Mental Health

In place of a process of a labelling which brought alienation and often detention, sectioning, and mind altering anti-psychotic medication, many psychoanalysts and psychotherapists felt that even in severe cases of schizoid withdrawal we were not necessarily wasting our time in attempting to restore health by the difficult work of unravelling experiences in order to make sense of an illness. In this way, psychoanalysis has been, in its most radical form, a critic of a society, which failed to exercise imaginative empathy when passing judgement on people. The work of Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Harold Searles or R.D. Laing - all trained as psychiatrists and all of them rebels against the standard procedures – provided a way of working with people very different from the psychiatric model, which seemed to encourage a society to repress its sickness by making a clearly split off group the carriers of it.  A psychiatrist in a mental hospital once joked to me, with some truth, when I commented on the number of carrier bags carried by many of the medicated patients around the hospital grounds, that they assessed the progress of the patient in terms of the reduction of the number of carrier bags. It is too often difficult to believe, however, when hearing the history of a life, that the “schizophrenic” was not suffering the effects of having been made, consciously and unconsciously, the carefully concealed carrier of the ills of the family.

For someone who felt his mind was going to pieces, to be put into the stressful situation of the psychiatric examination, even when the psychiatrist acquitted himself with kindness, the situation of the assessment procedure itself, can be ‘an effective way to drive someone crazy, or more crazy.’ (Laing, 1985, p 17).  But if the accounting of bizarre experiences more or less guaranteed you a new label or a trip to the psychiatric ward, there is even more reason for a new group of people to be outraged about how their symptoms are being diagnosed.  A doubly cruel sentence is being imposed on people who are the victims of the most appalling abuse by scientific-military experiments, and a totally uncomprehending society is indifferent to their evidence. For the development of a new class of weaponry now has the capability of entering the brain and mind and body of another person by technological means.

Harnessing neuroscience to military capability, this technology is the result of decades of research and experimentation, most particularly in the Soviet Union and the United States. (Welsh, 1997, 2000) We have failed to comprehend that the result of the technology that originated in the years of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the West, has resulted in using satellite technology not only for surveillance and communication systems but also to lock on to human beings, manipulating brain frequencies by directing laser beams, neural-particle beams, electro-magnetic radiation, sonar waves, radiofrequency radiation (RFR), soliton waves, torsion fields and by use of these or other energy fields which form the areas of study for astro-physics. Since the operations are characterised by secrecy, it seems inevitable that the methods that we do know about, that is, the exploitation of the ionosphere, our natural shield, are already outdated as we begin to grasp the implications of their use. The patents deriving from Bernard J. Eastlund’s work provide the ability to put unprecedented amounts of power in the Earth’s atmosphere at strategic locations and to maintain the power injection level, particularly if random pulsing is employed, in a manner far more precise and better controlled than accomplished by the prior art, the detonation of nuclear devices at various yields and various altitudes. (ref High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project, HAARP).

Some patents, now owned by Raytheon, describe how to make “nuclear sized explosions without radiation” and describe power beam systems, electromagnetic pulses and over-the-horizon detection systems. A more disturbing use is the system developed for manipulating and disturbing the human mental process using pulsed radio frequency radiation (RFR), and their use as a device for causing negative effects on human health and thinking. The victim, the innocent civilian target is locked on to, and unable to evade the menace by moving around. The beam is administered from space.  The Haarp facility as military technology could be used to broadcast global mind-control, as a system for manipulating and disturbing the human mental process using pulsed radio frequency (RFR). The super-powerful radio waves are beamed to the ionosphere, heating those areas, thereby lifting them. The electromagnetic waves bounce back to the earth and penetrate human tissue.

Dr Igor Smirnov, of the Institute of Psycho-Correction in Moscow, says: “It is easily conceivable that some Russian ‘Satan’, or let’s say Iranian – or any other ‘Satan’, as long as he owns the appropriate means and finances, can inject himself into every conceivable computer network, into every conceivable radio or television broadcast, with relative technological ease, even without disconnecting cables…and intercept the radio waves in the ether and modulate every conceivable suggestion into it. This is why such technology is rightfully feared.”(German TV documentary, 1998).

If we were concerned before about diagnostic criteria being imposed according to the classification of recognizable  symptoms, we have reason now to submit them to even harsher scrutiny. The development over the last decades since the Cold War arms race has included as a major strategic category, psycho-electronic weaponry, the ultimate aim of which is to enter the brain and mind. Unannounced, undebated and largely unacknowledged by scientists or by the governments who employ them – technology to enter and control minds from a distance has been unleashed upon us. The only witnesses who are speaking about   this terrible technology with its appalling implications for the future, are the victims themselves and those who are given the task of diagnosing mental illness are attempting to silence them by classifying their evidence and accounts as the symptoms of schizophrenia, while the dispensers of psychic mutilation and programmed pain continue with their work, aided and unopposed.

If it was always crucial, under the threat of psychiatric sectioning, to carefully screen out any sign of confused speech, negativity, coldness, suspicion, bizarre thoughts, sixth sense, telepathy, premonitions, but above all the sense that “others can feel my feelings, and that someone seemed to be keeping up a running commentary on your thoughts and behaviour,” then reporting these to a psychiatrist, or anyone else for that matter who was not of a mind to believe that such things as mind-control could exist, would be the end of your claim to sanity and probably your freedom. For one of the salient characteristics of mind-control is the running commentary, which replicates so exactly, and surely not without design, the symptoms of schizophrenia. Part of the effort is to remind the victim that they are constantly under control or surveillance. Programmes vary, but common forms of reminders are electronic prods and nudges, body noises, twinges and cramps to all parts of the body, increasing heart beats, applying pressures to internal organs – all with a personally codified system of comments on thoughts and events, designed to create stress, panic and desperation. This is mind control at its most benign. There is reason to fear the use of beamed energy to deliver lethal assaults on humans, including cardiac arrest, and bleeding in the brain.

It is the government system of secrecy, which has facilitated this appalling prospect. There have been warning voices. “…the government secrecy system as a whole is among the most poisonous legacies of the Cold War …the Cold War secrecy (which) also mandate(s) Active Deception…a security manual for special access programs authorizing contractors to employ ‘cover stories to disguise their activities.  The only condition is that cover stories must be believable.” (Aftergood & Rosenberg, 1994; Bulletin of Atomic Scientist). Paranoia has been aided and abetted by government intelligence agencies.

In the United Kingdom the fortifications against any disturbing glimmer of awareness of such actual or potential outrages against human rights and social and political abuses seem to be cast in concrete.  Complete with crenellations, ramparts and parapets, the stronghold of nescience reigns supreme.  To borrow Her Majesty the Queen’s recent observation: “There are forces at work of which we are not aware.”  One cannot say that there is no British Intelligence on the matter, as it is quite unfeasible that the existence of the technology is not classified information. Indeed it is a widely held belief that the women protesting against the presence of cruise missiles at Greenham Common were victims of electro-magnetic radiation at gigahertz frequency by directed energy weapons, and that their symptoms, including cancer, were consistent with such radiation effects as reported by Dr Robert Becker who has been a constantly warning voice against the perils of electro-magnetic radiation. The work of Allen Frey suggests that we should consider radiation effects as a grave hazard  producing increased permeability of the blood-brain barrier, and weakening crucial defenses of the central  nervous system against toxins. (Becker, 1985, p. 286).  Dr Becker has written about nuclear magnetic resonance as a familiar tool in medecine known as magnetic resonance imaging or MRI. Calcium efflux is the result of cyclotronic resonance which latter can be explained  thus: If a charged particle or ion is exposed to a steady magnetic field in space, it will begin to go into a circular or orbital, motion at right angles to the applied magnetic field.The speed with which it orbits will be determined by the ratio between the charge and the mass of the particle and by the strength of the magnetic field. (Becker, 1990,p.235) The implications of this for wide scale aggression by using a combination of radar based energy and the use of nuclear resonating are beyond the scope of the writer, but appear to be worth the very serious consideration of physicists in assessing how  they might be used against human beings.

Amongst medical circles, however, it has so far not been possible for the writer to find a neuroscientist, neurologist or a psychiatrist, nor for that matter, a general medical practitioner, who acknowledges even the potential for technological manipulation of the nervous system as a problem requiring their professional interest. There has been exactly this response from some of England’s most eminent practitioners of the legal profession, not surprisingly, because the information about such technology is not made available to them. They would refer anyone attempting to communicate mind- harassment as a psychiatric problem, ignoring the crime that is being committed.

The aim here is not to attempt a comprehensive history and development of the technology of mind control. These very considerable tasks - which have to be done under circumstances of the most extreme difficulty - have been addressed with clarity and courage by others, who live with constant harm and threats, not least of all contemptuous labelling. Their work can be readily accessed on the internet references given at the end of this paper. For a well-researched outline of the historical development of electro-magnetic technology the reader should refer to the timeline of dates and electromagnetic weapon development by Cheryl Welsh, president of Citizens against Human Rights Abuse. (Welsh 1997; 2001). There are at least one and a half thousand people worldwide who state they are being targeted. Mojmir Babacek, now domiciled in his native Czech Republic, after eight years of residence in the United States in the eighties, has made a  painstakingly meticulous review of the technology, and continues his research. (Babacek 1998, 2002)

We are concerned here with reinforcing in the strongest possible terms:

i) The need for such abuses to human rights and the threats to democracy to be called to consciousness, and without further delay.

ii) To analyse the reasons why people might defend themselves from becoming conscious of the existence of such threats.

iii) To address the urgent need for intelligence, imagination, and information  - not to mention compassion  - in dealing with the victims of persecution from this technology, and

iv) To alert a sleeping society, to the imminent threats to their freedom from the threat from fascist and covert operations who have in all probability gained control of potentially lethal weaponry of the type we are describing.
 

It is necessary to emphasise that at present there is not even the means for victims to gain medical attention for the effects of radiation from this targeting. Denied the respect of credulity of being used as human guinea pigs, driven to suicide by the breakdown of their lives, they are treated as insane – at best regarded as ‘sad cases’.  Since the presence of a permanent ‘other’ in one’s mind and body is by definition an act of the most intolerable cruelty, people who are forced to bear it but who refuse to be broken by it, have no other option than to turn themselves into activists, their lives consumed by the battle against such atrocities, their energies directed to alerting and informing the public of things they don’t want to hear or understand about evil forces at work in their society.
It is necessary, at this point, to briefly outline a few – one might say the precious few – attempts by public servants to verify the existence and dangers inherent in this field:
 

•  In January 1998, an annual public meeting of the French National Bioethics Committee was held in Paris. Its chairman, Jean-Pierre Changeux, a neuroscientist at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, told the meeting that “advances in cerebral imaging make the scope for invasion of privacy immense. Although the equipment needed is still highly specialized, it will become commonplace and capable of being used at a distance. That will open the way for abuses such as invasion of personal liberty, control of behaviour and brainwashing. These are far from being science-fiction concerns…and constitute “a serious risk to society.” (“Nature.” Vol 391, 1998.
•  In January 1999, the European Parliament passed a resolution where it calls “ for an international convention introducing a global ban on all development and deployment of weapons which might enable any form of manipulation of human beings. It is our conviction that this ban can not be implemented without the global pressure of the informed general public on the governments. Our major objective is to get across to the general public the real threat which these weapons represent for human rights and democracy and to apply pressure on the governments and parliaments around the world to enact legislature which would prohibit the use of these devices to both government and private organisations as well as individuals.”  (Plenary sessions/Europarliament, 1999)
•  In October 2001, Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich introduced a bill to the House of Representatives which, it was hoped would be extremely important in the fight to expose and stop psycho-electronic mind control experimentation on involuntary, non-consensual citizens. The Bill was referred to the Committee on Science, and in addition to the Committee on Armed Services and International Relations. In the original bill a ban was sought on ‘exotic weapons’ including electronic, psychotronic or information weapons, chemtrails, particle beams, plasmas, electromagnetic radiation, extremely low frequency (ELF) or ultra low frequency (ULF) energy radiation, or mind control technologies. Despite the inclusion of a prohibition of the basing of weapons in space, and the use of weapons to destroy objects or damage objects in space, there is no mention in the revised bill of any of the aforementioned mind-invasive weaponry, nor of the use of satellite or radar or other energy based technology for deploying or developing technology designed for deployment against the minds of human beings. (Space Preservation Act, 2002)

In reviewing the development of the art of mind-invasive technology– there are a few outstanding achievements to note:

In 1969 Dr Jose Delgado, a Yale psychologist, published a book: “Physical Control of the Mind: Towards a Psychocivilized Society”. In essence, he displayed in practical demonstrations how, by means of electrical stimulation of the brain which had been mapped out in its relations between different points and activities, functions and sensations, - by means of electrical stimulation, how the rhythm of breathing and heartbeat could be changed, as well as the function of most of the viscera, and gall bladder secretion. Frowning, opening and closing of eyes and mouth, chewing, yawning, sleep, dizziness, epileptic seizures in healthy persons were induced. The intensity of feelings could be controlled by turning the knob, which controlled the intensity of the electric current. He states at the end of his book the hope that the new power will remain limited to scientists or some charitable elite for the benefit of a “psychocivilized society.”

In the 1980’s the neuromagnetometer was developed which functions as an antenna and could monitor the patterns emerging from the brain. (In the seventies the scientists had discovered that electromagnetic pulses enabled the brain to be stimulated through the skull and other tissues, so there was no more need to implant electrodes in the brain). The antenna, combined with the computer, could localize the points in the brain where the brain events occur. The whole product is called the magnetoencephalograph.

In January 2000 the Lockheed Martin neuroengineer Dr John D. Norseen, was quoted (US News and World Report, 2000) as hoping to turn the electrohypnomentalaphone, a mind reading machine, into science fact. Dr Norseen, a former Navy pilot, claims his interest in the brain stemmed from reading a Soviet book in the 1980’s claiming that research on the mind would revolutionize the military and society at large. By a process of deciphering the brain’s electrical activity, electromagnetic pulsations would trigger the release of the brain’s own transmitters to fight off disease, enhance learning, or alter the mind’s visual images, creating a ‘synthetic reality’. By this process of BioFusion, (Lockheed Martin, 2000) information is placed in a database, and a composite model of the brain is created. By viewing a brain scan recorded by (functional) magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, scientists can tell what the person was doing at the time of recording – say reading or writing, or recognise emotions from love to hate. “If this research pans out”, says Norseen, “you can begin to manipulate what someone is thinking even before they know it.” But Norseen says he is ‘agnostic’ on the moral ramifications, that he’s not a mad scientist – just a dedicated one. “The ethics don’t concern me,” he says, “but they should concern someone else.”

The next big thing looks like being something which we might refer to as a neurocomputer but it need not resemble a laptop – it may be reducible to whatever size is convenient for use, such as a small mobile phone. Arising from a break-through and exploitation of PSI-phenomena, it may be modelled on the nervous-psychic activity of the brain – that is, as an unbalanced, unstable system of neurotransmitters and interacting neurones, the work having been derived from the creation of a copy of a living brain – accessed by chance,  and ESP and worked on by design.
 

On receiving a communication from the writer on the feasibility of a machine being on the horizon which, based on the project of collecting electromagnetic waves emanating from the brain and transmitting them into another brain that would read a person’s thoughts, or using the same procedure in order to impose somebody else’s thoughts on another brain and in this way direct his actions – there was an unequivocal answer from IBM at executive level that there was no existing technology to create such a computer in the foreseeable future. This is at some variance with the locating of a patent numbered 03951134 on the Internet pages of IBM Intellectual Property Network for a device, described in the patent, as capable of picking up at a distance the brain waves of a person, process them by computer and emit correcting waves which will change the original brain waves. Similar letters addressed to each of the four top executives of Apple Inc., in four individual letters marked for their personal attention, produced absolutely no response. This included the ex- Vice President of the United States, Mr Al Gore, newly elected to the Board of Directors of Apple.

Enough people have been sufficiently concerned by the reports of victims of mind control abuse to organise The Geneva Forum, in 2002, held as a joint initiative of the Quaker United Nations Office, Geneva; the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research; the International Committee of the Red cross, and the Human Rights Watch (USA), and Citizens against Human Rights Abuses (CAHRA); and the Programme for Strategic and International Security Studies, which was represented by the Professor and Senior Lecturer from the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford.

In England, on May 25, 1995, the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. carried an article based on a report by Nic Lewer, the peace researcher from Bradford University, which listed “more than 30 different lines of research into ‘new age weapons’…”some of the research sounds even less rational. There are, according to Lewer, plans for ‘pulsed microwave beams’ to destroy enemy electronics, and separate plans for very-low-frequency sound beams to induce vomiting, bowel spasm, epileptic seizures and also crumble masonry.” Further, the article states, “There are plans for ‘mind control’ with the use of 'psycho-correction messages’ transmitted by subliminal audio and visual stimuli. There is also a plan for ‘psychotronic weapons’ – apparently the projection of consciousness to other locations – and another to use holographic projection to disseminate propaganda and misinformation.” (Welsh, Timeline). Apart from this notable exception it is difficult to locate any public statement of the problem in the United Kingdom.

Unfortunately, the problem of credulity does not necessarily cease with frequent mention, as in the United States, in spite of the number of reported cases, there is still not sufficient public will to make strenuous protest against what is not only already happening, but against what will develop if left unchecked. It appears that the administration believes that it is necessary and justifiable, in the interests of national security, to make experimental human sacrifices, to have regrettable casualties, for there to be collateral damage, to suffer losses in place of strife or war.  This is, of course, totally incompatible with any claims to be a democratic nation which respects the values of human life and democracy, and such an administration which tutors its servants in the ways of such barbaric tortures must be completely condemned as uncivilised and hypocritical.
 

Disbelief as a Defence Mechanism

In the face of widespread disbelief about mind-control, it seems worth analysing the basis of the mechanisms employed to maintain disbelief:

i) In the sixties, Soviet dissidents received a significant measure of sympathy and indignant protest from western democracies on account of their treatment, most notedly the abuse of psychiatric methods of torture to which they were subjected. It is noteworthy that we seem to be able to access credulity, express feelings of indignant support when we can identify with victims, who share and support our own value system, and who, in this particular historical case, reinforced our own values, since they were protesting against a political system which also  threatened us at that time. Psychologically, it is equally important to observe that support from a safe distance, and the benefits to the psyche of attacking a split-off  ‘bad father’, the soviet authorities in this case, presents no threat to one’s internal system; indeed it relieves internal pressures.  On the other hand, recognizing and denouncing a similar offence makes very much greater psychic demands of us when it brings us into conflict with our own environment, our own security, our own reality.  The defence against disillusion serves to suppress paranoia that our father figure, the president, the prime minister, our governments - might not be what they would like to be seen to be.

ii) The need to deposit destructive envy and bad feelings elsewhere, on account of the inability of the ego to acknowledge ownership of them - reinforces the usefulness of persons or groups, which will serve to contain those, disowned, projected feelings which arouse paranoid anxieties. The concepts of mind-invasion strike at the very heart of paranoid anxiety, causing considerable efforts to dislodge them from the psyche. The unconscious identification of madness with dirt or excrement is an important aspect of anal aggression, triggering projective identification as a defence.

iii) To lay oneself open to believing that a person is undergoing the experience of being invaded mentally and physically by an unseen manipulator requires very great efforts in the self to manage dread.
 

iv) The defence against the unknown finds expression in the split between theory and practice; between the scientist as innovator and the society who can make the moral decisions about his inventions; between fact and science fiction, the latter of which can present preposterous challenges to the imagination without undue threat, because it serves to reinforce a separation from the real.

v) Identification with the aggressor. Sadistic fantasies, unconscious and conscious, being transferred on to the aggressor and identified with, aid the repression of fear of passivity, or a dread of punishment. This mechanism acts to deny credulity to the victim who represents weakness. This is a common feature of satanic sects.

vi) The liberal humanist tradition which denies the worst destructive capacities of man in the effort to sustain the belief in the great continuity of cultural and scientific tradition; the fear, in one’s own past development, of not being ‘ongoing’, can produce the psychic effect of reversal into the opposite to shield against aggressive feelings. This becomes then the exaggerated celebration of the ‘new’ as the affirmation of human genius which will ultimately be for the good of mankind, and which opposes warning voices about scientific advances as being pessimistic, unenlightened, unprogressive and Luddite.  Strict adherence to this liberal position can act as overcompensation for a fear of envious spoiling of good possessions, i.e. cultural and intellectual goods.

vii) Denial by displacement is also employed to ignore the harmful aspects of technology. What may be harmful for the freedom and good of society can be masked and concealed by the distribution of new and entertaining novelties. The technology, which puts a camera down your gut for medical purposes, is also used to limit your freedom by surveillance. The purveyors of innovative technology come up with all sorts of new gadgets, which divert, entertain and feed the acquisitive needs of insatiable shoppers, and bolster the economy.  The theme of “Everything’s up to date in Kansas City” only takes on a downside when individual experience – exploding breast implants, say – takes the gilt off the gingerbread. Out of every innovation for evil (i.e. designed for harming and destroying) some ‘good’  (i.e. public diversion or entertainment) can be promoted for profit or crowd-pleasing.

viii) Nasa is sending a spacecraft to Mars, or so we are told.  They plan to trundle across the Martian surface searching for signs of water and life. We do not hear dissenting voices about  its feasibility.

Why is it that, when a person accounts that their mind is being disrupted and they are being persecuted by an unseen method of invasive technology, that we cannot bring ourselves to believe them?  Could it be that the horror involved in the empathic identification required brings the shutters down? Conversely, the shared experience of the blasting of objects into space brings with it the possibilities of shared potency or the relief  that resonates in the unconscious of a massive projection or evacuation – a shared experience which is blessed in the name of man’s scientific genius.

ix) The desire ‘not to be taken in’, not to be taken for a fool, provides one of the most powerful and common defence mechanism against credulity.
 

Power, Paranoia and Unhealthy Governments

The ability to be the bearer and container of great power without succumbing to the pressures of latent narcissistic psychoses is an important matter too little considered. The effect of holding power and the expectation and the need to be seen as capable of sustaining it, if not exercising it, encourages omnipotence of thought. In the wake of this, a narcissistic overevaluation of the subject’s own mental processes may set in. In the effort to hold himself together as the possessor, container and executor of power, he (or indeed, she) may also, undergo a process of splitting which allows him, along with others, to bear enthralled witness of himself in this illustrious role. This may mean that the seat of authority is vacated, at least at times. The splitting process between the experiencing ego and the perceiving ego allows the powerful leader to alternate his perception of himself inside and outside, sometimes beside, himself. With the reinforcement of himself from others as his own narcissistic object, reality testing is constrained.  In this last respect, he has much in common with the other powerful figure of the age, the movie star. or by those, in Freud’s words, who are “ruined by success.”

In a world, which is facing increasing disillusion about the gulf between the public platforms on which governments are elected, and the contingencies and pragmatics of retaining defence strategies and economic investments, the role of military and intelligence departments, with their respective tools of domination and covert infiltration, is increasingly alarming.  Unaccountable to the public, protected from exposure and prosecution by their immunity, licensed to lie as well as to kill, it is in the hands of these agents that very grave threats to human rights and freedom lies. Empowered to carry out aggression through classified weapon experimentation which is undetectable, these men and women are also open to corruption from lucrative offers of financial reward from powerful and sinister groups who can utilize their skills, privileged knowledge and expertise for frankly criminal and fascist purposes.  

Our information about the psychological profiles of those who are employed to practice surveillance on others is limited, but it is not difficult to imagine the effects on the personality that would ensue with the persistent practice of such an occupation, so constantly exposed to the perversions. One gains little snatches of insight here and there. In his book on CIA mind control research (Marks, 1988), John Marks quotes a CIA colleague’s joke (always revealing for personality characteristics): “If you could find the natural radio frequency of a person’s sphincter, you could make him run out of the room real fast.” (One wonders if the same amusement is derived from the ability to apply, say infra-sound above 130 decibels, which is said to cause stoppage of the heart, according to one victim/activist from his readings of a report for the Russian Parliament.)

Left to themselves, these servants of the state may well feel exempt from the process of moral self-scrutiny, but the work must be dehumanising for the predator as well as the prey. It is probably true that the need to control their agents in the field was an incentive to develop the methods  in use today. It is also an effectively brutalising training for persecuting others. Meanwhile the object, the prey, in a bid for not only for survival but also in a desperate effort to warn his or her fellows about what is going on, attempts to turn himself into a quantum physicist, a political researcher, a legal sleuth, an activist, a neurologist, a psychologist, a physiologist – his own doctor, since he cannot know what effects this freakish treatment might have on his body, let alone his mind. There are always new methods to try out which might prove useful in the search to find ways of disabling and destroying opponents – air injected into brains and lungs, lasers to strike down or blind, particle beams, sonar waves, or whatever combination of energies to direct, or destabilise or control.

Science and Scepticism

Scientists can be bought, not just by governments, but also by sinister and secret societies.  Universities can be funded by governments to develop technology for unacceptably inhumane uses.  The same people who deliver the weapons - perhaps respected scientists and academics - may cite the acceptable side of scientific discoveries, which have been developed by experimenting on unacknowledged, unfortunate people. In a cleaned up form, they are then possibly celebrated as a break-through in the understanding of the natural laws of the universe. It is not implausible that having delivered the technical means for destruction, the innovator and thinker goes on, wearing a different hat, to receive his (or her) Nobel Prize. There are scientists who have refused to continue to do work when they were approached by CIA and Soviet representatives. These are the real heroes of science.

In the power struggle, much lies at stake in being the first to gain control of ultimate mind-reading and mind-controlling technology. Like the nuclear bomb, common ownership would seem by any sane calculations to cancel out the advantage of possession, but there is always a race to be the first to possess the latest ultimate means of mass destruction.  The most desirable form is one that can be directed at others without contaminating oneself in the process - one that can be undetected and neatly, economically and strategically delivered. We should be foolish to rule out secret organisations, seeing threat only from undemocratic countries and known terrorist groups.

As consumers in a world which is increasingly one in which shopping is the main leisure activity, we should concern ourselves to becoming alert to the ways in which human welfare may have been sacrificed to produce an awesome new gadget. It may be the cause for celebration for the ‘innovator’, but brought about as the result of plugging in or dialling up the living neuronal processes of an enforced experimentee.  If we are concerned not to eat boiled eggs laid by battery hens, we might not regard it morally irrelevant to scrutinise the large corporations producing electronically innovative  ‘software.’ We might also be wary about the origins of the sort of bland enticements of dating agencies who propose finding your ideal partner by matching up brain frequencies and ‘bio-rhythms’.

We do not know enough about  the background of such technology, nor how to evaluate it ethically. We do not know about its effects on the future, because we are not properly informed. If governments persist in concealing the extent of their weapon capability in the interests of defence, they are also leaving their citizens disempowered of the right to protest against their deployment. More alarmingly, they are leaving their citizens exposed to their deployment by ruthless organisations whose concerns are exactly the opposite of democracy and human rights.
 

Back in the United Kingdom

Meanwhile, back in England, the Director of the Oxford Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Professor Colin Blakemore, also the elective Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council writes to the author that he “... knows of no technology  (not even in the wildest speculations of neuroscientists) for scanning and collecting ‘neuronal data’ at a distance.” (Blakemore, 2003, ) This certitude is at distinct variance with the fears of other scientists in Russia and the United States, and not least of all with the fears of the French neuroscientist, Jean-Pierre Changeux of the French National Bioethics Committee already quoted (see page 5). It is also very much at odds with the writing of Dr Michael Persinger from the Behavioural Neuroscience Laboratory at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. His article “On the Possibility of Directly Accessing Every Human Brain by Electromagnetic Induction of Algorithms” (1995), he describes the ways that individual differences among human brains can be overcome and comes to a conclusion about the technological possibilities of influencing a major part of the approximately six billion people on this planet without mediation through classical sensory modalities but by generating electromagnetic induction of fundamental algorithms in the atmosphere. Dr Persinger’s work is referred to by Captain John Tyler whose work for the American Air Force and Aerospace programmes likens the human nervous system to a radio receiver. (1990)

Very recently the leading weekly cultural BBC radio review had as one of its guests, the eminent astro-physicist and astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, who has recently published a book, “Our Final Century”, in which he makes a sober and reasoned case for the fifty-fifty chance that millions of people, probably in a ‘third-world country’ could be wiped out in the near future through biotechnology and bio-terrorism – “by error or malign release.” He spoke of this devastation as possibly coming from small groups or cults, based in the United States. “…few individuals with the right technology to cause absolute mayhem.”  He also said that in this century, human nature is no longer a fixed commodity, that perhaps we should contemplate the possibility that humans would even have implants in the brain.

The other guests on this programme were both concerned with Shakespeare, one a theatre producer and the other a writer on Shakespeare, while his remaining guest was a young woman who had a website called “Spiked”, the current theme of which was Panic Attack, that is to say, Attack on Panic. This guest vigorously opposed what she felt was the pessimism of Sir Martin, regarding his ideas as essentially eroding trust, and inducing panic. This reaction seems to typify one way of dealing with threat and anxiety, and demonstrates  the difficulty that a warning voice, even from  a man of the academic distinction of Martin Rees, has in alerting people to that which they do not want to hear. This flight reaction was reinforced by the presenter who summed up the morning’s discussion at the end of the programme with the words:  “We have a moral! Less panic, more Shakespeare!”
 

The New Barbarism

Since access to a mind-reading machine will enable the operator to access the ideas of another person, we should prepare ourselves for a new world order in which ideas will be, as it were, up for grabs.  We need not doubt that the contents of another’s mind will be scooped up, scooped out, sorted through as if the event was a jumble sale. The legal profession would therefore be well advised to consider the laws on Intellectual Property very judiciously in order to acquit themselves with any degree of authenticity. We should accustom ourselves to the prospect of recognizing our work coming out of the mouth of another. The prospect of wide-scale fraud, and someone posturing in your stolen clothes will not be a pretty sight.  The term “personal mind enhancement”  is slipping in through the back door, to borrow a term used by the Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and it is being done through technologically-induced mental co-ercion – mind raping and looting.  In place of, or in addition to, cocaine, we may expect to see ‘mind-enhanced’ performances on “live” television.

The brave new science of neuropsychiatry and brain mapping hopes to find very soon, with the fMRI scanner - this “brand new toy that scientists have got their hands on” - “the blob for love” and “the blob for guilt”, (BBC Radio 4: All in the Mind, 5 March, 2003). Soon we will be able to order a brain scan for anyone whose behaviour strikes us as odd or bizarre, and the vicissitudes of a life need no longer trouble us in our diagnostic assessments. In his recent Reith Lectures for the BBC (2003), Professor Ramachandran, the celebrated neuroscientist from the La Hoya Institute in San Diego, California, has demonstrated for us many fascinating things that the brain can do. He has talked to us about personality disorders and shown that some patients, who have suffered brain damage from head injury, do not have the capacity to recognise their mothers. Others feel that they are dead. And indeed he has found brain lesions in these people. In what seems to be an enormous but effortless leap, the self-styled “kid in a candy store” is now hoping to prove that all schizophrenics, have damage to the right hemisphere of the brain, which results in the inability to distinguish between fantasy (sic) and reality. Since  Professor Ramachandran speaks of schizophrenia in the same breath as denial of illness, or agnosia, it is not clear, and it would be interesting to know, whether the person with the head injury has been aware or unaware of the head injury. Also does the patient derive comfort and a better chance at reality testing when he is told of the lesion?  Does he feel better when he has received the diagnosis? And what should the psychoanalysts – and the psychiatrists, - feel about all those years of treating people of whose head injuries they were absolutely unaware? Was this gross negligence? Were we absolutely deluded in perceiving recovery in a sizeable number of them?

It is, however, lamentable that a neuroscientist with a professed interest in understanding schizophrenia should seek to provide light relief to his audience by making jokes about schizophrenics being people who are “convinced that the CIA has implanted devices in their brain to control their thoughts and actions, or that aliens are controlling them.”  (Reith Lecture, No 5, 2003).

There is a new desire for concretisation. The search for meaning has been replaced by the need for hard proof. If it doesn’t light up or add up it doesn’t have validity. The physician of the mind has become a surgeon. “He found a lump as big as a grapefruit!”

Facing up to the Dread and Fear of the Uncanny

Freud believed that an exploration of the uncanny would be a major direction of exploration of the mind in this century. The fear of the uncanny has been with us for a very long time. The evil eye, or the terrifying double, or intruder, is a familiar theme in literature, notably of Joseph Conrad in The Secret Sharer, and Maupassant’s short story, Le Horla. Freud’s analysis of the uncanny led him back to the old animistic conception of the universe: “…it seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to the animistic phase in primitive men, that none of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as ‘uncanny’ fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression.” (Freud: 1919. p.362)

The separation of birth, and the childhood fear of ‘spooks in the night’, also leave their traces in each and every one of us. The individual experience of being alone in one’s mind – the solitary fate of man which has never been questioned before, and upon which the whole history of civilised nurture is based - is now assaulted head-on.  Since growing up is largely synonymous with acceptance of one’s aloneness, the effort to assuage it is the basis for compassion and protection of others; it is the matrix for the greatest good, that of ordinary human kindness, and is at the heart of the communicating power of great art. Even if we must all live and die alone, we can at least share this knowledge in acts of tenderness which atone for our lonely state. In times of loss and mental breakdown, the starkness of this aloneness is all too clear.  The best of social and group constructiveness is an effort to allay the psychotic anxieties that lie at the base of every one of us, and which may be provoked under extreme enough conditions.

The calculated and technological entry into another person’s mind is an act of monumental barbarism which obliterates– perhaps with the twiddling of a dial – the history and civilisation of man’s mental development. It is more than an abuse of human rights, it is the destruction of meaning. For any one who is forced into the hell of living with an unseen mental rapist, the effort to stay sane is beyond the scope of tolerable endurance.  The imaginative capacity of the ordinary mind cannot encompass the horror of it.  We have attempted to come to terms with the experiments of the Nazis in concentration camps. We now have the prospect of systematic control authorised by men who issue instructions through satellite communications for the destruction of societies while they are driving new Jaguars and Mercedes, and going to the opera.

This is essentially about humiliation, and disempowerment. It is a manifestation of rage acted out by those who fear impotence with such dread, that their whole effort is directed into the emasculation and destruction of the terrifying rival of their unconscious fantasies. In this apocalypse of the mind the punitive figure wells up as if out of the bowels of the opera  stage, and this phantasmagoria is acted out on a global scale. These men  may be mad enough to believe they are creating a ‘psychocivilised world order”. For anyone who has studied damaged children, it is more resonant of the re-enactment from the unconscious, reinforced by a life devoid of the capacity for empathic identification, of the obscenities of the abused and abusing child in the savage nursery.  Other people -which were to them like Action Man toys to be dismembered, or Barbie Dolls to be obscenely defiled - become as meaningless in their humanity as pixillated dots on a screen.

Although forced entry into a mind is by definition obscene, an abbreviated assessment of the effects that  mind-invaded  people describe testifies  to the perverted nature of the experiments.  Bizarre noises are emitted from the body, a body known well enough by its owner to recognise the noises as extrinsic; air is pumped in and out of orifices as if by a bicycle pump. Gradually the repertoire is augmented - twinges and spasms to the eyes, nose, lips, strange tics, pains in the head, ringing in the ears, obstructions in the throat, pressure on the bowel and bladder causing incontinence; tingling in the fingers, feet, pressures on the heart, on breathing, dizziness, eye problems leading to cataracts; running eyes, running nose; speeding up of heart beats and the raising of pressure in the heart and chest; breathing and chest complaints leading to bronchitis and deterioration of the lungs; agonizing migraines; being woken up at night, sometimes with terrifying jolts ; insomnia; intolerable levels of stress from the loss of one’s privacy. This collection of assorted symptoms is a challenge to any medical practitioner to diagnose.

There are, more seriously, if the afore-going is characterised as non-lethal, the potential lethal effects since the capability of ultrasound and infra-sound to cause cardiac arrest, and brain lesions, paralysis and blindness, as well as blinding by laser beam, or inducing asphyxia by altering the frequencies which control breathing in the brain, epileptic seizure – all these and others may be at the fingertips of those who are developing them. And those who do choose to use them may be sitting with the weapon, which resembles, say, a compact mobile telephone, on the restaurant table next to the bottle of wine, or beside them at the swimming pool.

Finally – if the victims at this point in the new history of this mind-control, cannot yet prove their abuse, it must be asserted that, faced with the available information about technological development – it is certainly not possible for those seeking to evade such claims – to disprove them. To wait until the effects become widespread will be too late.
 

• For these and other reasons which this paper has attempted to address, we would call for an acknowledgement of such technology at a national and international level. Politicians, scientists and neurologists, neuroscientists, physicists and the legal profession should, without further delay, demand public debate on the existence and deployment of psychotronic technology; and for the declassification of information about such devices which abuse helpless people, and threaten democratic freedom.
• Victims’ accounts of abuse should be admitted to public account, and the use of psycho-electronic weapons should be made illegal and criminal,
• The medical profession should be helped to recognise the symptoms of mind-control and psychotronic abuse, and intelligence about their deployment should be declassified so that this abuse can be seen to be what it is, and not interpreted automatically as an indication of mental illness.

If, in the present confusion and insecurity about the search for evidence of weapons of mass destruction, we conclude that failure to locate them - whatever the truth of the matter –encourages us to be generally complacent, then we shall be colluding with very dark forces at work if we conclude that a course of extreme vigilance signifies paranoia. For there may well be other weapons of mass destruction being developed and not so far from home; weapons which, being even more difficult to locate, are developed invisibly, unobstructed, unheeded in our midst, using human beings as test-beds. Like ESP, the methods being used on humans have not been detectable using conventional detection equipment. It is likely that the signals being used are part of a physics not known to scientists without the highest level of security clearance. To ignore the evidence of victims is to deny, perhaps with catastrophic results, the  only evidence which might otherwise lead the defenders of freedom to becoming alert to the development of a fearful new methods of destruction. Manipulating terrorist groups and governments alike, these sinister and covert forces may well be very thankful for the professional derision of the victims, and for public ignorance. 

References

Laing, R.D. (1985) :  Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist. Macmillan, 1985

Welsh, Cheryl (1997): Timeline of Important Dates in the History of Electromagnetic Technology and Mind Control, at: 
www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~welsh/timeline.htm

Welsh, Cheryl (2001):Electromagnetic Weapons: As powerful as the Atomic Bomb, President Citizens Against Human Rights Abuse, CAHRA Home Page: U.S. Human Rights Abuse Report: www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~welsh/emr13.htm

Begich, Dr N. and Manning, J.: 1995 Angels Don’t Play this HAARP, Advances in Tesla Technology, Earthpulse Press.

ZDF TV:    “Secret Russia: Moscow – The Zombies of the Red Czars”, Script to be published in Resonance,  No. 35

Aftergood, Steven and Rosenberg, Barbara: “The Soft Kill Fallacy”, in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept/Oct 1994.

Becker, Dr Robert:  1985,The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life, William Morrow, N.Y.

Babacek, Mojmir: International Movement for the Ban of Manipulation of The Human Nervous System: http://mindcontrolforums.com/babacek.htm and go to: Ban of Manipulation of Human Nervous System

“Is it Feasible to Manipulate the Human Brain at a Distance?” 
www.aisjca-mft.org/braindist.htm

 “Psychoelectronic Threat to Democracy” 
http://mindcontrolforums.com/babacek.htm

Nature:  “Advances in Neuroscience May Threaten Human Rights”, Vol, 391, Jan. 22, 1998, p. 316; (ref Jean- Pierre Changeux)

Space Preservation Act: Bill H.R.2977 and HR 3616 IH in 107th Congress – 2nd Session: see: www.raven1.net/govptron.htm

Sessions European Parliament:
www.europarl.eu.int/home/default_en.htm?redirected=1

Click at Plenary Sessions, scroll down to Reports by A4 number, click, choose 1999 and fill in oo5 to A4

Delgado, Jose M.R: 1969. “Physical Control  of the Mind: Towards a Psychocivilized Society”, Vol. 41, World Perspectives, Harper Row, N.Y.

US News & World Report:  Lockheed Martin Aeronautics/ Dr John Norseen; Report January 3/10 2000, P.67

Freud, Sigmund:  1919: Art and Literature:” The Uncanny”.  Penguin,
Also  “Those Wrecked by Success.”

Marks, John:   1988 :The CIA and Mind Control – the Search for the Manchurian Candidate,  ISBN 0-440-20137-3

Persinger, M.A. “On the Possibility of Directly Accessing Every Human Brain by Electromagnetic Induction of Fundamental Algorythms”; In Perception and Motor Skills,  June, 1995, vol. 80, p. 791 – 799

Tyler, J.“Electromagnetic Spectrum in Low Intensity Conflict,” in  “Low Intensity Conflict and Modern Technology”,    ed. Lt. Col. J. Dean, USAF, Air University Press, Centre For Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education, Maxwell Air Force base, Alabama, June, 1986.

Rees, Martin Our Final Century:  2003, Heinemann.

Conrad, Joseph: The Secret Sharer, 1910.  Signet Classic.

Maupassant, Guy de: Le Horla, 1886. Livre de Poche.

The Guardian newspaper, that defender of truth in the United Kingdom, published an article by the Science Correspondent, Ian Sample, on 9 February 2007 entitled:

‘The Brain Scan that can read people’s intentions’, with the sub-heading: ‘Call for ethical debate over possible use of new technology in interrogation".

"Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there's no way you could possibly tell is in there. It's like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall", the scientists were reported as saying.

At the same time, London’s Science Museum was holding an exhibition entitled ‘Neurobotics: The Future of Thinking’. This venue had been chosen for the launch in October 2006 of the news that human thoughts could be read using a scanner. Dr Geraint Rees’ smiling face could be seen in a photograph at the Neurobotics website, under the heading "The Mind Reader". Dr Rees is one of the scientists who have apparently cracked the problem which has preoccupied philosophers and scientists since before Plato: they had made entry into the conscious mind. Such a reversal of human historical evolution, announced in such a pedestrian fashion, makes one wonder what factors have been in play, and what omissions made, in getting together this show, at once banal and extraordinary. The announcement arrives as if out of a vacuum. The neuroscientist - modern-style hunter-gatherer of information and darling of the "Need to Know" policies of modern government - does little to explain how he achieved this goal of entering the conscious mind, nor does he put his work into any historical context. Instead, we are asked in the Science Museum’s programme notes:  

If Dr Rees has decoded the mind sufficiently for such an announcement to be made in an exhibition devoted to it, presumably somewhere is the mind which has been, and is continuing to be, decoded. He is not merely continuing his experiments using functional magnetic resolution scanning (fMRI) in the way neuroscientists have been observing their subjects under scanning devices for years, asking them to explain what they feel or think while the scientists watch to see which area lights up, and what the cerebral flow in the brain indicates for various brain areas. Dr Rees is decoding the mind in terms of conscious and unconscious processes. For that, one must have accessed consciousness itself. Whose consciousness? Where is the owner of that consciousness – and unconsciousness? How did he/she feel? Why not ask them to tell us how it feels, instead of asking us.

The Neurobotics Exhibition was clearly set up to make these exciting new discoveries an occasion for family fun, and there were lots of games for visitors to play. One gets the distinct impression that we are being softened up for the introduction of radical new technology which will, perhaps, make the mind a communal pool rather than an individual possession. Information technology seeks to connect us all to each other in as many ways as possible, but also, presumably, to those vast data banks which allow government control not only to access all information about our lives, but now also to our thoughts, even to our unconscious processing. Does anyone care?

One of the most popular exhibits was the ‘Mindball’ game, which required two players to go literally head-to-head in a battle for brainpower, and used ‘brainpower’ alone. Strapped up with headbands which pick up brain waves, the game uses neurofeedback, but the person who is calm and relaxed wins the game. One received the impression that this calmness was the spirit that the organisers wished to reinforce, to deflect any undue public panic that might arise from the news that private thoughts could now be read with a scanner. The ingress into the mind as a private place was primarily an event to be enjoyed with the family on an afternoon out:

Other searching questions are raised in the program notes, and more games:

There were also demonstrations of grateful paraplegics and quadriplegics showing how the gods of science have so unselfishly liberated them from their prisons: this was the serious Nobel Prize side of the show. But there was no-one representing Her Majesty’s government to demonstrate how these very same devices can be used quite freely, and with relative ease, in our wireless age, to conduct experiments on free-ranging civilians tracked anywhere in the world, and using an infinitely extendable form of electrode which doesn’t require visible contact with the scalp at all. Electrodes, like electricity, can also take an invisible form – an electrode is a terminal of an electric source through which electrical energy or current may flow in or out. The brain itself is an electrical circuit. Every brain has its own unique resonating frequency. The brain is an infinitely more sensitive receiver and transmitter than the computer, and even in the wireless age, the comprehension of how wireless networks operate appears not to extend to the workings of the brain. The monotonous demonstration of scalps with electrodes attached to them, in order to demonstrate the contained conduction of electrical charges, is a scientific fatuity, in so far as it is intended to demonstrate comprehensively the capability of conveying charges to the brain, or for that matter, to any nerve in the body, as a form of invisible torture.

As Neurobotics claims: ‘Your brain is amazing’, but the power and control over brains and nervous systems achieved by targeting brain frequencies with radiowaves must have been secretly amazing government scientists for many years. The problem that now arises, at the point of readiness when so much has been achieved, is how to put the technology into action in such a way, as it will be acceptable in the public domain. This requires getting it through wider government and legal bodies, and for that, it must be seen to spring from the unbiased scientific investigations into the workings of the brain, in the best tradition of the leading universities. It is given over to Dr Rees and his colleague, Professor Haynes, endowed with the disclosure for weightier Guardian readers, to carry the torch for the government. Those involved may also have noted the need to show the neuroscientist in a more responsible light, following US neuroengineer for government sponsored Lockheed Martin, John Norseen’s, ingenuous comment, in 2000, about his belief about the consequences of his work in fMRI:

‘If this research pans out’, said Norseen, ‘you can begin to manipulate what someone is thinking even before they know it.’ And added: "The ethics don’t concern me, but they should concern someone else."

While the neuroscientists report their discovery (without even so much as the specific frequency of the light employed by this scanner/torch), issuing ethical warnings while incongruously continuing with their mind-blowing work, the government which sponsors them, remains absolutely mute. The present probing of people’s intentions, minds, background thoughts, hopes and emotions is being expanded into the more complex and subtle aspects of thinking and feeling. We have, however, next to no technical information about their methods. The description of ‘shining a torch around the brain’ is as absurd a report as one could read of a scientific endeavour, especially one that carries such enormous implications for the future of mankind. What is this announcement, with its technical obfuscation, preparing us for? 

Writing in Wired contributing editor Steve Silberman points out that the lie-detection capability of fMRI is ‘poised to transform the security system, the judicial system, and our fundamental notions of privacy’. He quotes Cephos founder, Steven Laken, whose company plans to market the new technology for lie detection. Laken cites detainees held without charge at Guantanamo Bay as a potential example. ‘If these detainees have information we haven’t been able to extract that could prevent another 9/11, I think most Americans would agree that we should be doing whatever it takes to extract it’. Silberman also quotes Paul Root Wolpe, a senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, who describes the accelerated advances in fMRI as ‘ a textbook example of how something can be pushed forward by the convergence of basic science, the government directing research through funding, and special interests who desire a particular technology’. Are we to believe that with the implied capability to scan jurors’ brains, the judiciary, the accused and the defendant alike, influencing one at the expense of the other, that the legal implications alone of mind-accessing scanners on university campuses, would not rouse the Minister for Justice from his bench to say a few words about these potential mind weapons?

So what of the ethical debate called for by the busy scientists and the Guardian’s science reporter? Can this technology- more powerful in subverting thought itself than anything in prior history – really be confined to deciding whether the ubiquitously invoked terrorist has had the serious intention of blowing up the train, or whether it was perhaps a foolish prank to make a bomb out of chapatti flour? We can assume that the government would certainly not give the go-ahead to the Science Museum Exhibition, linked to Imperial College, a major government-sponsored institution in laser-physics, if it was detrimental to surveillance programs. It is salutary to bear in mind that government intelligence research is at least ten years ahead of any public disclosure. It is implicit from history that whatever affords the undetectable entry by the gatekeepers of society into the brain and mind, will not only be sanctioned, but funded and employed by the State, more specifically by trained operatives in the security forces, given powers over defenceless citizens, and unaccountable to them.

The actual technology which is now said to be honing the technique ‘to distinguish between passing thoughts and genuine intentions’ is described by Professor John-Dylan Haynes in the Guardian in the most disarmingly untechnical language which must surely not have been intended to enlighten.

The Guardian piece ran as follows:

We know therefore that they are using light, but fMRI has been used for many years to attempt the unravelling of neuronal activity, and while there have been many efforts to record conscious and unconscious processes, with particular emphasis on the visual cortex, there has been no progress into consciousness itself. We can be sure that we are not being told the real story.

Just as rats and chimpanzees have been used to demonstrate findings from remote experiments on humans, electrode implants used on cockroaches to remotely control them, lasers used to steer fruit-flies , and worms engineered so that their nerves and muscles can be controlled with pinpricks of light, the information and techniques that have been ruthlessly forged using opportunistic onslaughts on defenceless humans as guinea pigs - used for myriad purposes from creating 3D haptic gloves in computer games to creating artificial intelligence to send visual processing into outer space - require appropriate replication for peer group approval and to meet ethical demands for scientific and public probity.

The use of light to peer into the brain is almost certainly that of terahertz, which occurs in the wavelengths which lie between 30mm and 1mm of the electromagnetic spectrum. Terahertz has the ability to penetrate deep into organic materials, without (it is said) the damage associated with ionising radiation such as x-rays. It can distinguish between materials with varying water content – for example fat versus lean meat. These properties lend themselves to applications in process and quality control as well as biomedical imaging. Terahertz can penetrate bricks, and also human skulls. Other applications can be learnt from the major developer of terahertz in the UK, Teraview, which is in Cambridge, and partially owned by Toshiba.

Efforts to alert human rights’ groups about the loss of the mind as a place to call your own, have met with little discernible reaction, in spite of reports about over decades of the dangers of remote manipulation using technology to access the mind, Dr Nick Begich’s book, Controlling the human mind, being an important recent contribution. A different approach did in fact, elicit a response. When informed of the use of terahertz at Heathrow and Luton airports in the UK to scan passengers, the news that passengers would be revealed naked by a machine which looked directly through their clothes produced a small, but highly indignant, article in the spring 2007 edition of the leading human rights organisation, Liberty. If the reading of the mind met with no protest, seeing through one’s clothes certainly did. It seems humans’ assumption of the mind as a private place has been so secured by evolution that it will take a sustained battle to convince the public that, through events of which we are not yet fully informed, such former innocence has been lost.

Trained light, targeted atomic spectroscopy, the use of powerful magnets to absorb moisture from human tissues, the transfer of radiative energy – these have replaced the microwave harassment which was used to transmit auditory messages directly into the hearing. With the discovery of light to disentangle thousands of neurons and encode signals from the complex circuitry of the brain, present programs will not even present the symptoms which simulated schizoid states. Medically, even if terahertz does not ionise, we do not yet know how the sustained application of intense light will affect the delicate workings of the brain and how cells might be damaged, dehydrated, stretched, obliterated.

This year, 2007, has also brought the news that terahertz lasers small enough to incorporate into portable devices had been developed.

Sandia National Laboratories in the US in collaboration with MIT have produced a transmitter-receiver (transceiver) that enables a number of applications. In addition to scanning for explosives, we may also assume their integration into hand-held communication systems. ‘These semiconductor devices have output powers which previously could only be obtained by molecular gas lasers occupying cubic meters and weighing more than 100kg, or free electron lasers weighing tons and occupying buildings.’ As far back as 1996 the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board predicted that the development of electromagnetic energy sources would ‘open the door for the development of some novel capabilities that can be used in armed conflict, in terrorist/hostage situations, and in training’ and ‘new weapons that offer the opportunity of control of an adversary … can be developed around this concept’.

The surveillance technology of today is the surveillance of the human mind and, through access to the brain and nervous system, the control of behaviour and the body’s functions. The messaging of auditory hallucinations has given way to silent techniques of influencing and implanting thoughts. The development of the terahertz technologies has illuminated the workings of the brain, facilitated the capture of emitted photons which are derived from the visual cortex which processes picture formation in the brain, and enabled the microelectronic receiver which has, in turn, been developed by growing unique semi-conductor crystals. In this way, the technology is now in place for the detection and reading of spectral ‘signatures’ of gases. All humans emit gases. Humans, like explosives, emit their own spectral signature in the form of a gas. With the reading of the brain’s electrical frequency, and of the spectral gas signature, the systems have been established for the control of populations – and with the necessary technology integrated into a cell-phone.

Carole Smith was born and educated in Australia, where she gained a Bachelor of Arts degree at Sydney University. She trained as a psychoanalyst in London where she has had a private practice. In recent years she has been a researcher into the invasive methods of accessing minds using technological means, and has published papers on the subject.

She has written the first draft of a book entitled: "The Controlled Society".The ethical implications of building machines to read people's minds, DISSENT, Issue 25,  http://www.dissent.com.au/index.htm 

From Carole Smith newcriteria@blueyonder.co.uk  Dec 12/07. The Canberra-based magazine DISSENT is sold at selected bookshops and by subscription.