpoche has never told me exactly what he thinks," says K.T.
Shedrup Gyatso, a former monk KPC and head of a temple in San Jose,
"but other people close to him say that, on some level, he regrets
having 'recognized' her."

None of these allegations phases Middleton, he says he hasn't heard of
the letter. "I believe in my heart of hearts that Jetsunma is only
hard wired for compassion. I believe that if I wait long enough,
it'll all make sense to me."

The difference between a cult and a religion is largely a matter of
mathematics and history. Religions are big and enduring, cults are
small and new. Both offer their adherents not so much a method of
fathoming mystery as a means of transcending it. Faithful disciples
in a cult, passionate devotee of religion -- in terms of intent, what
really is the distinction? The real issue here is one of good and
evil, truth and mirage, and how to figure out which is which.

Jetsunma's worshippers gaze into her eyes and see the answer that
passes understanding. Her truth is greater than their own. Those who
have abandoned Jetsunma have looked into their own hearts and have
determined that the truth is widely distributed, that they will trust
themselves before all else. That both views require an equal measure
of faith is, of necessity, a perverse paradox.

In the desert now, among the rich, she goes again by the name of Alyce
Zeoli, according to the documentary maker Byron Pickett. Wealthy
people, too, have spiritual needs. She's there in Sedona on what
Middleton calls "semi retreat," a mere hop, skip, and a jump from the
ultimate samsara factory of Hollywood, where privileged lives like
Richard Gere's unfold and private splendor. There is always a better
life to be had, even on this earth. Accompanying her is a tight group
of family and longtime allies, 10 in number, including the ever loyal
Alana. Soon it will be Alana's duty to transform unseemly revelations
into a narrative of persecution and misunderstanding. She will tell
the doubters that they are wrong and her lama his right, that they
have not attained sufficient merit to understand.

The house and Poolesville is occupied, rent free, by Jetsunma's two
20-something sons. One, Christopher, is said to be especially close
to his mother, and perhaps is the heir apparent in her line of work.
It is said they sometimes practice staring into each other's eyes for
minutes on and. On Sundays, the faithful of KPC back in Poolesville
gather nearby, at the temple, and watch videotapes of their lama's
greatest hits. They listen to her say things like "beauty and youth
will fail us, even with the presence of a Estee Lauder in the world."
Have they been abandoned? Perhaps not. Although the Tibetans are
said to be hopeful that Jetsunma's stay in the desert is a long one,
Richard Dykeman believes that she'll keep coming back to KPC. "It's
her economic base," he says. She has sworn to her family that she'll
never be poor again, says one former acquaintance.

It's beautiful country, the Arizona desert. A holy place. Even
skeptics respond to its bare, bone-dry power. Jetsunma is no stranger
to the red sand and rock, the scrub, the blue infinity of sky. Back
in the '80s, she told her followers, she was forced to make several
emergency visits here to help fix a problem with the openings to the
other world. "The Hopi Indians, whose job it was to maintain the
portals, apparently weren't doing a very good job," says an ex-KPC
member.

Now, she once again stands at the gateway between two very different
worlds -- the world of image and the world of reality. The question
that Jetsunma, the Buddha from Brooklyn, must answer is: can SHE tell
the difference between them anymore?

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.buddhism.tibetan/msg/3d37c11708b96b2f?&q=jetsunma+ahkon+lhamo

[Elvis]

At least these fellows, it seems, were told they were being given something;
as someone who's had 100 or more acid experiences, I can't help chuckling at some of the effects seen here:

[Simulist]

Thank you for posting this, American Dream.

Two Sisters, LSD and Dr. Buckman

Marion McGill, today an attorney and college professor in the western United States and her sister, Trudy, were sent in 1960 by their parents to be interviewed by Drs. Ling and Buckman at the Chelsea Clinic in London. At the time, Marion was 13 years old and her sister was 15. Marion says that both her mother and father were "quite taken with the benefits of LSD and thought that we would also benefit from the drug." Both parents had undergone a series of ten LSD "treatments" at the Chelsea clinic. Marion goes on:

"As a 13-year old at the time, my decision-making capacity was very limited. I was, by nature, fairly compliant and docile, rather eager to please my parents. I understood nothing of what was being suggested for me and my 15 year-old sister - namely that we participate in some sort of 'research' that both our parents had also participated in. Whether the word 'experiment' was used, I don't recall. The term 'LSD' was vaguely familiar, however, because my parents were 'taking' this drug as a form of 'quick therapy' - their term for it - that had been recommended by my uncle, a psychiatrist at a well known east coast medical school. Both parents needed therapy, in my view. While highly successful professionally, my father was a tightly wound, rather angry and insecure man, an accomplished academic, but an 'industrial strength narcissist,' as I later called him. My mother was a submissive, obedient, Catholic woman without much identity of her own, other than being a doctor's wife.

"My sister and I, however, were about as 'normal' as any two teenagers could be. We were at the top of our classes in school; both of us had lots of friends, participated in extra curricular activities. We didn't need 'therapy.' We were told we would get a day off from school after each overnight stay at the clinic for this LSD. It was perhaps the prospect of a day off from Catholic girls' school that persuaded us to do it. I wasn't aware of making a 'decision.' The purpose of this program was never explained. There were to be 10 sessions - once a week for 10 weeks. I believe they started in January 1960.

"The experiences at the clinic where the LSD was administered were quite strange. There was a brief 'interview' by Dr. John Buckman, asking banal questions about health issues (none), but providing no information about what to expect from the LSD. There was no mention, for example, of hallucinations or perceptual distortions or anything frightening. I was not informed of any persistent effects, such as nightmares. Certainly the possibility of lasting damage was not mentioned. The word 'experiment' was not used. There was, in other words, no informed consent whatsoever. I was not told that I could refuse to participate, that I could quit at any time (as provided in the Nuremberg Code). Since I was below the age of consent, my parents would have been the ones to agree to this. Indeed, they were the ones to suggest that we be used in these experiments. It would not otherwise have happened. But my parents would never discuss this in later years and never explained why they did it.

"During the 10 sessions, each of which involved an injection, my sister and I were kept in separate bedrooms, darkened rooms, usually with someone present in the room, but I don't know who the person was. Occasionally, my mother was also present. At times, I was so frightened by the hallucinations that I screamed and tried to escape from the room. I remember once actually reaching the hallway and being forcibly put back into the bedroom by my mother. I saw a wild array of images - nightmarish visions, occasionally provoking hysterical laughter, followed immediately by wracking sobs. I had no idea what was happening to me. It was terrifying.

"There was no effort to counsel us during or after each of these sessions. There was no 'debriefing,' no explanation of what was happening or why this was being done to us. Why I did not refuse to participate after I first experienced it, I don't know. But as an adult and later as a professional medical ethicist, I recognized this lack of resistance as a function of childhood itself. Most children who are victims of parental abuse do not know how to resist. They fear rejection by parents more than they fear the abuse, it seems. The 'power differential' is huge between parents and children and the dependence on parents is virtually absolute. We were also, living in London at the time, away from our friends. My sister and I had been told not to talk about what we were doing. We were Catholics, obedient to parents, etc. Our father was a doctor, after all - it was hard to grasp that he would do harm to us or that our mother would. Children just don't think this way initially. A child's dependency usually means trusting one's parents or caregivers.

"Although each individual session was often terrifying, any lasting effects of the LSD unfolded gradually. In the weeks immediately following the final session, I experienced frequent nightmares - visions of crawling insects, horrible masks, etc. I couldn't sleep. I was afraid to shut my eyes. I became afraid of the dark. My parents were dismissive and unsympathetic. Their attitude was, in some ways, more disturbing to me than the experiments themselves because it meant that my parents had known full well that the experience would very likely be frightening - and hadn't cared.

"I discovered that my parents were dishonest and unfeeling in ways that I could not comprehend. They told my sister and me never to talk about the LSD experiences, never to disclose what had happened in London. This further ruptured our relationship with them, a relationship that was, by then, permanently damaged. I was still dependent on them, however and so was my sister.

"Two years after these experiments, during her freshman year in college, my sister suffered a nervous breakdown. I don't know the extent to which the LSD may have precipitated this. But my parents' response to what was probably a mild breakdown from which my sister could have recovered, was coercive and drastic. She had been asking questions about the LSD at this time. She was angry about it. We both were. We talked about it together, but I was afraid to confront our parents. My sister was not. The angrier she became, the more she was 'diagnosed' as a 'psychiatric' case and the more medication she was given. To this day, my sister is heavily medicated. She never fully recovered from that first episode.

"Our parents responded to my sister's anger in a way that frightened me further. I also felt tremendous guilt for not being able to prevent the horrors that my sister endured. Once she was 'classified' as a psychiatric patient, she was lost. Everything that was done to her in the name of 'treatment' seemed to me to be a form of ongoing abuse and torture.

"The fact that our father was a prominent, internationally known and widely respected physician - and his brother, who had introduced us to this LSD horror, was a prominent, internationally known and widely respected psychiatrist - made it impossible to expose them or go against them. Their reputations were more important to them than the health and well being of my sister.

"My own response was simply to leave home. I never trusted my parents again after the London LSD experience. I discovered many other ways in which my father and my uncle lied, covered up, dissembled and eventually threatened me, in order to keep this story from being told.

"On a positive note, the experience informed my career choices in both human rights and medical ethics, but it also made me alert to the ways in which academic medicine was - and is - corrupted by the drug industry itself and by the continuing abuse of human subjects to further the development of drugs as weapons - both for interrogation potential and also, more subtle behavior control on a massive scale. My own experience also sensitized me to the special vulnerability of children and teenagers in the medical environment.

"Even when I subsequently confronted my father with the evidence that LSD had been tested by the CIA for use as a military weapon in the 1950s and 1960s, he dismissed his participation by saying that it was an 'enlightening experience, like visiting an art gallery.' When I pointed out that this was not my experience as a child, he dismissed it, including the presumption that I must be a 'conspiracy theorist' to propose such a thing. At the age of 91, he finally admitted that it had perhaps not been a very good idea to subject my sister and me to LSD.

"Dr. Buckman and Ling were knowing participants in ongoing intelligence-based work with mind altering drugs. I 'met' Buckman in London when I was 13, but encountered him again years later at the university medical school in the United States where he was on the faculty.

"I went to see Dr. Buckman in his office. I asked him what he thought about the ethics of using children in an LSD experiment. At first, he didn't seem to realize who I was. I identified myself as one of his 'subjects' and gave him my business card as a Medical Ethicist and lawyer. He was clearly shocked, stood up, refused to talk to me and told me to leave his office. Shortly thereafter, I received a phone call from my father. His brother, the psychiatrist and colleague of Dr. Buckman, had been alerted to my impromptu visit. Subsequently, both my uncle and my father threatened me, saying they would make sure I lost my university faculty position if I disclosed anything publicly about the LSD experiments in London.

"'You will never work in bioethics again,' they said.

"The response of all these men to the threat of disclosure indicates their lack of ethical scruples, their lack of empathy, their own pathology. I don't know what the exact term would be, but I suspect there is a form of psychological 'doubling' at work - the sort of thing that was described in [Robert Jay] Lifton's book, The Nazi Doctors who were able to ignore their Hippocratic oath to 'first, do no harm,' and to inflict unimaginable horrors on their fellow human beings.

"The loss of my sister has been a life long source of sorrow for me. I attribute it to the LSD and its cover up, whether the chemicals themselves 'caused' her disintegration or not. In law this is called a 'contributing cause.' I learned that people cover up the most awful things, not just within a family but within communities, within universities, within 'polite society.' There is probably no absolute barrier that will prevent these things from being done, but they have to be exposed and called out for what they are, whenever they occur."

[American Dream]

David Icke on the EU:

...Delusion? Mythology? Racial bias?

http://www.borderland.co.uk/index.php?o ... t-watching

David Icke: The Fraud Continues...

We have long been in the vanguard of countering anti-semitism and bs masquerading as 'progressive' politics. Not everybody knows that of course. One bad penny who keeps turning up is con-artist David Icke. Below, check out the article by colleague Paul Stott. As time permits (focussed as our main energies are on the next issue of NFB plus another imminent publication), we will add a past article deconstructing Icke's anti-semitism written by Larry O'Hara. But the article is a start.. Heidi Svenson 27/10/11


Countering Nonsense In The Occupy Movement 23/10/11 (Paul Stott on 911 cultwatch blog)

From speaking to activists over the past few days, it is interesting, and slightly concerning, to note some news emerging from the Occupy movement.

Spreading from Occupy Wall Street, a series of similar occupations have occurred internationally. In the UK this has included an attempt to occupy the London Stock Exchange, and events in regional cities like Norwich and Birmingham. Opposition to the disastrous decision to bail out banks on the verge of financial collapse has now found a degree of articulation.

There are of course issues and debates around this. Speaking to Anarchists like Ian Bone at the Anarchist Bookfair yesterday, there were concerns that the importance of the Occupy movement was being greatly overstated, usually by sympathetic activists who want it to be so many things. It's particular form has also been criticised, whilst the vagueness of its anti-capitalist message has been condemned by libertarians, who draw a distinction between what they see as capitalism and corporatism/crony capitalism.

A more serious debate is now on-going about how to deal with the presence of conspiracy theorists at occupy events. The financial crisis is naturally something easily explained by the likes of David Icke, who has been vociferous in his condemnation of what he sees as Rothschild-Zionism. To Icke, no discussion of 9/11, or the financial crisis, can be made without reference to this conspiracy. Such nonsense makes all protestors easy targets for media exposes, hit-pieces on their 'racism' or their portrayal as addled thinkers. The serious questions raised about government economic policy, capitalism, our financial system and government relations with it, are in danger of being ignored in place of arguments about anti-Semitism or the sheer oddness of certain protestors.

There is only two responses to this. I discount ignoring them, because they will not go away, and numerically will form a significant number of the protestors in many cities. For such thinkers, the financial system is one of the issues - they certainly will not abandon it. Icke has been calling on the human race to get off its knees for so long, when they actually see it happening, their movement is energised

One response is to allow the Icke types to dominate. To walk away and do something else instead. The second response, which I know many are now turning to, is to try and counter them. This is difficult, not because their arguments are so strong - they are not - but because arguing with people full of Zeitgeist or Icke thought is not an easy process. They have been exposed to an absolute truth. Those who do not follow it cannot be allowed to simply disagree with them, but become part of the problem as soon as they disagree.

It is neccesary to attack Icke's anti-Semitism, his ludicrous reptilian fantasies and to ask what Icke has proved in twenty plus years of 'exposing' the system. Other than improving his bank balance - the answer is nothing. Events like the banking crisis and 9/11 are actually very simple. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for attacking New York, and the evidence for US or Israeli participation is nil. The banking crisis occurred because the banks gambled lots of money, and governments who had long dropped any pretence of regulation, bailed out their mates with our cash.

Keep it simple. Because it is simple.

[undead]

It is neccesary to attack Icke's anti-Semitism, his ludicrous reptilian fantasies and to ask what Icke has proved in twenty plus years of 'exposing' the system. Other than improving his bank balance - the answer is nothing. Events like the banking crisis and 9/11 are actually very simple. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for attacking New York, and the evidence for US or Israeli participation is nil. The banking crisis occurred because the banks gambled lots of money, and governments who had long dropped any pretence of regulation, bailed out their mates with our cash.

Keep it simple. Because it is simple.

Yeah, really simple. Especially 9/11. And the 380 billion dollars laundered by Wachovia for Mexican drug cartels that was abruptly withdrawn when Obama's new justice department announced a further investigation. And the subsequent run on the banks and cascading downward spiral and inevitable crash. All very simple.

Icke is a reptillian shapeshifter. If this is true, then certainly everything else is true.

In Ray Nelson's "8 O Clock in the Morning", which was published in 1963, the controlling aliens are called the "Fascinators", which is a perfect description of Icke.

I am for more Credo Mutwa and zero David Icke.