What should be an exhibit in a war crimes tribunal prosecution against the Bush Cabal

A timeline to Bush government torture

Newly public evidence sheds greater light on Bush officials' efforts to develop brutal interrogation techniques for the war on terror.

By Mark Benjamin

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Daniel Baumgartner Jr., testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee about detainee treatment on June 17, 2008, in Washington.

June 18, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- For years now, the Bush White House has claimed that the United States does not conduct torture. Prisoner abuse at places like Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it has asserted, was an aberration -- the work of a few "bad apples" on the night shift. When the CIA used "enhanced" interrogation techniques such as waterboarding (simulated drowning), the abuse, according to Bush officials, did not add up to torture.

But as more and more documents from inside the Bush government come to light, it is increasingly clear that the administration sought from early on to implement interrogation techniques whose basis was torture. Soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon and the CIA began an orchestrated effort to tap expertise from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school, for use in the interrogation of terrorist suspects. The U.S. military's SERE training is designed to inoculate elite soldiers, sailors and airmen to torture, in the event of their capture, by an enemy that would violate the Geneva Conventions. Those service members are subjected to forced nudity, stress positions, hooding, slapping, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and, yes, in some cases, waterboarding.

SERE training has nothing to do with effective interrogation, according to military experts. Trained interrogators don't work in the program. Skilled, experienced interrogators, in fact, say that only a fool would think that the training could somehow be reverse-engineered into effective interrogation techniques.

But that's exactly what the Bush government sought to do. As the plan rolled forward, military and law enforcement officials consistently sent up red flags that the SERE-based interrogation program wasn't just wrongheaded, it was probably illegal.

On Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee conducted a hearing on the evolution of abusive interrogations under the Bush administration. Through a series of memos and documents released by the committee, some old and some new, the following timeline has now been established. Committee chairman Carl Levin, the senior Democrat from Michigan, discussed this timeline at length in his opening statement.

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July 2002 -- Richard Shiffrin, a deputy general counsel in the Department of Defense, called Lt. Col. Daniel Baumgartner Jr. from the military's SERE school. Shiffrin wanted information on SERE training techniques. Baumgartner testified on Tuesday that during this period, he received similar requests from the Defense Intelligence Agency and "another agency" he declined to name.

July 25 and 26, 2002 -- Baumgartner responded to the Pentagon request by sending two memos to the Pentagon's general counsel's office describing SERE training techniques. The memos discuss (among other things) sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, stress positions, waterboarding, slapping, sensory overload and diet manipulation. The hearing on Tuesday did not go into what information was sent to the DIA or the "other agency."

Aug. 1, 2002 -- The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel sent memos to Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, about the definition of torture. It sent another memo to the CIA. The memo to Gonzales defined torture as pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." The CIA memo remains classified.

Week of Sept. 16, 2002 -- Interrogators from Guantánamo Bay traveled to the SERE school at Fort Bragg, N.C., for training by SERE staff.

Sept. 25, 2002 -- David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel; acting CIA general counsel John Rizzo, Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes; and Michael Chertoff, then head of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department; all traveled to Guantánamo. They attended briefings on "intel techniques," according to a military after-action report.

Oct. 2, 2002 -- Jonathan Fredman, chief counsel to the CIA's counterterrorism center, went to Guantánamo. While there, Fredman discussed with military officials a classified memo on aggressive interrogation techniques prepared by a psychologist and psychiatrist who had attended SERE training at Fort Bragg, according to minutes from the meeting. In attendance was Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a staff judge advocate at Guantánamo. Fredman explained that for the CIA, the Justice Department had to approve the use of "significantly harsh" techniques. He also agreed to show the military officials a copy of a CIA request regarding the use of those methods, so the military officials could see what such a request looks like. Among other things, military officials asked if the CIA used waterboarding, as taught through SERE. "If a well trained individual is used to perform this technique it can feel like you are drowning," Fredman replied, according to the minutes. "The lymphatic system will react as if you're suffocating, but your body will not cease to function. It is very effective to identify phobias and use them, i.e.; insects, snakes, claustrophobia." The meeting minutes also show a discussion about hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Oct. 11, 2002 -- Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who was in charge of Guantánamo, sent a memo to his superiors at U.S. Southern Command requesting approval of the use of three categories of increasingly brutal interrogation techniques. They included stress positions, exploitation of phobias, forced nudity, hooding, isolation, sensory deprivation, exposure to cold, and waterboarding. Attached was a memo from Beaver, justifying the legality of the techniques.

Oct. 25, 2002 -- U.S. Southern Command Cmdr. Gen. James Hill forwarded the request to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Early November 2002 -- Push-back: In a series of scathing memos, alarmed military officials from all four services raised questions about the legality and effectiveness of the techniques under consideration. The Air Force cited "serious concerns regarding the legality" of the techniques. The chief of the Army's international law division said some of the techniques, like stress positions and sensory deprivation, "cross the line of 'humane' treatment.'" He added that the techniques "may violate the torture statute." The Navy called for further legal review. The Marine Corps wrote that the techniques "arguably violate federal law."

Nov. 23, 2002 -- The interrogation of a prisoner named Mohammed al-Khatani began at Guantánamo. The list of SERE-based indignities visited upon Khatani is long. Among them: Khatani was forced to stand naked in front of a female interrogator, was accused of being a homosexual, was forced to wear women's underwear and to perform "dog tricks" on a leash. He received 18-to-20-hour interrogations during 48 of 54 days. (Last month, the Convening Authority for military commissions "dismissed without prejudice" the charges against al-Khatani.)

Nov. 27, 2002 -- Despite the concerns raised by military leaders, Haynes, the Pentagon general counsel, sent a memo to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recommending approval of all but three of the techniques requested for use at Guantánamo by Dunlavey. Among the things Haynes recommended for approval: stress positions, forced nudity, use of dogs and sensory deprivation.

Dec. 2, 2002 -- Rumsfeld approved Haynes' memo authorizing the harsh techniques for Guantánamo. He added a now infamous handwritten note about forcing prisoners to stand for long periods: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" A copy of the memo signed by Rumsfeld was sent from Guantánamo to Afghanistan.

Early December 2002 -- Senior staff at Guantánamo drafted standard operating procedures for using SERE techniques during interrogations. According to the procedures, SERE training techniques "can be used to break real detainees during interrogation." That included slapping, stripping, stress positions and hooding.

Dec. 17, 2002 -- Push-back: FBI officials balked at the Guantánamo standard operating procedure, writing in a memo that law enforcement officials "object to these aggressive interrogation techniques."

Dec. 20, 2002 -- Push-back: Alberto Mora, then general counsel of the Navy, meets with Haynes, the Pentagon general counsel. Mora strongly objects to the techniques approved by Rumsfeld for Guantánamo. A memo describing the meeting shows Mora told Haynes that the techniques approved by Rumsfeld "could rise to the level of torture."

Dec. 30, 2002 -- Two instructors from the Navy SERE program arrive at Guantánamo. The next day, they school 24 members of the interrogation staff about slapping and stress positions.

January 2003 -- The officer in charge of the intelligence section at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan viewed a PowerPoint presentation on the techniques approved by Rumsfeld on Dec. 2, 2002.

Jan. 9, 2003 -- Push-back: Mora met with Haynes again and objected to the interrogation techniques.

Jan. 15, 2003 -- Push-back: Mora urged Haynes to rescind the interrogation techniques authorized at Guantánamo. Mora said that if the abuse were not rolled back, he would sign a memo declaring that some of the more aggressive techniques approved by Rumsfeld "were violative of domestic and international legal norms." Rumsfeld rescinded his Dec. 2, 2002, memo authorizing harsh interrogation techniques.

Jan. 15, 2003 -- Rumsfeld established a "working group" to develop interrogation techniques to replace his Dec. 2, 2002, memorandum he had rescinded under pressure from Mora.

Jan. 24, 2003 -- A military attorney in Afghanistan produced an interrogation memo, which remains classified. A military report later divulged that the memo included some techniques approved by Rumsfeld on Dec. 2, 2002, including the use of dogs and forced nudity.

March 14, 2003 -- John Yoo, from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, drafted a memo on interrogations claiming that anti-torture law would not apply to some interrogations. Rumsfeld's working group has been widely criticized for disregarding the input of military attorneys such as Mora, and following Yoo's guidance.

Early 2003 -- Special Mission Unit forces in Iraq developed interrogation protocol based on techniques in use in Afghanistan. Interrogations included yelling, loud music, light control, exposure to heat and cold, sleep deprivation, stress positions and use of dogs for intimidation. The interrogation officer in charge of Abu Ghraib obtained a copy of the Special Mission Unit policy and submitted it to her command as proposed policy for use by conventional U.S. forces in Iraq.

April 16, 2003 -- Based on his working group's recommendations, Rumsfeld approved another list of interrogation techniques for use at Guantánamo. It authorized dietary manipulation, environmental manipulation and sleep "adjustment." It also said other techniques might be approved on request.

Aug. 13, 2003 -- Rumsfeld approved an interrogation program for a specific prisoner at Guantánamo, Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Documents from the plan remain classified. A Department of Defense inspector general report cites an FBI agent who saw a draft of the plan. The agent said it was similar to the plan for Khatani.

September 2003 -- SERE instructors are deployed to Iraq to assist interrogators, in response to a request from commander of the Special Mission Unit Task Force.

Sept. 14, 2003 -- Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, in charge of U.S. forces in Iraq, issued a standard operating procedure for interrogation that authorized stress positions, environmental manipulation, sleep management and use of dogs.

April 2004 -- Prisoner abuse by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib comes to light and becomes a worldwide scandal. Pictures showed forced nudity, stress positions, hooding, sexual humiliation and other SERE-based techniques.

Original article posted here.

Making your children crazy: obey or be medicated

How Teenage Rebellion Has Become a Mental Illness

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet.

For a generation now, disruptive young Americans who rebel against authority figures have been increasingly diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric (psychotropic) drugs.

Disruptive young people who are medicated with Ritalin, Adderall and other amphetamines routinely report that these drugs make them "care less" about their boredom, resentments and other negative emotions, thus making them more compliant and manageable. And so-called atypical antipsychotics such as Risperdal and Zyprexa -- powerful tranquilizing drugs -- are increasingly prescribed to disruptive young Americans, even though in most cases they are not displaying any psychotic symptoms.

Many talk show hosts think I'm kidding when I mention oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). After I assure them that ODD is in fact an official mental illness -- an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers -- they often guess that ODD is simply a new term for juvenile delinquency. But that is not the case.

Young people diagnosed with ODD, by definition, are doing nothing illegal (illegal behaviors are a symptom of another mental illness called conduct disorder). In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) created oppositional defiant disorder, defining it as "a pattern of negativistic, hostile and defiant behavior." The official symptoms of ODD include "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules" and "often argues with adults." While ODD-diagnosed young people are obnoxious with adults they don't respect, these kids can be a delight with adults they do respect; yet many of them are medicated with psychotropic drugs.

An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than overt defiance is some type of passive defiance.

John Holt, the late school critic, described passive-aggressive strategies employed by prisoners in concentration camps and slaves on plantations, as well as some children in classrooms. Holt pointed out that subjects may attempt to appease their rulers while still satisfying some part of their own desire for dignity "by putting on a mask, by acting much more stupid and incompetent than they really are, by denying their rulers the full use of their intelligence and ability, by declaring their minds and spirits free of their enslaved bodies."

Holt observed that by "going stupid" in a classroom, children frustrate authorities through withdrawing the most intelligent and creative parts of their minds from the scene, thus achieving some sense of potency.

Going stupid -- or passive aggression -- is one of many nondisease explanations for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all ADHD-diagnosed children will pay attention to activities that they enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the "disease" goes away.

There are other passive rebellions against authority that have been medicalized by mental health authorities. I have talked to many people who earlier in their lives had been diagnosed with substance abuse, depression and even schizophrenia but believe that their "symptoms" had in fact been a kind of resistance to the demands of an oppressive environment. Some of these people now call themselves psychiatric survivors.

While there are several reasons for behavioral disruptiveness and emotional difficulties, rebellion against an oppressive environment is one common reason that is routinely not even considered by many mental health professionals. Why? It is my experience that many mental health professionals are unaware of how extremely obedient they are to authorities. Acceptance into medical school and graduate school and achieving a Ph.D. or M.D. means jumping through many meaningless hoops, all of which require much behavioral, attentional and emotional compliance to authorities -- even disrespected ones. When compliant M.D.s and Ph.D.s begin seeing noncompliant patients, many of these doctors become anxious, sometimes even ashamed of their own excessive compliance, and this anxiety and shame can be fuel for diseasing normal human reactions.

Two ways of subduing defiance are to criminalize it and to pathologize it, and U.S. history is replete with examples of both. In the same era that John Adams' Sedition Act criminalized criticism of U.S. governmental policy, Dr. Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry (his image adorns the APA seal), pathologized anti-authoritarianism. Rush diagnosed those rebelling against a centralized federal authority as having an "excess of the passion for liberty" that "constituted a form of insanity." He labeled this illness "anarchia."

Throughout American history, both direct and indirect resistance to authority has been diseased. In an 1851 article in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright reported his discovery of "drapetomania," the disease that caused slaves to flee captivity. Cartwright also reported his discovery of "dysaesthesia aethiopis," the disease that caused slaves to pay insufficient attention to the master's needs. Early versions of ODD and ADHD?

In Rush's lifetime, few Americans took anarchia seriously, nor was drapetomania or dysaesthesia aethiopis taken seriously in Cartwright's lifetime. But these were eras before the diseasing of defiance had a powerful financial ally in Big Pharma.

In every generation there will be authoritarians. There will also be the "bohemian bourgeois" who may enjoy anti-authoritarian books, music, and movies but don't act on them. And there will be genuine anti-authoritarians, who are so pained by exploitive hierarchies that they take action. Only occasionally in American history do these genuine anti-authoritarians actually take effective direct action that inspires others to successfully revolt, but every once in a while a Tom Paine comes along. So authoritarians take no chances, and the state-corporate partnership criminalizes anti-authoritarianism, pathologizes it, markets drugs to "cure" it and financially intimidates those who might buck the system.

It would certainly be a dream of Big Pharma and those who favor an authoritarian society if every would-be Tom Paine -- or Crazy Horse, Tecumseh, Emma Goldman or Malcolm X -- were diagnosed as a youngster with mental illness and quieted with a lifelong regimen of chill pills. The question is: Has this dream become reality?


Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green, 2007).

Original article posted here.

The only thing you have to fear is fear itself . . .

Dave Lindorff: They're Scaring Us to Death

Dave Lindorff

Well, now we know. Scientists have documented that the Bush/Cheney Administration has been a greater threat to Americans' health and safety than Osama Bin Laden and his terror band.

Specifically, The New York Times, in its science section today, reports that a new study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry has found that while the risk to Americans of dying at the hands of a terrorist was roughly equal to the chance of "drowning in a toilet," the risk of cardiovascular disease among people who are frightened about the threat of terrorism is 300%-500% higher than for people who are not worried.

What this means is that the Bush/Cheney Administration, by constantly hyping the nation's fears of terror through the use of everything from daily color-coded terror alerts, to absurd inspection procedures at airline terminals and parcel post restrictions, is actually scaring some of us to death. And for what?

From the moment those planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon back in September 2001, Bush, Cheney, and their allies -- Republican and Democrat -- in Congress and the media have been peppering us with warnings that the "bad guys" are out to kill us, to destroy our way of life, and to defeat America.

It has been a ludicrous idea from the start. The idea that a small gang of guys from the Middle East could bring the mightiest nation that the world has ever known to its knees, or even significantly threaten the safety and security of the people of the United States is simply absurd and laughable. Why, even the detonation of a small smuggled nuclear device in or near an American city, should such a thing ever come to pass, would be less of a threat to the nation as a whole than the eruption of one of our many active volcanoes -- say Mt. Rainier or Mt. Hood, or the Yellowstone caldera -- or an 8 or 9-point earthquake in San Francisco or Los Angeles. And those natural disasters are probably more likely than the explosion of a terrorist nuke.

Yet Bush, Cheney, and other charlatans such as Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and the former senator and now Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Rick Santorum continue to do the scare routine, warning that we are in grave danger -- from Al Qaeda or Iran getting The Bomb, to Venezuela buying military aircraft from Brazil, to Cuba manufacturing dangerous biological weapons.

I have been stunned at the response of my fellow Americans to this blatant nonsense. Shortly after the Twin Towers went down, my local school district announced the cancellation for the entire year of all school trips! There was a fear among parents and members of the local school authorities that the buses carrying them to museums or the zoo might pose tempting targets for terrorists! Our kids were also treated to scary "intruder lockdowns" where they'd be locked with their teachers in their classrooms while local cops dressed in black SWAT gear and armed with assault rifles played army in the hallways looking for imaginary terrorists.

I've gone on plane flights where I've had to wait in line for an hour while Transportation Security Administration guards check the tiny shoes of six-month-old infants to make sure they weren't shoe bombs, and have had to surrender countless bottles of mouthwash and drinking water and tubes of toothpaste, all suspected of being smuggled explosives. (I was also honored with an "S" mark on my boarding pass a couple of times, which meant I was pulled aside for special inspection for fear I might be a terrorist myself.)

All of this nonsense, however, is coming with a price. I can laugh because I know it's nonsense. But some people aren't laughing. They're living in fear. And that fear is causing them to suffer cardiovascular disease, according to this new study.

Of course, that's only the tip of the iceberg, really, when it comes to the cost of the Washington terror scam.

American businesses have spent literally tens of billions of dollars -- maybe hundreds of billions of dollars -- on security measures, fearing terror attacks on their installations, or on their communications, or on Wall Street. Thousands of foreign science students and scientists have been banned from the US -- or even deported -- for fear they might be terrorists in training. Municipalities and states have spent billions in taxpayer dollars on security that they simply don't need. My little town of Upper Dublin, just north of Philadelphia, with just some 26,000 people, has its own police SWAT team, for Pete's sake, complete with a large gray SWAT vehicle -- a panel truck loaded with heavy combat firepower capable of repelling a small third-world army. I wonder how many teachers that money could have hired? Maybe they wouldn't have had to let the elementary music program go down the tubes.

I haven't mentioned the whole $1-2 trillion War in Iraq, which was all the result of presidential and vice presidential scare mongering.

And of course, that's just the financial cost of scare mongering. We've also given up most of our Bill or Rights, and even some more ancient rights, such as the right of Habeas Corpus. And we're about to give up our entire right to privacy if the government gets its way and introduces a national identity card. How far away are we from having to get injected with identity chips?

All this panic and fear, and yet we still sing this national anthem that calls America "the home of the brave"?

I don't think so. "Home of the scared shitless" might be more appropriate.

The good news is that maybe this new report on the health threat posed by government scare mongering will cause people to do something about it. If there's one thing Americans get worked up about, it's threats to their health. Look how anxious people get about Bird Flu, West Nile Virus, Anthrax, Bubonic Plague, AIDS, etc. Maybe now that we're learning that worrying about terror can kill us, we'll demand that officials and politicians in Washington just shut the hell up about it.

I don't know about you, but I really don't think about terrorists. The chances that I'm going to be the victim of a bombing, plane hijacking, or mall attack is so minimal it can't be measured.

I'm much more worried that the country that I grew up in has been hijacked by a bunch of power-mad war-mongers bent on destroying the Constitution and bringing to an end the free and free-wheeling society we've been building for over 200 years.

I hope that worrying doesn't end up giving me a heart attack...

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

Television as war crime propaganda medium

Prof: After 9/11, we see torture as normal

Samara Kalk Derby

Fox Broadcasting co.

Keifer Sutherland (left) appears as Agent Jack Bauer in a scene from Fox's "24," which shows scenes of violence and torture frequently.

Torture has become normalized in American society post-9/11 and that is why the public is not outraged when the U.S. government does it, a Beloit College sociology professor told a Madison audience Tuesday night in the Meriter Main Gate auditorium.

Carol Wickersham, an anti-torture activist who is also a Presbyterian minister, showed a picture of actor Kiefer Sutherland, who plays a counterterrorism agent on the Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning Fox show "24," and asked if anyone in the room knew who he was.

The group of 30, members of the Dane County chapter of the United Nations Association, was silent.

"It's Jack Bauer, the star of '24,' " she said. " '24' is one of the most popular shows on television and '24' shows torture every single show."

According to Fox publicity materials, Bauer helps prevent major terrorist attacks on the United States, saving both civilians and government leaders. Wickersham acknowledges that the show is "very well done" and that it is compelling drama. But at the same time, she said, the program has helped normalize torture as a part of American life and culture.

Prior to 9/11, torture was shown two or three times on an average season of network television. After 9/11, it's been closer to 67 times a season, she said. Before 9/11, torture was always done by the bad guys. Now torture is usually done by the good guys, she added.

"This is a huge sea change in American culture and those of us, including me, who don't watch television need to understand that this is going on," Wickersham said.

A group of West Point generals went to Hollywood to talk to the producers of "24" and asked them to tone it down, telling them that soldiers in the field are passing around DVDs of the program, and instead of following U.S. military rules of engagement, they are using Jack Bauer's rules of engagement.

"And what did the producers of '24' say? 'No. Our ratings are really good,'" Wickersham said.

When the photographs from the U.S. military's Abu Ghraib prison came out Wickersham was
working on the national peacemaking conference for the Presbyterian Church.

"I was horrified," she said, adding that there was no longer plausible deniability that torture was occurring. "It was outrageous that people weren't more outraged."

Wickersham is coordinator of No2Torture, which sprung from the 2005 Presbyterian Peacemaking Conference as a grassroots movement to take a stand for the humane treatment of prisoners captured and held by the United States and its allies following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

She is also a board member of the National Religious Coalition Against Torture, which is composed of about 300 faith-based groups. Members came together from across the political and theological spectrums to basically say the same thing, Wickersham said, "which is, torture is

a moral issue. And it is always wrong. There is no exception to this rule."

To take action against torture, Wickersham encouraged the local United Nations Association crowd to mobilize friends, family and neighbors. "If we are going to take action we have to learn how to frame the conversation," she said.

There are two important questions to answer when it comes to torture: What is torture? And do we do it?

The definition of torture from article 3 of the Geneva Conventions uses the phrase "humiliating and degrading treatment," adding that "it's sadism if one person does it to another. It's torture if a nation does it."

Do nations have a right to interrogate people? she asked. "I think most of us would say yes. There is a right to hold people for questioning if you believe they may have committed a crime or an act of war."

One of the things to remember is that prisoners who are being held in Guant namo have no access to the evidence against them. Most of them haven't been charged with any crime, she said.

have examined the victims of torture.

In terms whether of the United States engages in torture, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George Bush have both stood up and said the United States does not torture. Wickersham said she'd like to believe that, but she is instead listening to a host of others who say the opposite is true.

That list includes former prisoners and their attorneys; human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights; former interrogators and guards have come forward and talked about it; military lawyers; the international Red Cross; The Center for Victims of Torture; physicians and psychologists who

"What we say is that it was a few bad apples," Wickersham said. "That was the line that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney used. We prosecuted the Lynndie Englands and the Charles Graners, the low-level soldiers who committed the torture."

Original article posted here.

No, we don't torture

C.I.A. Admits It Destroyed Tapes of Harsh Interrogations

By MARK MAZZETTI

Published: December 6, 2007

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself,” and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes.

The existence and subsequent destruction of the tapes are likely to reignite the debate over the use of severe interrogation techniques on terror suspects, and their destruction raises questions about whether C.I.A. officials withheld information from the courts and from the presidentially appointed Sept. 11 commission about aspects of the program. It was not clear who within the C.I.A. authorized the destruction of the tapes, but current and former government officials said it had been approved at the highest levels of the agency.

The Times informed the C.I.A. on Wednesday evening that it planned to publish in Friday’s newspaper an article about the destruction of the tapes.. Today, the C.I.A. director, General Michael V. Hayden, wrote a letter to the agency workforce explaining the matter.

The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 commission, which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and any other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.

C.I.A. lawyers told federal prosecutors in 2003 and 2005, who relayed the information to a federal court in the Moussaoui case, that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge in the case. It was unclear whether the judge had explicitly sought the videotape depicting the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah.

Mr. Moussaoui’s lawyers had hoped that records of the interrogations might provide exculpatory evidence for Mr. Moussaoui — showing that the Al Qaeda detainees did not know Mr. Moussaoui and clearing him of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, plot.

General Hayden’s statement said that the tapes posed a “serious security risk,” and that if they were to become public they would have exposed C.I.A. officials “and their families to retaliation from Al Qaeda and its sympathizers.”

“What matters here is that it was done in line with the law,” he said. He said in his statement that he was informing agency employees because “the press has learned” about the destruction of the tapes.

General Hayden said in a statement that leaders of Congressional oversight committees were fully briefed on the matter, but some Congressional officials said notification to Congress had not been adequate.

“This is a matter that should have been briefed to the full Intelligence Committee at the time,” an official with the House Intelligence Committee said. “This does not appear to have been done. There may be a very logical reason for destroying records that are no longer needed; however, this requires a more complete explanation. “

Staff members of the Sept. 11 commission, which completed its work in 2004, expressed surprise when they were told that interrogation videotapes existed until 2005.

“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and later as a senior counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings,” he said.

Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with Al Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed.

If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations.

General Hayden said the tapes were originally made to ensure that agency employees acted in accordance with “established legal and policy guidelines.” General Hayden said the agency stopped videotaping interrogations in 2002.

“The tapes were meant chiefly as an additional, internal check on the program in its early stages,” his statement read

In October, federal prosecutors in the Moussaoui case were forced to write a letter to the court amending those C.I.A. declarations. The letter stated that in September, the C.I.A. notified the United States attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., that it had discovered a videotape documenting the interrogation of a detainee. After a more thorough search, the letter stated, C.I.A. officials discovered a second videotape and one audio tape.

The letter is heavily redacted and sentences stating which detainees’ interrogations the recordings document are blacked out. Signed by the United States attorney, Chuck Rosenberg, the letter states that the C.I.A.’s search for interrogation tapes “appears to be complete.”

There is no mention in the letter of the tapes that C.I.A. officials destroyed last year. Mr. Moussaoui was convicted last year and sentenced to life in prison.

John Radsan, who worked as a C.I.A. lawyer from 2002 to 2004 and is now a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, said the destruction of the tapes could carry serious legal penalties.

“If anybody at the C.I.A. hid anything important from the Justice Department, he or she should be prosecuted under the false statement statute,” he said.

A former intelligence official who was briefed on the issue said the videotaping was ordered as a way of assuring “quality control” at remote sites following reports of unauthorized interrogation techniques. He said the tapes, along with still photographs of interrogations, were destroyed after photographs of abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib became public in May 2004 and C.I.A. officers became concerned about a possible leak of the videos and photos.

He said the worries about the impact a leak of the tapes might have in the Muslim world were real.

It has been widely reported that Mr. Zubaydah was subjected to several tough physical tactics, including waterboarding, which involves near-suffocation. But C.I.A. officers judged that the release of photos or videos would nonetheless provoke a strong reaction.

“People know what happened, but to see it in living color would have far greater power,” the official said.

Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, has been pushing legislation in Congress to have all detainee interrogations videotaped so officials can refer to the tapes multiple times to glean better information.

Mr. Holt said he had been told many times that the C.I.A. does not record the interrogation of detainees. “When I would ask them whether they had reviewed the tapes to better understand the intelligence, they said ‘What tapes?’,” he said.

Original article posted here.

Mind blowing historical tape exposing the wonderful possiblity to manipulate people's religious beliefs and the US government's role in the same

Please listen to this (and comment)



Jim Jones discussion starts at approximately minute 19

Mind blowing historical tape exposing the wonderful possiblity to manipulate people's religious beliefs and the US government's role in the same

Jim Jones discussion starts at approximately minute 19

Training the monkeys how to jump

Burning chilli sparks terror fear

A pot of burning chilli sparked fears of a biological terror attack in central London.

Firefighters wearing protective breathing apparatus were called to D'Arblay Street, Soho, after reports of noxious smoke filling the air.

Police closed off three roads and evacuated homes following the alert.

Specialist crews broke down the door to the Thai Cottage restaurant at 1900 BST on Monday where they discovered the source - a 9lb pot of chillies.

Nam Prik Pao recipe Heat garlic and shallots in oil and remove to a bowl Place red chillies in the pan with some oil and fry until they go dark in colour. Then set aside Mix shrimp paste with the rest of the ingredients and pound in a mortar and pestle Return the mixture to the heat until it becomes a thick dark coloured paste

The restaurant had been preparing Nam Prik Pao, a red-hot Thai dip which uses extra-hot chillies which are deliberately burnt.

But the smell prompted several members of the public to call the emergency services.

Alpaslan Duven, a Turkish journalist based in the restaurant's building, said: "I was sitting in the office when me and my chief start coughing and I said this was something really dodgy.

"I looked out of the window and saw people rushing and then we heard the sirens."

Supranee Yodmuang, the restaurant supervisor, was above the restaurant when she received a phone call from her boss.

"It was about 4pm when I saw the police who were closing off the roads but I didn't know why.

"My boss rang me and said I had to get out of the building because of a chemical attack."

She added: "Because we're Thai, we're used to the smell of chillies."

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: "The street was closed off for three hours while we were trying to discover the source of the odour."

Original article posted here.

The Shock Doctrine

Drugging kids: Film on kids on psychotropic drugs

Extremely important video about mind control

Fighting an uphill battle against fascism.

His lawyers are suing federal officials, alleging that they played key roles in his military detention and interrogation. Shirley Henderson/AP

Padilla sues US officials over confinement

Despite his conviction on terror conspiracy charges, his lawyers say he suffered 'psychological abuse' during military detention.

By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Convicted Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla is seeking to hold former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 59 other US officials responsible for what his lawyers say were abusive and unconstitutional tactics used against Mr. Padilla while he was held in military custody as an enemy combatant from 2002 to 2006.

Lawyers working on Padilla's behalf filed the civil lawsuit earlier this year in federal court in South Carolina. It was publicly disclosed by the lawyers this week.

"Mr. Padilla suffered gross physical and psychological abuse at the hands of federal officials as part of a scheme of abusive interrogation intended to break down Mr. Padilla's humanity and his will to live," the 30-page complaint says.

"The grave violations suffered by Padilla were not isolated occurrences by rogue lower-level officials," the suit says. Besides Mr. Rumsfeld, it names Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lowell Jacoby, among others, who "personally ordered and/or approved Mr. Padilla's detention and interrogation program."

Last week, Padilla was found guilty by a Miami jury of conspiring with Al Qaeda to engage in violent jihad. Federal prosecutors said he attended a training camp in Afghanistan. He faces a potential life sentence in prison.

Some analysts have pointed to Padilla's conviction as vindication of the Bush administration's alleged harsh treatment of him at the US Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C., prior to his transfer to the criminal justice system in early 2006. But other analysts say that regardless of the guilty verdict in Miami, significant constitutional and other legal issues surrounding Padilla's treatment by the military remain unresolved.

Chief among them is whether a US citizen, like Padilla, who was arrested on American soil, can be stripped of most of his constitutional rights while being held in military custody and interrogated as an enemy combatant. Padilla was held at the brig for 43 months.

According to the court docket, a Justice Department lawyer is representing each of the named defendants. Andrew Ames, a Justice Department spokesman, said the government would have no comment on the pending case.

The defendants have been ordered to respond to the suit by Oct. 15.

A Defense Department spokesman also offered no specific response to the lawsuit, but repeated earlier statements that all detainees in the war on terror are treated humanely.

Padilla's lawyers are asking US District Judge Henry Floyd to declare Padilla's treatment in the brig unlawful and in violation of the Constitution. They are also asking the judge to award damages of $1 against each of the potential 60 defendants.

Although Padilla's lawyers are not asking for millions of dollars in damages, the case raises landmark constitutional issues dealing with the scope of the president's power as commander in chief to sweep aside many of the constitutional rights of citizens whom he determines are enemy combatants. The suit is also significant because it is the only means available of subjecting Padilla's military detention to the independent scrutiny of the federal judiciary.

"This is the American people's last chance to know what happened behind the closed doors in Charleston, and the last chance for a court to determine if what happened is consistent with our Constitution and values," says Jonathan Freiman, one of Padilla's lawyers who also works with the National Litigation Project at Yale Law School.

Unlike the Abu Ghraib scandal, which has involved the prosecution of a few low-level individuals, the Padilla lawsuit seeks to hold the chain of command accountable. In addition to cabinet-level officials, it seeks to identify and hold accountable key brig staff members, military and other government lawyers, medical and psychological staff members, brig guards, and Padilla's interrogators. Most of the prospective defendants have not yet been identified by name in the suit.

Padilla was subjected to sleep deprivation, stress positions, prolonged isolation, and sensory deprivation, among other interrogation techniques, the suit says. "These procedures were calculated to and actually did disrupt profoundly his senses and personality," the complaint says. It was done to "destroy Mr. Padilla's ordinary emotional and cognitive functioning and break his will, in order to extract information from him and punish him."

The government held Padilla for two years without any outside contact, including with his lawyers. When that policy changed, government officials warned Padilla not to reveal any conditions of his confinement to his lawyers. They told Padilla that his lawyers were not trustworthy and were actually working for the government, the suit says.

If true, this would amount to a government effort to undermine the ability of Padilla's lawyers to learn of Padilla's actual conditions of confinement and effectively challenge them in court.

Padilla was denied access to mental health care, the complaint says. Military officials "deliberately caused Mr. Padilla to undergo extreme psychiatric stress without providing any psychiatric care," the suit says. They denied this access even after Padilla's lawyers reported "signs of psychiatric distress in Mr. Padilla, such as involuntary twitching, and self-inflicted scratch wounds on his body."

The suit also says that two years into his military detention brig staff grew so concerned about Padilla's psychological distress from his prolonged isolation that they asked for permission to at least allow him to eat his meals with another prisoner. The request was denied.

One major hurdle for Padilla's civil suit is whether the government will ask Judge Floyd to dismiss it on grounds that any open-court discussion of Padilla's interrogation and treatment in the brig would reveal state secrets.

Legal analysts are divided on whether a judge would throw out Padilla's case should the government invoke the so-called state secrets privilege. A lawsuit filed by a German citizen mistakenly held and interrogated in secret locations overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency was dismissed on those grounds by a federal judge in Virginia. In March, the action was upheld by the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals, which also has jurisdiction over cases in South Carolina. That case has been appealed to the US Supreme Court.

Original article posted here.

More fallout from 9/11: Neurological Problems

Continuing Effects of 9/11

High brain activity in people affected by the tragedy could lead to later health problems
By Karen A. Frenkel

Six years after the events of September 11, researchers are beginning to understand the attacks’ enduring toll on mental health. Recent studies at New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical College and New York University have shown long-term psychological and neurological repercussions in adult witnesses who were near the World Trade Center and in children who lost a parent in the tragedy.

Researchers at Cornell and N.Y.U. compared brain scans of people who were near the WTC during the attacks and people who were farther away. Both studies found that those who were closer continue to show heightened activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain that regulates emotional intensity and creates emotional memories. In the Cornell study, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) scans showed that people within two miles of the site that day have a hyperactive amygdala as compared with people who lived 200 miles away, even though those nearby were seemingly resilient and show no signs of mental disorder. The N.Y.U. team similarly found that when asked to recall the events of 9/11, twice as many people who were near Ground Zero had elevated amygdala activity as compared with people who were five miles away in midtown Manhattan. Slow recovery of a highly active amygdala, the Cornell researchers say, could increase susceptibility to mental health problems later in life.

The N.Y.U. study also found that the direct experience of 9/11 yielded a type of memory similar to a “flashbulb memory,” the exceptionally vivid, confident and multisensory recollection of a shocking public event. Those near the WTC who saw, heard and smelled the results of the attacks showed depressed activity in the parahippocampal cortex, which encodes neutral peripheral details. This altered brain activity might help explain how flashbulb memories are formed and why they seem to last longer than other types of memories.

Another study conducted at Cornell followed 45 bereaved children who lost a parent in the disaster. Despite the fact that most received therapy during the two years following their loss, the prevalence of psychiatric illness in these children doubled from 32 percent before 9/11 to nearly 73 percent afterward. Anxiety, post-traumatic stress and separation anxiety were the most common afflictions. The grieving children also had chronic elevations of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva, suggesting that their bodies’ “fight or flight” mechanisms remained switched on. According to the researchers, long-term cortisol elevation may lead to hypersensitivity to stress later in life, which in turn could cause cognitive impairment, weak bones, and insulin resistance.

Understanding the biology underlying these vulnera­bilities will help treat people who experienced this and other traumas, the researchers say.

Original article posted here.

Piece on David Shayler, former MI5 Agent having "a few problems": Tough to assess whether how is right, but felt this is worth passing on

David Shayler's former partner reveals: How the bullying State crushed him By ANNIE MACHON

Ten years ago this month former MI5 officer David Shayler made shocking revelations in this newspaper about how Britain's spies were unable to deal with the growing threat of global terrorism.

He disclosed how MI5's peculiar obsession with bureaucracy and secrecy prevented crucial information being used to stop bombings.

And he told how insufficient agents and inept decision-making meant that terrorist groups were not properly monitored.

Annie Machon says the Government bullied former partner and MI5 whistleblower David Shayler

None of his original disclosures was shown to be wrong.

Indeed, in 2005 the bombings in London proved the whistleblower correct: MI5 was not equipped to counter terror on our streets.

The Government response to David's disclosures was to place a gagging order on The Mail on Sunday and launch a six-year campaign to discredit and persecute Shayler.

Alastair Campbell threatened to 'send in the heavies' and the whistleblower was forced into exile abroad, jailed twice and sued for damages; his friends and family were harassed and some arrested.

He faced a bleak, uncertain future and for many years he was under intense stress and pressure, often isolated and always under surveillance.

I had a ringside seat for the 'Get Shayler' operation because I was an MI5 officer at the same time (1991-96) and also his girlfriend and co-campaigner until last year when I ended my relationship with a broken man.

I witnessed first-hand the extraordinary psychological, physical and emotional burden of being a whistleblower when the full power of the secret State is launched against you.

A decade on the results of that pernicious campaign became clear when I heard that David had proclaimed himself as "The Messiah" and "God" and could predict the weather. I was saddened but not shocked.

Annie and David in happier times in 2002

The story of David Shayler is not just one of a whistleblower but also an indictment of the lack of democracy and accountability in Britain.

I first met David when we were both working in F2, the counter-subversion section of MI5, where we were repeatedly reassured that MI5 had to work within the law.

We were young and keen to help protect our country. I noticed David immediately, as he was very bright, and always asked the difficult questions.

Over a period of a year we became friends, and then we fell in love.

In the run-up to the 1992 General Election we were involved in assessing any parliamentary candidate and potential MP.

This meant that they all had their names cross-referenced with MI5's database.

If any candidates had a file, this was reviewed. We saw files on most of the top politicians of the past decade, from Tony Blair down, something that gave us concerns.

We then both moved to G Branch, the international counter-terrorist division, with David heading the Libyan section.

It was here that he witnessed a catalogue of errors and crimes: the illegal phone-tapping of a prominent Guardian journalist, the failure of MI5 to prevent the bombing of the Israeli embassy in London in July 1994, which resulted in the wrongful conviction of two innocent Palestinians, and the attempted assassination of Colonel Gaddafi of Libya.

David raised this with his bosses at the time but they showed no interest.

So we resigned from MI5 after deciding to go public to force an inquiry into the Gaddafi plot.

After The Mail on Sunday revelations we decamped to France while David tried to get the Government to take his evidence and investigate MI5's crimes, something, to this day, it has refused to do.

Rather than addressing the problem, the Intelligence Services tried to shoot the messenger.

They planted stories claiming David was a fantasist, overlooked for promotion, and was too junior to know what he was talking about.

These are classic tactics used against whistleblowers and were wheeled out again when Dr David Kelly took his life.

We eventually returned home in 2000, by which time David felt isolated and angry.

He began to distrust friends and thought that many of them might be reporting on him.

He was convinced he was constantly followed and began to take photographs of people in the street.

When the trial started, and with David effectively gagged, the jury had no choice but to convict.

He received a six-month sentence but the judgment exonerated him of placing agents' lives at risk, conceding that he had spoken out in what he thought to be the public interest.

David had blown the whistle with the best of motives.

He had exposed heinous State crimes up to and including murder, yet he was the one in prison with his reputation in tatters.

His release from jail saw a changed man.

David was full of anger, frustration and bitterness and became depressed and withdrawn.

He was drawn to the spiritual teachings of kabbalah, and became obsessed with the subject instead of focusing on what we should do to survive.

Last summer, I went away for a weekend. When I returned, David had shaved off all his hair and his eyebrows as part of his spiritual evolution.

He knew that I had always loved his long, thick hair, so it felt like a personal slap in the face.

He was in trouble. He was quick to anger if anyone questioned him. He became obsessive about little details, espoused wacky theories and shunned his family and old friends. His paranoia also escalated.

His experience of being hounded and vilified for a decade had left a deep persecution complex.

Eventually the strain was too much and I ended the relationship.

It was difficult as we had shared so much over the 14 years we had been together, but it felt that we were no longer a team – David was focusing only on esoteric issues.

Looking back, I am still proud of what we did. I believe that if you witness the crimes that we did, you have to take action.

But the price for taking that stand against a bully State can be high.

It is tragic to see an honourable and brave man crushed in this way. The British Establishment is ruthless in protecting its own interests rather than those of our country.

Today David Shayler is living testimony to that.

Original article posted here.

Weazl's Repost: Power of Nightmares Part 3 in Honor of the Legal Disgrace that is the Jose Padilla Verdict

Thankfully no mass terror event occurred yesterday, but that doesn't mean that we are out of the woods yet

Santorum Suggests New Terror Attacks Will Change View Of War

Former Senator predicts "unfortunate events" within a year that will alter perceptions

Paul Joseph Watson

In an alarming display of fearmongering, former Republican Senator Rick Santorum has suggested that a series of "unfortunate events," namely terrorist attacks, will occur within the next year and change American citizen's perception of the war.

Appearing on the Hugh Hewitt radio show, Santorum also hyped the necessity of "confronting Iran in the Middle East," and predicted that Giuliani, Romney and Tommy Thompson would be the three surviving Republican candidates who would go head to head in the race for the nomination.

Santorum went on to clearly imply that terror attacks will occur inside America which will alter the body politic and lead to a reversal of the anti-war sentiment now dominating the country.

"Between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public’s going to have a very different view of this war, and it will be because, I think, of some unfortunate events, that like we’re seeing unfold in the UK. But I think the American public’s going to have a very different view," said the former senator from Pennsylvania.

Is Santorum expressing foreknowledge of some coming atrocity or is he merely using a tactic familiar to the leadership of his party - exploiting the fear of terror for the purposes of political rhetoric?

Last month, the new chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party Dennis Milligan said that there
needed to be more attacks on American soil for President Bush to regain popular approval.

"At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001]," Milligan told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, "And the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country," he concluded.

Yearning for new mass casualty terror attacks for political gain is a GOP strategy - Milligan is merely parroting what was written in a leaked confidential memo that was circulated among senior Republican leaders in late 2005.

"A confidential memo circulating among senior Republican leaders suggests that a new attack by terrorists on U.S. soil could reverse the sagging fortunes of President George W. Bush as well as the GOP and "restore his image as a leader of the American people," reported Capitol Hill Blue on November 12, 2005.

Original article posted here.

We won't call it "Justice" regarding the barbarism of CIA mind control under MK Ultra and Artichoke, but it is a step in the right direction

Woman gets cash after CIA brainwashing ordeal

Max Harrold, CanWest News Service

MONTREAL — A Montreal woman who underwent years of debilitating brainwashing techniques in the 1950s and 1960s has ended her case against the federal government, accepting an undisclosed amount of money.

Janine Huard, 79, accepted a cheque for an amount that “will make her very comfortable,” her lawyer, Alan Stein, said Wednesday.
Stein said part of his client’s agreement was that she not disclose the amount.

The settlement opens the door for other former patients of Huard’s doctor at the time, the former director of McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute, Ewen Cameron, to try and get compensation for their treatment by him despite the long delay.

The treatment included electroshock therapy and sleeping while wearing earphones that played repeated messages. The experiments were conducted by the Canadian government and the CIA.

“It’s a landmark decision,” Stein said, adding that he knows of about 10 former patients and 20 relatives of former patients who may now be part of a class-action suit he is preparing.

Huard entered the Allan Memorial Institute in 1957 suffering postpartum depression after the birth of her second child. Her newborn had become ill and Huard was having trouble sleeping.

But instead of helping her, Cameron used her as a guinea pig to carry out experimental brainwashing techniques that he mistakenly believed could treat depression.

Original article posted here.

Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience: New ways to fight wars within the confines of one's brain

Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience

Dual Use Discipline for Understanding & Managing Complexity and Altering Warfare

by John Stanton

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in political and national security affairs. Reach him at camus666ster@gmail.com

The Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience (ECN) discipline, and its associated fields, may produce tools that advance humanity's ability to understand and manage itself. Simultaneously, ECN may also yield brain-centric weaponry that drastically alters human warfare. The United States Department of Defense (DOD) may marshal significant resources--as it did during the 1941 to 1946 Manhattan Project—to drive ECN research, development and testing. DOD is the only entity in the United States with the capability to fully fund ECN programs. The DOD's Defense Science Board and the United States' Intelligence Community has recently suggested research thrusts into ECN and the merging of data-heavy sciences and social sciences. Success will ultimately depend on program directors and researchers' acceptance of general Evolutionary Theory and, in particular, Evolutionary Psychology. Failure to do this will result in a mosh-pit of studies based on dated science and methodology.

The Evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience disciplines are set merge into a unified field known as Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience or ECN. ECN may produce novel integrated micro, macro models of brain-behavior relationships based on the principles of general Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology and the findings of Neuroscience. Applications may range from predictive human behavior models to neuroweaponry.

Social science literature and United States' Department of Defense (DOD) documentation also suggests that the time is ripe for an even larger merger between the data-heavy sciences and the social sciences. ECN may serve as both a conduit and foundation for this convergence particularly as the DOD recognizes its importance to national security. However, the entire effort will fail if program directors and researchers exclude general Evolution and Evolutionary Psychology from their methodologies.

Complexity (the number of ways-hows-and-whys a system can act) may become an anachronism as novel research demystifies consciousness reducing human complexity to a deterministic system. Biomachines that bypass time consuming conscious activity ultimately may be fielded by the DOD. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is already working towards this end. Through its Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts program, it has probed brain signals triggered when an analyst sees something interesting in a satellite image. The analyst’s brain registers the discovery long before the analyst becomes cognitively aware of it. “The brain can signal the discovery three times faster than the analyst can respond…My goal is to use these technologies to harness the speed of thought…I know it’s possible, especially if we confront these challenges not just as problems of biology and neuroscience but problems of physics, math, materials science and microtechnology.”

The DOD has a very aggressive interest in understanding and adapting to the Human Terrain (brain-behavior relationships in local, regional, national and global environments). With a budget of approximately $1.2 trillion ($US), and the ability to obtain additional funding, the DOD stands alone in its ability to accelerate research and development (R&D) programs in ECN, as well as catalyze the fusion of the data-heavy and social sciences. Such an effort may be as significant as the Manhattan Project (Atomic Bomb) or the development of Quantum Theory. There is historical precedent for thinking as much.

“I think the military is the place to do it…I think it is time for the Pentagon to do for human science what it did for chemistry in World War I, for physics in World War II and for computers in the post-Cold War era. I’m convinced that we’re fighting human wars now and that another stealth bomber, another battleship is not how to win these wars…”

This DOD R&D effort may certainly revolutionize warfare. In the process it may also transform the understanding and conduct of human affairs which in turn may present challenges to the legitimacy of long established, cumbersome institutions. For example, from a policy and organizational perspective, the United States may find it necessary to create some sort of DOD-Plus organization: one centralized defense and foreign apparatus that has a comprehensive capability to anticipate and respond to evolving threats in local, regional, national, and global environments. A secondary organization might be needed for post-response consequence and stability management.

Another side-effect of this R&D activity may be a significant shift in the way human beings view themselves nestled as they are on the outskirts of 1 of the estimated 125 billion galaxies in the known universe. Already, papers such as Quantum Physics in Neuroscience and Psychology: A Neurophysical Model of Mind-Brain Interaction offer intriguing insights and prospects. ECN encourages innovative thinking through progressive and tested science.

“Neuroscientists studying the connection of mind and consciousness to physical processes in the brain often assume that a conception of nature based on classic physics will eventually turn out to be adequate. That assumption would have been reasonable during the nineteenth century. But now, in the twenty-first century, it is rationally untenable. Quantum Theory must be used in principle because the behavior of the brain depends sensitively upon atomic, molecular and ionic processes, and these processes in the brain often involve large quantum effects.

The whole range of science, from atomic physics to mind-brain dynamics, has the possibility of being brought together into a single rationally coherent theory of an evolving cosmos that is not constituted by matter but by actions of agents. In this conceptualization of nature, agents could naturally evolve in accordance with the principles of natural selection, owing to the fact that their efforts have physical consequences. The outline of a possible rationally coherent understanding of the connection between mind and matter begins to emerge...A shift to this pragmatic approach that incorporates agent based choices as primary empirical input variables may be as important to progress in neuroscience and psychology as it was to atomic physics.”

In the United States, the ongoing obsession with national security and the enormous funding necessary to soothe a national psyche of fear and war is a key driver for enhancing security thereby eliminating the uncertainty of daily living. ECN may generate predictive and diagnostic biotechnologies to reduce tension. Such a development could eliminate much uncertainty and concomitant drama in human affairs by providing leaders with assets to manage the complexities in brain-behavior relationships. To get there though, reliable data on human beings, as they function as interconnected consumers, warfighters, enemies, refugees, diplomats, criminals, and citizens of their respective nations will need to be collected and assessed. The entire effort depends on the application of general Evolution and Evolutionary Psychology.

A comprehensive knowledge base of planetary ecosystems and how humans interface with those ecosystems will have to be constructed and meshed with the findings of brain-behavior functions. The dissection of the individual and global organism may lead to unprecedented forecasting capability The ultimate outcome may be the creation of biomachine systems that suggest procedures and diagnostics with which to anticipate and/or minimize a wide range of human problems. Biomachine tools that can suggest courses of action such as military intervention, diplomacy, containment, stability and consequence management operations, economic aid, covert operations, or a Pontius Pilate approach to nations that engage in internal self-destruction may become available.

Worldscape 2007: Savannah's and Jungles

The United States diplomatic corps has made general use of standard psychology, game theory, and related social sciences to engage in diplomacy on behalf of the United States. Likewise, the Department of Defense (DOD) has used elements of the social sciences--especially psychology--to predict, for example, who will or will not earn pilot’s wings, or become a special forces operator.

Now, however, the DOD is moving far beyond its generalized use of the social sciences and is making a considerable effort to incorporate ECN and a bevy of related disciplines into its arsenal.

If approached correctly and conducted properly, this effort, and the technology and/or knowledge transfer from it, could be the catalyst for a certifiable revolution in human affairs. At the very least, DOD’s surge into these fields may produce unmanned and autonomous intelligence biotechnologies, warfighting and medical biomachinery (with civilian applications), along with thousands of terabytes of data on human behavior. In any other time this might be termed acceptable progress. Advancements in ECN and associated fields have changed what acceptable means.

Consider, for example, the Defense Advanced Research Agency’s (DARPA) Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA) program. “Recent advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience have given us a much richer scientific understanding of how cognition works in the human brain. The BICA program is developing a new generation of cognitive architectures and computational models of human cognition based on that new understanding.” One BICA team consists of scientists from the University of Michigan, MIT Media Lab, AlgoTek, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Harvard University and Rutgers University. They have developed TOSCA: A Comprehensive Brain Based Cognitive Architecture. According to the researchers,

“This organization [TOSCA] starts to answer the question as to where is the magic in human cognition…”

The United States’ national security establishment has determined that the study of the brain-behavior relationships--and its participation and interaction with the global organism--is essential to national security. Today, in the intelligence community, for example, the social sciences are being called upon to assist analysts in the development of new methods for educing information (interrogation) from prisoners of war and/or conflict.

Beyond contributions to United States’ national security, ECN and associated disciplines may offer new approaches and solutions to minimize violence and ethnic conflict; prevent or manage warfare, pandemics and poverty; protect the global commons; reduce income disparity; and negotiate the allocation of finite resources and space amongst nations and/or groups. New gear is required to help humanity manage that which is the source of its complexity: brain-human behavior relationships.

“We are at a crossroads of human existence: We possess the technical knowledge required to provide for the material needs of all of humanity without systematic plunder and extermination of others: yet, systematic plunder and genocidal extermination continue to thrive.”

“We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.”

Humanity is one of the many children of evolutionary forces. ECN may play a key role in helping humanity relook its role on the planet. ECN may convince humans that they are agents in an interconnected local to global organism. The acceptance of this fact, this reality, may come just in time for humanity as it faces global instability. Such knowledge—and the practical application of it--now seems critical to the survival, stability and prosperity of our species and those that support us.

A key feature of homo sapiens' evolutionary design has been the ability to forecast; to think ahead, to model and simulate multiple scenarios and outcomes for survival, stability and prosperity. Evolution seems to be working its magic as sections of the government, commercial organizations, academia, and the world’s public recognize that survival, stability and prosperity are very fragile realities. There seems to be a sense of urgency in developing new models to manage the future.

The human species faces global climate change; ethnic conflict in geostrategic regions; simmering immigration conflict in apparently stable democracies; intermittent warfare; disinformation; income disparity and employment insecurity, the mobility of corporations to roam the planet in search of low cost labor; the continued spread of weapons of mass destruction; and—significantly--a new era of global economic competition between individual powers like China, Basil, India, Russia, the United States, and consortium's like the European Union, the South American Community of Nations, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

In local-to-global savannahs and jungles; nations, and groups that want to form nations, now have many choices for international support, recognition, and economic and military assistance. They can roam the globe via the Internet or by aircraft. They can openly appeal to national governments, covertly appeal to a government’s military-intelligence agencies and private security contractors, or to quasi-state groups for support. They have far more maneuverability to pit the larger global economic competitors against one another to get the best economic package, thwart a military intervention, or simply buy time to purse a policy. Iran, for example, in pursuit of regional influence, nuclear power and weapons capability, has conducted an impressive series of maneuvers that often match European Union, Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Pakistani and Indian economic needs against United States and Israeli interests.

Predators and Prey

On the flip side, larger nations can utilize smaller nations and quasi-state groups in an effort to pursue policies and destabilize competitors. With its military supremacy, the United States, like any upstanding, self-interested predator, has consistently made life and trade difficult for many intransigent nations and groups. But why do many nations prefer war? The phenomenon of removing the brakes on non-violent behavior and the promotion of war as a positive activity and economic engine is one of the most understudied issues in human history. ECN may be useful in understanding the war phenomenon as it relates to creation of dehumanized others and violence in general.

According to the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation, approximately 16,000 people are murdered each year in the United States. Nations and peoples around the globe are coping not only with “crime”, but with the fallout from conventional and guerrilla warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Chechnya, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Sudan, Colombia, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Kashmir, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. Refugees fleeing conflict, increased global fuel costs, the spread of disease, and the creation of slums that house next-generation insurgents are just a handful of the effects of today’s conflicts.

The United States’ generic response to much of this international activity has been to restructure military commands and build more military bases, embassies and consulates around the globe to encircle and contain conflict areas. In short, a sort of quarantine -based approach. This is particularly evident with countries and regions rich in natural resources and in close proximity to sea and land-based choke points. A recent example of this was the creation of a new Unified Combatant Command called AFRICOM. Coincidently, the United States government announced AFRICOM’s existence on February 6, 2007, in the midst of the Chinese government’s 12 nation tour of Africa.

Global climate change, in the most severe scenarios, threatens to alter large portions of the planet and in the process either exterminate or relocate many of the humans, plants and other creatures that subsist on it. With the most advanced predictive human behavior models available, humanity may still ignore data forecasting catastrophe. Federal, state and local officials' response to Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that even with ample warning and time to prepare for difficult outcomes, ignorance stymied success.

Severe weather events may continue to destabilize densely populated coastal regions resulting in refugee populations and disruption of commercial and national security enterprises. Hurricane Katrina temporarily shut down United States’ Navy contractor Northrop Grumman’s shipbuilding operations in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Katrina has hampered Northrop Grumman’s ability to hire skilled workers and house them. Hence, it is no surprise that global climate change has been determined to be an urgent national security threat to the United States by the influential Center for Naval Analysis in Alexandria, Virginia.

Just as global climate change is inevitable, so too is an increase in the world’s population. By 2050 there will likely be 9 billion human beings occupying the globe with 60 percent of that number living in urban environments in close proximity to ocean littoral zones. Approximately 1 billion of the 9 billion will be relegated to slum life or coerced to migrate as displaced human beings in search of improved economic opportunity.

One Thing Affects Everything

According to Robert Jervis, “Garrett Hardin gets to the heart of the matter in pointing out that, contrary to many hopes and expectations, we cannot develop or find any highly specific agent which will do only one thing…We can never do merely one thing. Wishing to kill insects, we may put an end to the singing of birds…Seeking to protect the environment by developing nonpolluting sources of electric power, we build windmills that kill hawks and eagles that fly into the blades; cleaning the water in our harbors allows the growth of mollusks and crustaceans that destroys wooden piers and bulkheads…”

Jervis pointed out that it’s the same in politics. “In politics, connections are often more idiosyncratic, but their existence guarantees that here too, most actions, no matter how well targeted, will have multiple affects.”

This dizzyingly interconnected environment has confused, perhaps even frightened, today’s global leaders and their advisors whose worldviews were heavily influenced by the binary simplicity of the Cold War and the illusory post-Cold War dominance of the United States. More problematic is local-to-global leadership that tends to consult antediluvian belief systems and mythical beings in their decision making processes. Hence, leaders the world over—particularly here in the United States--are making decisions based on a Flatland approach, ignoring consequences, fallout, outcomes, and linkages. This mode of thinking rolls downhill to infect local, regional, national and global populations.

For example, the United States’ involvement in Iraq and elsewhere on the Asian continent provides an obvious example of cloudy judgment by leadership and the subsequent disastrous fallout. Additionally, once dominant institutions, and important tools of United States foreign and economic policy, are seeing their influence wane in the presence of simple geopolitical competition The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are two organizations whose reach has been shortened by the inflexibility and predictability of United States' foreign policy. The Chinese government has been courting alliances by disbursing large amounts of cash in the form of no interest loans and with minimal interference in the borrower’s internal affairs. This is in stark contrast to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund who demand painful economic reforms from their borrowers.

With $1 trillion (US) in cash reserves, and an energy-hungry economy, China is acting as one might expect: it is maximizing its prospects for survival. stability and prosperity.

Exploring and Dissecting the Human Terrain

“The increasing global interdependence implies an increase in complexity. However, the relationship that was discussed between this complexity and the internal structural changes that are taking place in social and economic systems provides us with an additional insight. The change from hierarchical to distributed control implies that the complexity of collective behaviors is not only increasing, it is already higher than that of a single individual. In this context, the traditional conflict between individual and collective good and rights should be revisited. This philosophical and practical conflict manifested itself in the conflict between democracy and communism. It was assumed that communism represented an ideology of the collective while democracy represented an ideology of the individual. The transition to a complex organism implies that this conflict has been resolved, not in favor of one or the other, but rather of a third category—an interdependent complex collective formed out of diverse individuals.

The traditional collective model was a model that relied on the uniformity of the individuals rather than diversity. Similarly, the ideology of the individual did not view the individual in relation to the collective, but rather the individual serving himself or herself. It should be acknowledge that both philosophies were deeper than their caricatures would suggest. The philosophy of democracy included the idea that the individualistic actions would also serve the benefit of the collective, and the philosophy of communism included the idea that the collective would benefit the individual.

Nevertheless, the concept of civilization as a complex organism formed out of human beings is qualitatively different than either form of government. There are two natural conclusions to be drawn from recognizing that human beings are part of a global organism. First. one can recognize that human civilization has a remarkable capacity for responding to external and internal challenges. The existence of such a capacity for response does not mean human civilization will survive external challenges any more than the complexity of an organism guarantees its survival. However, one can hope that the ability to prevent local disasters will increase…Second, the complexity of our individual lives must be understood in the context of a system that must enable its components (us) to contribute effectively to the collective system…The merging of disciplines in the field of complex systems runs counter to the increasing specialization in science and engineering [but] it provides many opportunities for synergies and the recognition of general principles that can form a basis for education and understanding in all fields.”

In February 2007, the Defense Science Board (DSB) released a little noticed report titled, 21st Century Strategic Technology Vectors. In the report the DSB recommended that military planners explore the Human Terrain in which US warfighters operate. To do this, the DSB suggested a radical approach: tap into the non-kinetic social sciences network for analytical data and marry future findings and applications to the military’s warfighting toolkit.

“Human, Social, cultural and behavior (HSCB) modeling…pushes the boundaries of DOD’s comfort zone the farthest. However, it is an area that DOD cannot afford to ignore. The DOD needs to become much more familiar with the theories, methods, and models from psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive science, political science and economics in order to be able to identify those with real potential to add value to DOD’s toolkit. Coupling these to quantitative and computational modeling and simulation techniques from mathematics, physics, statistics, operations research, and computer science could lead to powerful new tools that represent complex human and social systems…One promising starting point for the application of HSCB models is to complement the more familiar physical network modeling with human/group behavioral models.

HSCB models are designed to help understand the structure, interconnections, dependencies, behavior, and trends associated with organizational entities. Macro HSCB models address nation states, socio-cultural regions, economies, and political systems. Micro HSCB models deal with religious and ethnic tribes, militias, insurgent and terrorist networks, and military units at the tactical level. Integrated models try to tie together the macro and micro models. A formidable challenge in modeling social and behavioral phenomena is to integrate and make coherent micro-macro models at multiple levels of data, granularity, and analysis, and across multiple disciplines of the social sciences, and to acquire and structure data that can be used to guide and test the models.”

Evolutionary Psychology: Some Basics

Evolutionary Psychology offers four linked, interdependent paths to understanding how brain-behavior relationships change over time in individuals and populations. Change and/or adaptation happens biologically through molecular development that affects the genetic substrates of behavior; psychologically through emotions, and conscious and unconscious mental activity; culturally through social life; and environmentally as behavior adapts to ecosystem and social system changes.

Evolutionary Psychology is an approach and a way of thinking. The mind is seen as a set of information-processing mechanisms designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors during the Pleistocene era. There are five basic principles that form the foundation of Evolutionary Psychology.

1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.

2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species evolutionary history.

3. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of what goes in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler than it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve as they require very complicated neural circuitry.

4. Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.

5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.

“Our species lived as hunter-gatherers 1000 times longer than as anything else. The world that seems so familiar to you an me—a world with roads, schools, grocery stores, factories, farms and nation-states—has lasted for only an eye blink of time when compared to our entire evolutionary history The computer age is only a little older than the typical college student and the industrial revolution is a mere 200 years old. Agriculture first appeared on earth only 10,000 years ago, and it wasn’t until abut 5000 years ago that as many as half the human population engaged in farming rather than hunting and gathering. Natural selection is a slow process and there haven’t been enough generations for it to design circuits that are well adapted to post-industrial life.”

Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience: Problem Solving Tool

ECN fuses Evolutionary Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience into one unified theory of human behavior based on the foundations of evolutionary meta-theory. The fruitfulness of ECN and, hence, the DOD’s R&D efforts to divine the Human Terrain, depends largely upon the willingness of participants and practitioners to accept and apply the general principles of Evolution and, most particularly, the basic tenets of Evolutionary Psychology.

“Like Pre-Darwinian psychology and other social sciences, cognitive neuroscience without evolution will have difficulty accurately describing the functional workings of the human mind…A cognitive neuroscience approach to ultimate questions without evolutionary meta-theoretical guidance makes little sense…An evolutionary perspective provides a structure from which to guide empirical investigations and hypothesis generation about brain behavior relationships…

Evolutionary psychology assumes that an evolved psychological mechanism and its corresponding neural substrates is an information-processing module that was selected during a species’ evolutionary history because it reliably produces behavior that solved a particular adaptive problem. Evolved psychological mechanisms are understood in terms of their specific inputs, decision rules and outputs. The filter of natural selection operates on psychological mechanisms that produce behavior. Natural selection cannot operate on behavior directly, but on the genes associated with neural substrates that generate the psychological mechanisms that produce the behavior…Evolutionary Psychology is not post hoc storytelling: its practitioners often use a deductive approach moving from theory to data…

The majority of psychological mechanisms are presumed to be domain specific. The mind is comprised of content-dependent machinery—physiological and psychological mechanisms--that is presumed to have evolved to solve specific adaptive problems. Psychological mechanisms can also be expressed as cognitive biases that cause people to more readily attend to some pieces of information relative to others…A domain, when referring to a psychological mechanism, is a selection pressure, an adaptive problem. Domain, then, is synonymous with problem. A domain-specific mechanism refers to a problem-specific mechanism—a mechanism that evolved to solve a specific adaptive problem. Although evolutionary and cognitive psychologists use the term domain-specific, perhaps some confusion could be avoided if the more accurate term problem-specific were employed.

Why is ECN important? Without evolutionary meta-theoretical guidance, cognitive science will fail to describe with anything but superficial accuracy the human and animal mind. Cognitive science will simply explain proximate mechanisms (i.e., the “how”) or brain-behavior relationships (most often using theoretical models derived from standard social science models). This is only half the equation. The approach misses the ultimate (i.e., “why”) questions of brain behavior relationships.

By adopting the ECN approach and directly addressing ultimate questions about brain-behavior relationships, scientists will be in a position to better describe the cognitive processes and the neural correlates that they investigate. Likewise without cognitive neuroscientific methods, evolutionary psychology may not be able to adequately describe and understand the neurophysiological mediators to psychological adaptations and hence may never be able to accurately describe the evolved nature of the human mind. Without peering into the brain with techniques such as modern functional neuroimaging, evolutionary psychological investigations can only describe the cognitive processing of human mental characteristics.

Evolutionary Psychology can describe function but is limited in its description of structure, and thus has no ability to relate function to structure which might be important especially in comparative investigations of cognitive evolution. The relationship between structure and function is inherently a problem of evolutionary biology; .i.e., the genes that give rise to brain structure and its component nuclei and modularity, as well as its ability to process information, were the combined units of selection.

The need for an integrated science of the mind that utilizes evolutionary meta-theoretical guidance to cognitive neuroscience investigations is overdue, but beginning to flourish...By adopting an ECN approach, scientists will be in a position to think about uniquely human traits such as higher-level consciousness, theory of mind and self awareness.

It is likely that the most exciting advancements in technology for understanding the evolved mind are going to come from interdisciplinary collaborations...In fact, ECN might be the only approach that can give rise to such an understanding. Evolutionary cognitive neuroscience might be the newest science of the mind.”

Applications

ECN may be used to inform current studies of human activity by providing insights as to how 21st Century humanity graduated from multiple hunter-gatherer bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and kingdoms to become nation-states. This may provide insights to public policy makers of the future, particularly given that humanity may be now working its way from nation-state back to tribal-state as the accelerated global mobility of everything from insurgent groups and viral strains to ideas and corporations threatens slow-moving governing institutions. Already, ECN has tackled matters as varied as water pollution and fetal development; the role of women and men in society and conflict; violent crime; leadership styles; terrorism, law and sentencing; world government; drug use, and an array of other issues falling into brain-behavior relationships.

In the end, humanity should be its own best resource for researching and solving complexity since humanity itself is the root cause of its problems. ECN may lead humanity to figure itself out. In that process there may be a possibility that this discovery will show that the species is really not as complex as it is egotistical and dualistic by evolutionary design. Humanity may find that it does, indeed, occupy a special place--not in the known universe or some mythical after-life, but right here at home.

Dangers

Neuroweapons may be an outcome of ECN R&D programs. It is likely that DOD may classify as Top Secret programs that seek to turn the speed of thought into a weapon, or programs that blur the line between human and machine. With classification, no one may ever know of the existence of such programs. Some in the scientific community have suggested that, beyond the development of neuro-biomachinery and genetic manipulation, non-traceable neuroweapons with viral genetic payloads may be used to disrupt the brain and central nervous system. As a result, the creation of neurosecurity advisory and/or ethics boards may be required to keep R&D and testing efforts in bounds.

Original article posted here.