Joe Szimhart & CultAware - New Niche for Psychopaths

This thread is distressing about how it got originated and what is getting discovered. It is common in developing countries and poor countries to force their own children in to situations ( marriages, forced education institutions , Jobs , religious associations, life long slaving for parental debts etc.) that child doesn't want. Most of all, the guilty parties seems to be able get away with out any punishment.
 
Name, the letter I posted was written in 2004 and was a reaction I had to seeing an advertisement for New Hope Manor on the internet. I have never tried to contact them since that letter, and it did end up helping me in a way, to write it. It was cathartic to tell them what I thought and felt about their 'programs'. I have not had any contact with my mother in quite some time, since the post I made on this forum regarding her behavior and the circumstances of my father's death. Of course I agree that continued contact with all those you mentioned would not bring any 'happiness'. In fact, I've been studiously avoiding contact. The letter is from 8 years ago. Seeing the promotional ad for this facility at the time brought up a whole bunch of memories for me, and I guess I just needed to let them know what I thought of their overall 'purpose' and their techniques/tactics/programming/abuse, and how it impacted one life: mine. I had no expectation that my letter would accomplish anything or that it would even be acknowledged. It was something I thought I needed to do at that time - for myself.
NHM did respond to the letter I wrote and encouraged me to go there so they could 'help me' and they said something to the effect that the people who were running the facility back when I was there no longer run it and things are 'different' now.

For what I hope should be obvious reasons, I declined to take them up on their offer. I never responded to their email.
I'm not sure though, why you are astonished.
Writing has been my one 'consistent' form of self-help all of my life, since I could hold a pencil. Writing gets the bad stuff outside of yourself, so you don't implode.
Why wouldn't I write it out? It didn't bring any happiness, but it did help someone.
It helped me....:-)
 
Perceval said:
I see the filename includes Unadfi. Is the information about that group?
Mostly. It is intended to document their connections in the European context.
My thought was "one picture is worth 1000 words".
I am working something similar for what is in this thread, the USA / SE Pennsylvania network.
 
[quote author=Lisa Guliani]
Writing has been my one 'consistent' form of self-help all of my life, since I could hold a pencil. Writing gets the bad stuff outside of yourself, so you don't implode.
Why wouldn't I write it out? It didn't bring any happiness, but it did help someone.
It helped me
....:-)
[/quote]

Helps other too.
 
Writing has been my one 'consistent' form of self-help all of my life, since I could hold a pencil. Writing gets the bad stuff outside of yourself, so you don't implode.
Why wouldn't I write it out? It didn't bring any happiness, but it did help someone.
It helped me....:-)

Same here. :flowers:

Your writing helps a lot of people Lisa, thank you. :rockon: :hug:
 
A historical side note. The Norristown State Hospital is mentioned in Cisco Wheeler and fritz Springmeier's "Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave" on page 293.


Wheeler and Springmeier said:
During W.W. II, Amish conscientious objectors were forced by the government
to do alternate public service in lieu of military service. This was known as Civilian Public Service.

Amish & Mennonite conscientious objectors were placed into Mental
Hospitals to help. They served at Allentown State Hosp., Allentown, PA;
Cantonsville State Hosp., Cantonsville, MD; Cleveland State Hosp.,
Cleveland, OH; Delaware State Hosp., Parnhurst, DL; Denver State Hosp.,
Denver, CO; Greystone Park State Hosp., Greystone Park, NJ; Harrisburg
State Hosp., Harrisburg, PA; Hudson River State Hosp., Poughkeepsie,
NY; Kalamazoo State Hosp., Kalamazoo, MI; Lima State Hosp., Lima,
OH; Livermore State VA Hosp., Livermore, CA; Macedonia State Hosp.,
Macedonia, OH; Marlboro State Hosp., Marlboro, NJ; Mt. Pleasant State
Hosp., Mt. Pleasant, 10; Norristown State Hosp., Norristown, PA; Provo
State Hosp., Provo, UT; Rhode Is. State Hosp., Howard, RI; Roseburg VA
State Hosp., Roseburg, OR; Staunton State Hosp., Staunton, VA; Tiffin
State Hosp., Tiffin, OH; Wernersville State Hosp., Wernersville, PA;
Ypsilanti State Hosp., Ypsilanti, MI.


The author, Fritz, believes that the complete story of how the Illuminati
got a secret foothold into the Amish community lies in what happened in
mental hospitals to the anxious-to-please, compliant, innocent Amish boys,
who were assigned to these mental hospitals. Many people do not realize
that during W.W. I, several Mennonite/Hutterite conscientious objectors
were tortured to death by our government. Not a pretty picture when you
find out how sadistic our government was willing to be toward its own
citizens. Not only did the Amish boys go to lots of mental hospitals during
W.W. II, but all of the religious groups that participated in the
conscientious objector service (called Civilian Public Service) contributed
boys to the Office of Scientific Research & Development (part of the
Army), which was still using these boys for experiments until Dec. 31,
1946.

What kinds of "experiments" were the Amish boys, who were offered up
as guinea pigs, subjected to by the OSRD? We now know that some of
these experiments were very dangerous to their human guinea pigs. 1-0
classification was the Selective Service Board's Conscientious Objector
classification.


Another detail which calls my attention is that Kathleen Sullivan ("Unshackled") is from nearby Reading. The Lutheran Church where her father abused her looks almost exactly like the one behind a school where I went.
 
Here is something strange. Out of an impulse I reverse-looked up the phone number of the I.C.S.A. (icsahome.org), the successor org of the CAN, (239) 514-3081.


That org is domiciled in Woburn/MA at the address of its CPA, the principal officer is domiciled in Englewood/NJ per F990 of their registered 501(c)(3).
The reverse lookup of their phone gives landline owned by "American Family Foundation" in North Naples / FL.
See --> _http://www.reversenumberdatabase.com/searchResults?phone=239-514-3081
Yet, there is another user for this phone number, namely some "Sisters Of St Joseph" in St. Louis / MI.
See --> _http://mo.bizdirlib.com/m/business_directory/Sisters_Of_St_Joseph_19


The website given for these supposed nuns is csj.org. When I look at csj.org, it says that I should look at their new website, icsahome.org.
csj.org is registered to one Michael Langone of Bonita Springs/FL, one of the directors of the ICSA, and the phone in the registry information for csj.org is the same one as above for the nuns and the ICSA. I have several F990s for the supposedly defunct AFF and none of them points to Bonita Springs, there is just one that points to Palm Harbor/FL, what is about 80Km north.


The supposed convent of the "Sisters of St. Joseph" looks like a residential home and it is right next to something called "St. Elisabeth Academy" which is a school for catholic girls. According to their website (seahs.org), tuition is $8900/year. Around the corner and conveniently in the same building they have an "adult day care center" (psychiatric/geriatric institution). The website of that place is seadcc.org, it went offline while I was looking at it.


So, what would the connection of these nuns be to the CAN/ICSA/AFF story? (added) Or is this an error plain and simple?


And another thing: this Szimhart Person reminds me of a worker at a social service office here about whom I was told some years ago. He'd coerce "friendship" and sexual favors from female clients during sessions which he'd hold behind closed doors in his office. When the thing started becoming embarrassing (probably due to repeated complaints) they put a colleague with him in the room, finally he was kicked out when it was discovered that he had a collection of sleazy pictures on the web under his name.
 
name said:
Here is something strange. Out of an impulse I reverse-looked up the phone number of the I.C.S.A. (icsahome.org), the successor org of the CAN, (239) 514-3081.


That org is domiciled in Woburn/MA at the address of its CPA, the principal officer is domiciled in Englewood/NJ per F990 of their registered 501(c)(3).
The reverse lookup of their phone gives landline owned by "American Family Foundation" in North Naples / FL.

Interesting. AFF has some CIA connections:

_http://www.spirituallysmart.com/catholic_cultists.html
"In Martin's KINGDOM OF THE CULTS he never mentions Roman Catholicism as a cult, and never tells lost Roman Catholics to come out of that unscriptural system "THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH." (Rev. 17:5)" Jack chick's Smokescreens Chapter 9

"Rev. Debold is a recent contributor to "Cults, Sects, and the New Age," edited by fellow AFF Advisory Committee member Rev. James LeBar. Totally on his own account, Rev. Debold has published on cults in The Journal of Dharma (Bangalore, India), and in AFF's Cult Observer and Cultic Studies Journal. He is currently preparing a "pre-conference" session for clergy on the occasion of next October's Cult Awareness Network national convention. He is in fact associated with the New York/New Jersey affiliate of CAN and the representative of the Newark Archdiocese on the New York Interfaith Coalition of Concern About Cults, the first such interfaith association in the United States."

_http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_profile/debold_walter.asp

The Above mentioned "AFF" stands for American Family Foundation (Sounds so nice!).

"AFF's official history claims it was founded in 1979 by a concerned parent, Kay Barney, the retired Raytheon International Affairs Director, and Dr. John Clark of Harvard Medical School." ~AFF Board of Directors Listing

Thats the common information. Here's what Barbara Boyd writes, "AFF's official history claims it was founded in 1979 by a concerned parent, Kay Barney, the retired Raytheon International Affairs Director, and Dr. John Clark of Harvard Medical School, in response to the threat posed by violent and coercive cults, particularly in the aftermath of the purported mass suicides of the members of the People's Temple Church of the Rev. Jim Jones, in Guyana in 1978. In contemporary language, this version of AFF's founding is an “urban legend.” In reality, the AFF's business is mind-control. Three of its “experts,” Robert J. Lifton, Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, and Margaret Singer, did not merely study mind-control—they practiced coercive conditioning in the Nazi-doctor-style horrific secret experiments funded by the CIA's and Army intelligence's MK-Ultra. A fourth MK-Ultra veteran with AFF, Rabbi Maurice Davis, actually financed the psychotic Rev. Jim Jones of the People's Temple suicide church, in Jones's early years in Indianapolis.

However, in 1977, when a series of Congressional hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives forced the CIA et al. to close down the covert mind-control programs, Lifton, Singer, West, and others who had worked for years on the covert CIA payroll, were cut loose. They found a new home in the AFF."


(Raytheon just happens to be is a major American defense contractor and the world's largest producer of guided missiles.)

Here Father Lebar goes into a detailed explanation as to why Opus Dei isn't a cult:

"Cult-Like Practices?"

"Opus Dei has been accused by critics of having "cult-like" practices. Religious scholars say Opus Dei is not a cult. But many do say it engages in practices that appear cult-like, practices used by many strict religious groups and that used to be common in some Roman Catholic orders.

Though he doesn't believe Opus Dei is a cult, Father James LeBar, who has been the Archdiocese of New York's consultant on cults for some 20 years told ABCNEWS.com that some of Opus Dei's practices resemble those used in cults: "Yes, because they do use practices that were prevalent in the 1950s in all Catholic orders, [though] many of the orders have done away with them, the close supervision ... " he says.

LeBar says Opus Dei's practices are not necessarily wrong: "If someone wishes to follow a very strict way of life, and be very closely supervised, and they willingly go into that, that's fine," he says. "But if the group manipulates people so that this happens to them and they don't know it, I'd have objection to that."

LeBar says he has been in contact with Opus Dei over the years, "hoping to help them see where the line is drawn and where they cross over it." "What I've disagreed with at times are the methods by which they either invite people in or seek to keep them in when they want to leave," he says, but adds, "I've never found any serious problems, nothing to really raise a ruckus about." Source:
http://www.rickross.com/reference/opus/opus1.html

Notice in the above bold that Lebar states, "If someone wishes to follow a very strict way of life, and be very closely supervised, and they willingly go into that, that's fine," This statement is in complete contradiction with the whole mission of the "anti-cult" movement. They are saying that people who are involved with what they consider cults aren't able to make this decision by themselves. Thus it is a completely hypocritical stance he is taking excusing groups affiliated with the Catholic Church while attacking all kinds of other groups that, in my opinion, are way less demanding.

edit:
missed this post by Adaryn that covers the same info:
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,29849.msg384040.html#msg384040
 
_http://www.spirituallysmart.com/cults.html

Two of the Major "Anti-Cult" groups, AFF and CFF were formed in the wake of the Jonestown "Suicides" (Murders). It is said that there was heavy CIA involvement in that operation. ~Link

CFF (Citizen's Freedom Foundation) became CAN (Cult Awareness Network) and finally is now called, The Leo J Ryan Educational Foundation.

Recall that Leo J Ryan was the congressman who was shot in the Jonestown CIA experiment.

Just an interesting aside, it appears that Scientologists have also set up an organization with the same name:

_http://www.apologeticsindex.org/l00.html
Leo J. Ryan Education Foundation [Cult-Info]

Name adopted by Bridgeport, Connecticut-based Cult Info, a cult awareness organization. Leo J. Ryan was the US congressman who was murdered by members of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple. Not affilliated with the Glendale, CA-based foundation by the same name.

Leo J. Ryan Education Foundation [Scientology]

The Glendale, California-based Leo J. Ryan Education Foundation is owned by Edgar Carty. Internic lists the domain information as
Registrant:
Leo J Ryan Education Foundation (EDUCFND-DOM)
p.o Box 9946
Glendale, CA 91226
Domain Name: EDUCFND.ORG
Accessed Aug. 14, 1999
That is also the mailing address for
Registrant:
Relay Point, Inc. (SITEGATEWAY2-DOM)
PO Box 9946 Glendale, CA 91226
Domain Name: SITEGATEWAY.COM
Accessed Aug. 14, 1999
Relay Point, Inc. is owned by Doug DeStafeno, a Scientologist (according to literature published by WISE, a Scientology frontgroup)
This foundation is not affiliated with the Bridgeport, CT-based foundation by the same name.
This group uses the domain name EDUCFND.ORG. The domain name leads to the "Anti-Brainwashing Campaign." Its purpose is stated as follows:
The Anti-Brainwashing Campaign is a movement founded by individuals dedicated to educating the public on the real facts about "deprogrammers" or "thought reform consultants" or "exit counselors."
We are dedicated to eradicating the dangerous use of brainwashing techniques being used under the guise of "counseling."
 
this goes into Galen Kelly's exploits that have been mentioned. It was only available in the waybackmachine:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080905083937/http://www.etext.org/Politics/LaRouche/cult_awareness_network

Subject: Re: Cult Awareness Network - CAN



Cult Awareness brainwashers, Galen
Kelly exposed at last

by Warren A.J. Hamerman

Self-styled ``cult deprogrammer'' Galen Kelly,
who is actually a professional kidnapper and brainwasher,
was indicted on March 3, 1993 by a federal grand jury at
the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia on a
felony charge that he kidnapped Debra Dobkowski on May 5,
1992. The indictment comes just as Kelly and his cronies
in the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) had geared up a
propaganda campaign to present themselves as legitimate
consultants on so-called cults in the aftermath of the
Feb. 26 bombing of the New York World Trade Center (being
blamed on Islamic radicals) and the Feb. 28 shootout
between the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF)
and the Branch Davidian religious group in Waco, Texas.
The kidnapping for which Kelly has been indicted is
described in the prologue to a new book to be released
this month by Executive Intelligence Review, entitled
{Travesty--A True Crime Story.}
Kelly is not just another thug; he is part of an
international apparatus of Israeli, American, and British
secret intelligence communities' ``wetworks'' capability.
Kelly is on the board of JINSA, the Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs, a liaison group between Israeli
and American military establishments that is suspected of
having been at the center of the Jonathan Pollard spy
ring. Kelly is also the security henchman and a paid
operative of CAN.
Immediately after the Waco, Texas incident erupted,
Kelly and one of his CAN deprogramming sidekicks named
Rick Ross appeared on national media as experts to
``explain'' the events. According to various media reports
the central ``deprogramming'' adviser to the ATF and FBI
on the Branch Davidian sect is, in fact, the self-same
Rick Ross. Along with Kelly, Ross is a leading
deprogrammer for CAN. Ross is a convicted jewel thief. He
was arrested in November 1975 and pled guilty to the crime
of Conspiracy to Commit Grand Theft Second Degree-Open
End, according to a Phoenix Police Departmental Report.
Ross was under criminal investigation in Washington state
for a failed 1991 deprogramming attempt.
Ross was publicly described by CAN Executive Director
Cynthia Kisser as ``among the half-dozen best
deprogrammers in the country.'' Priscilla Coates, the
director of CAN in Los Angeles, said of Ross: ``Rick
has helped me with all kinds of questions. He has also
competently counseled many parents and cult members.''
Ross is a member of two national committees for the Union
of American Hebrew Congregations and an outspoken critic
of Christian fundamentalist groups. He is past chairman of
the Religious Advisory Committee to the Arizona Department
of Corrections and of the International Coalition for
Jewish Prisoner Services of the B'nai B'rith
International, Washington, D.C.
The victim of Kelly's latest kidnap indictment is
Debra Dobkowski, the roommate of the intended target, who
was on her way home from work late at night when she was
grabbed by two men and two women and forcibly taken to
Leesburg, Virginia, some 40 miles northwest of Washington.
On the way, she asked one of her abductors his name and he
replied, ``Galen Kelly,'' according to court papers. A
study of telephone records showed that the mother of
Dobkowski's roommate had placed calls to the Cult
Awareness Network in Chicago three months before the
abduction.
Kelly is to be arraigned in U.S. Magistrates Court
in Alexandria on March 15. Assistant U.S. Attorney
Lawrence Leiser told the media that, if convicted, Kelly
faces a maximum sentence of up to life in prison. Kelly,
45, was acquitted Dec. 31 of plotting to kidnap Lewis du
Pont Smith.

- What is CAN? -
``We're not a criminal organization, we don't engage
in kidnappings,'' was the public comment of CAN's Cynthia
Kisser, upon hearing
of the arrests last September of Galen Kelly, Don Moore,
Newbold Smith, Bob Point, and Tony Russo for conspiracy to
kidnap LaRouche associate Lewis du Pont Smith. Oh, but the
lady doth protest too much.
The evidence that has emerged from what has been
called the ``Kidnappers, Inc.'' trial, only provides more
confirmation that the Cult Awareness Network is exactly
what Kisser says it is not.
Originally called the Citizens Freedom Foundation,
CAN was founded in 1974 by Henrietta Crampton and a small
group of advocates of ``deprogramming,'' a euphemism for
making someone change his or her beliefs by force, which is
otherwise called ``brainwashing.'' Crampton described Ted
Patrick as a prime force behind the formation of CFF.
Patrick, a pioneer of ``deprogramming'' who has been
convicted numerous times for violent crimes, wrote in his
book {Let Our Children Go!} that deprogramming involves
``kidnapping at the very least, quite often assault and
battery, almost invariably conspiracy to commit a crime
and illegal restraint.''
Since its founding, CFF changed its name to CAN,
obtained more prominent sponsors, and broadened its
affiliations; but it has always remained the same--a
clearinghouse and referral service for people who, for a
fee, will do whatever it takes to break a targeted
individual from his or her beliefs.
Bucknell University religion professor Larry Shin
told the {Philadelphia Inquirer} in 1992 that
deprogramming is ``the most destructive of the legacies of
the great American cult scare.... CAN is much closer to a
destructive cult than most of the groups they attack.''
From the mid-1980s forward, CAN has functioned as the
most active of a throng of so-called anti-cult
organizations which sprang from the ravages of the
counterculture. Such groups as the Jewish Community
Relations Council's (JCRC) Task Force on Missionaries and
Cults, the American Family Foundation, the International
Cult Education Project and the Interfaith Coalition of
Concern about Cults, all share interlocking boards of
directors and funding. They give each other awards and
share referrals. Through these associations, CAN has
enjoyed the support and protection of powerful elements of
the eastern liberal financial establishment.
It was through CAN that all the conspirators in
Kidnappers, Inc. became associated.

- `There's money to be made' -
When E. Newbold Smith wanted a kidnapper/deprogrammer
to go after his son, Lewis du Pont Smith, he called CAN,
and they referred him to Galen Kelly, who in turn
received payments from CAN. When Smith needed a
psychiatrist who would testify to have his son Lewis
declared mentally incompetent, Smith called CAN and they
referred him to Dr. David Halperin, a board member of the
American Family Foundation, CAN's sister organization. Don
Moore needed work after he was fired from the Loudoun
County, Va., Sheriff's Department for rummaging through
department files. So, as he told another former sheriff's
deputy, Doug Poppa, after he sought to recruit Poppa to
the ``Kidnappers, Inc.'' scheme, ``I'm working for CAN.''
Moore added, ``There's money to be made in the anti-cult
work.'' And when Moore and Kelly wanted legal cover for
their kidnapping plans, lawyer Bob Point offered to
provide that cover under the auspices of the work he does
for CAN.
Cynthia Kisser has gone to
great lengths to deny CAN's involvement in kidnappings and
coercive deprogrammings, but there is ample evidence that
points precisely to that.
Estimates are that CAN maintains a network of 20 to
25 full-time deprogrammers, and 30 or so part-time
deprogrammers. Each full-time deprogrammer handles
approximately 25 deprogramming jobs per year, making a
conservative estimate of over 500 deprogrammings per year.
Of those deprogrammings, some 25% involve outright
kidnapping. The rest involve ``detaining'' the victim
against his or her will. It has been reported that at the
1992 CAN conference in Los Angeles, a CAN deprogrammer
claimed that over 2,000 deprogrammings occurred in the
United States in the last year.
Occasionally, deprogrammers are arrested. Most
frequently they plead guilty to lesser charges and spend
little or no time in jail. Often they go scot-free.
At CAN's national conferences and local meetings,
family members interested in having someone kidnapped or
deprogrammed can meet professionals like Galen Kelly, whom
they can hire. CAN claims to maintain files on over 1,000
organizations which it deems to be ``destructive cults,''
and it distributes hate literature on many of them. But if
an inquirer asks for more information about a particular
organization, CAN will eagerly refer the inquirer to their
``experts'' on the particular organization. The
``experts'' are deprogrammers, who, for a fee, will arrange
a kidnapping/deprogramming. A typical ``deprogramming''
fee is $20,000.
Cynthia Kisser has personally referred callers to
Galen Kelly as CAN's ``expert'' on LaRouche.
A critical element in CAN's deprogramming operations
is maintaining a continuous barrage of its hate propaganda
in the major media. If CAN succeeds in creating a hostile
environment around a particular target, that limits or
mitigates the reaction if they get caught. Such an effect
can certainly be seen in the case of the December 1992
Kidnappers, Inc. trial in Virginia.
There has also been no shortage of credulous
journalists who will do CAN's bidding. Former Loudoun
County Sheriff's Lt. Don Moore referred to this type of
operation with respect to the political movement around
Lyndon LaRouche, as ``busting the covey.'' Patricia Lynch,
a former NBC reporter who produced several TV slanders
against LaRouche in the mid-1980s, testified that
Priscilla Coates, the head of CAN in the mid-1980s, was a
major source for her stories. Moore had regular contacts
with reporters in Washington, D.C., Loudoun County, Va.,
and Philadelphia.
In any case, the arrest of Newbold Smith, Kelly,
Moore, and Point was not the first time that CAN had to
disavow illegality by its members. In October 1990, the
Rev. Michael Rokos, an Episcopal priest, who was then
president of CAN, resigned after it became publicly known
that he had a sexual preference for young boys.
At that time, news stories broke in the {Baltimore
Sun} and elsewhere that Rokos had been arrested in July
1982 for soliciting sex with a Baltimore vice squad
officer posing as a minor. According to an affidavit from
arresting officer Joseph G. Wyatt, Rokos solicited him,
saying, ``I want you to tie me up, put clothespins on my
nipples, and make me suck your dick.''
While hiding his perverted criminal past, Rokos spoke
before law enforcement and civic groups slandering
LaRouche. He portrayed himself as an expert on ``political
cults'' and ``Satanism.'' Rokos also fraudulently
portrayed himself as the chaplain for the Maryland State
Police.
Another embarrassment CAN suffered was the defection
of ``cult deprogrammer'' Gary Scarff. In November 1991, Scarff
told a Los Angeles press conference that he had falsely
claimed to be a survivor of the 1978 mass suicide by the
People's Temple followers of the Rev. Jim Jones in Guyana.
Scarff said he lied in order to raise ``hundreds of
thousands of dollars'' for the Cult Awareness Network.
According to a sworn affidavit, Scarff says he was associated
with CAN for ten years. His affidavit recounts his
participation in kidnappings and deprogrammings. During
the preparations for one deprogramming, Scarff says, he
was sodomized by deprogrammer Ray Brandyberry. According
to Scarff, Cynthia Kisser was actively involved in
organizing deprogrammings. He also accused CAN attorney
Ford Greene of drug abuse and homosexuality.

- Helen Overington: a case study -
Sometimes a CAN deprogramming does not need the use
of thugs to forcibly kidnap someone. In those cases, CAN
uses other forms of pressure and intimidation to break the
target's beliefs. An example of this is the case of Helen
Overington.
Helen Overington is a former financial and active
political supporter of the LaRouche movement. When
LaRouche associate Rochelle Ascher was convicted on
securities violations in 1989, and given a barbaric
86-year sentence by a Virginia jury (later reduced to 10
years by the judge), Mrs. Overington wrote a letter to the
judge, Carleton Penn, vigorously denouncing the sentence.
But one year later, after being subjected to strong family
pressure and intensive sessions with CAN deprogrammers,
Mrs. Overington withdrew her support.
Pressure was brought on Mrs. Overington because her
daughters, Mary Rotz and Peggy Weller, and her son, John
Overington, opposed her political views, and wanted her
money.
Mrs. Overington's children first called the Virginia
Attorney General's Office and spoke with Assistant
Attorney General John Russell, who would later give false
testimony in the Kidnappers, Inc. case against government
witness Doug Poppa; Mrs. Overington's children also spoke
with Russell's investigator, Virginia State Police agent
C.D. Bryant.
Bryant later testified in court that he referred the
family to Mira Lansky Boland, the LaRouche case officer
for the Anti-Defamation League, because the family
believed Mrs. Overington had been ``brainwashed.'' Boland
in turn put the family in touch with CAN.
Soon, Mrs. Overington's children moved her from her
apartment in Baltimore, where she had been living on her
own, to a house next to her daughter's in Pennsylvania,
where she found herself under virtual house arrest. She
was worked on by Boland, then-CAN president Rev. Michael
Rokos, and Bryant, who all told her lies, slanders, and
half-truths about LaRouche and his associates. Mrs.
Overington resisted the pressure for some days, refusing
to believe the lies. She later told the news media that
her family had to work on her pretty hard before she would
believe she had been ``brainwashed'' when she supported
LaRouche.
In a January 1991 article in {Woman's Day} magazine,
Helen Overington described her political disagreements
with her family: ``When I tried to talk politics with my
children, they'd say, `Oh, Mom, you really don't believe
that stuff, do you?' or `Oh, Mom, you've been reading all
that conservative literature again.' Especially Peggy, the
most liberal. She finally told me, `Look, Mom, we can't
discuss these things. We just don't agree.'|''
In an interview with an investigator, Peggy
Overington Weller said her mother was deprogrammed with
the help of CAN.
The Overington children then teamed up with Newbold
Smith to organize and fund the ``LaRouche Victims Support
Group,'' which specifically targets supporters of LaRouche.
The group has a special phone number in CAN's office so
that callers can be referred to Kelly and other
``experts'' on LaRouche.
Once Mrs. Overington had been ``deprogrammed,'' her
family tried to use her to extort money from Rochelle
Ascher, threatening to testify against Ascher in a criminal
proceeding if Ascher didn't pay Overington some money. The
family hired the Harrisburg law firm of McNees Wallace
which had worked with the ADL and CAN in a previous case.
When Ascher's attorney exposed the extortion attempt,
McNees Wallace dropped out of the case.
The Overingtons also sought revenge by launching a
national media campaign using journalists sympathetic to
CAN and the ADL, like Pat Lynch of NBC. John Overington, a
West Virginia state legislator, sent CAN's hate literature
to every state legislator in the country, seeking to
harass LaRouche supporters through instigating bogus legal
proceedings. Overington also proposed legislation which
would effectively outlaw political fundraising.

- The MK-Ultra mind controllers -
CAN's theories of the psychology of mind control are
rooted in the CIA's mind control project, MK-Ultra. The
MK-Ultra project came out of the British Tavistock
Institute's studies of Nazi social control techniques.
After World War II, up through the 1960s and 1970s, the
CIA and U.S. military agencies funnelled money through
research foundations and universities to study the various
effects of torture, brain surgery, hypnosis, sensory
deprivation, and hallucinogenic drugs on individuals.
These experiments were seeking to perfect methods of mind
control. In many cases, the subjects were not volunteers,
but were given drugs and otherwised tortured without their
permission.
Many of the CIA's pioneer experimenters from the
MK-Ultra project are today board members and advisers to
the Cult Awareness Network and the American Family
Foundation.
For example, Dr. Louis Jolyon West received CAN's
1990 Leo J. Ryan Award for ``extraordinary courage,
tenacity and perseverance in the battle against tyranny
over the mind of man.'' Tyranny over the mind of man is
certainly Dr. West's stock in trade. Over the course of 30
years, West has experimented on the minds of veterans,
prisoners, alcoholics, and drug addicts with
hallucinogenic drugs, electroshock, isolation, and small
group behavior-control techniques.
In 1977, Dr. West was exposed on the front page of
the {New York Times} as being funded by the CIA to perform
experiments in mind destruction using LSD, as part of the
MK-Ultra project. In John Marks's book {The Search for the
Manchurian Candidate,} West was exposed as a pioneer of
LSD and mind control experiments funded by the CIA.
Despite these and other damaging stories, West continues
to be held in high regard among CAN's members, and is a
frequent lecturer and oft-cited researcher. West is also
an advisory board member of the American Family
Foundation.
Trained in group dynamics at the British Tavistock
Institute, the ``mother'' agency for most of the postwar
Anglo-American intelligence and ``dirty tricks''
apparatus, West set out to manipulate
group behavior with hallucinogenic drugs.
He ran ``field studies'' in the Haight-Ashbury
district of San Francisco in the early 1960s to study the
effect of drugs on youths, at a time when the hallucinogen
LSD was making it into the ``Bohemian'' groups via the
numerous MK-Ultra experiments.
West studied how drugs could be used ``as adjuncts to
interpersonal manipulation or assault.'' He studied the
use of drugs in controlled groups, such as Charles
Manson's killer cult. He wrote that the government could
supply drugs to control a group or a select portion of the
population. ``This method, foreseen by Aldous Huxley in
{Brave New World} (1932), has the governing element
employing drugs selectively to manipulate the governed in
various ways,'' West wrote. ``In fact, it may be more
convenient and perhaps even more economical to keep the
growing numbers of chronic drug users (especially of the
hallucinogens) fairly isolated and also out of the labor
market, with its millions of unemployed. To society, the
communards with their hallucinogenic drugs are probably
less bothersome--and less expensive--if they are living
apart, than if they are engaging in alternative modes of
expressing their alienation, such as active, organized,
vigorous political protest and dissent.''
To further his studies in LSD, he collaborated with
Age of Aquarius guru Aldous Huxley, the British pioneer
promoter of LSD and Satanism. Huxley praised West in a
1957 letter to Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the man who coined the
phrase ``psycho-delic'' (later changing it to
``psychedelic'' to take away any connotation of madness).
Huxley wrote: ``Dr. L.J. West, of the Medical School of
University of Oklahoma, was here a few weeks ago--an
extremely able young man, I think. His findings are that
mescalinized subjects are almost unhypnotizable. I
suggested to him that he should hypnotize his people
before they took LSD.''
After America's ghettoes exploded in violence in the
late 1960s, West promoted chemical castration and the
implanting of electrodes into people's brains as a means
of controlling violent behavior and political activity. In
1973, West proposed the creation of a Center for the Study
and Reduction of Violence. Among the programs planned were
genetic, biochemical, and neurophysiological studies of
violent individuals, including prison inmates and
``hyperkinetic'' children. West wrote to the California
director of health that a Nike missile base, which the
Army was turning over to civilian use, would be a perfect
setting for his center. ``Such a Nike missile base is
located in the Santa Monica Mountains, within a
half-hour's drive of the Neuropsychiatric Institute. It is
accessible but relatively remote. The site is securely
fenced.... Comparative studies could be carried out there,
in an isolated but convenient location, of experimental or
model programs for the alteration of undesirable
behavior.''
Although West's Violence Center was never approved,
he received millions of dollars in research funding for
the study of gangs, violence, alcohol and drug abuse.
West became an ``expert witness'' for several court
cases, including the Patty Hearst Symbionese Liberation
Army kidnapping case; and he interviewed Jack Ruby, who
murdered alleged John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey
Oswald, to evaluate Ruby's sanity. During the Hearst
trial, West gave away the ``family secrets'' about
brainwashing, when he said ``perhaps the most insidious
domestic threat posed by `brainwashing' is the tendency of
Americans to believe in its power.''

- Who's who among brainwashers -
@sb^{{Dr. Margaret Singer}} is considered
the {grande dame} of the Cult Awareness Network. Singer,
who is also an advisory board member of the American
Family Foundation, got her start as an Army psychiatrist,
studying Korean War veterans and prisoners of war. She
worked in projects with Drs. Edgar Schein and Albert
Biderman, both exposed in Marks's {The Search for the
Manchurian Candidate} as running the parallel military
MK-Ultra programs. Singer's writings are also cited by the
CIA front, the Society for the Study of Human Ecology,
Inc.
Together with Dr. West, she ran a survival and
torture-resistance study for Air Force Intelligence at
Stead Air Force Base in 1966. They helped devise a program
of ``survival training,'' by putting a group of airmen in
the desert, where they were forced to scrounge and eat
lizards to stay alive. They were kept in isolation boxes
overnight. The results of this experiment were a failure.
The training was so severe that it made the men weaker instead
of stronger.
Also working with West, Singer studied the
Haight-Ashbury hippie drug ``culture.'' She interviewed
hundreds upon hundreds of drug-crazed hippies, and
examinined their LSD-induced religious experiences in
order to build psychological profiles on them.
Singer has expended a great amount of energy trying
to give credence to her version of ``brainwashing,'' and
speaks regularly on the subject at CAN's annual
conferences. However, her theories have been discredited
by both the American Psychological Association and the
American Sociological Association.
Singer holds herself out as an expert witness for
legal proceedings involving what she calls ``mind control
or coercive persuasion.''
In a 1990 federal court case in California, Singer
was not allowed to testify as an expert witness on ``mind
control.'' In his ruling rejecting Singer's expertise,
U.S. Judge Lowell Jensen said, ``The evidence
before the court ... shows that neither the APA nor the
ASA has endorsed the views of Dr. Singer.... Her proffered
testimony in this case has been challenged by the
scientific community on grounds of both scientific merit
and methodological rigor.''
In another case, Judge Jensen stated,
``Significantly, the APA ultimately rejected the Singer
task force report on coercive persuasion when it was
submitted for consideration.''
Frustrated at the failure to get the courts to adopt
her absurd theories, Singer and her cohort Dr. Richard
Ofshe filed a racketeering suit in 1992 against the
American Psychological Association and the American
Sociological Association for refusing to sanction her
work.
@sb^{{Dr. Robert Jay Lifton}} is noted for
his groundbreaking work on Nazi interrogation and torture
techniques. He is a favorite of CAN and the ADL, and is
often cited as an authority on mind manipulation. Lifton
analyzed Korean brainwashing techniques by studying
American prisoners of war and Korean War veterans. He was
named in John Marks's book as heading one of the CIA-run
MK-Ultra parallel programs for the Air Force.
Lifton worked with Dr. Singer and others at the
Walter Reed Army Medical Center on ``Chinese Communist
thought reform, the assault upon identity and belief.''
His book, {Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism,}
is the bible for those who believe in brainwashing.
Deprogramming victims frequently are forced to read
Lifton's writings during their ordeal. What Lifton
describes in his book as thought reform, is remarkably
similar to what CAN calls ``deprogramming.''
He studied subjects who had been brainwashed in
Chinese Communist jails. The brainwashing succeeded
because the victims were forcibly detained, and subjected
to a selective use of physical force. The victim could
alleviate the physical pain by submitting to ``confession
and re-education.'' One of the subjects Lifton studied was
a Catholic priest who was forced to denounce his church to
relieve his suffering.
Compare Lifton's description of Chinese brainwashing
to a Galen Kelly deprogramming, for example, the woman
Kelly and Moore kidnapped in Washington, D.C. in May 1992.
The victim was forcibly detained. Kelly
told the woman that he had a whole slew of techniques from
drugs to various other methods, to force her to cooperate.
The situation would become progressively adverse, unless
the woman cooperated.
Lifton studied how to manipulate populations by fear
and guilt. His studies of the victims of Nazi Germany and
the Nazi doctors have been criticized for being overly
sympathetic to the Nazi doctors. Dr. Bruno Bettelheim
argued that Lifton went too far in ``understanding'' the Nazi
doctors.
@sb^{{Rabbi Maurice Davis}} is a member of the
CAN advisory board who works closely with Dr. John G.
Clark of Harvard in arranging ``deprogrammings.''
Davis was an early sponsor of Galen Kelly, and
also
helped create cult leader Jim Jones by arranging for an
empty Indianapolis synagogue to house Jones's early
activities. Jones later moved to San Francisco, where he
founded the People's Temple. In 1978, after moving his
followers to Guyana, Jones led a mass suicide of his
followers after one of them murdered U.S. Rep. Leo
J. Ryan. The resulting publicity propelled the anti-cult
mafia into prominence. Patrician Ryan, the late
congressman's daughter, is now the president of CAN.
Davis worked in the MK-Ultra program at the U.S.
Public Health Service's prison in Lexington, Kentucky with
Dr. Harris Isbell, who was administering psychotropic
drugs to inmates. One subject was kept on LSD for 77 days.
@sb^{{Rabbi Arnold James Rudin}} and his wife
{{Marcia Rudin}} are leaders of the ``interreligious''
group within the Cult Awareness Network and the American
Family Foundation and frequent spokesmen for the
American Jewish Committee. Marcia Rudin is head of the
International Cult Education Project, a spinoff of the
B'nai B'rith.
Rudin was an Air Force chaplain stationed in Korea
and Japan in 1960-62. He participated in the formation of
the New Religions Movement in America, along with such
pioneers of LSD-induced ``religious experiences,'' as Dr.
Timothy Leary's sidekick Richard Alpert (now Baba Ram
Das). The New Religions Movement, centered at the Graduate
Theological Union, Berkeley, California, was a project
which spawned numerous ``religions,'' New Age belief
systems, and helped revive ``old religions,'' such as
witchcraft and Satanism.
@sb^{{Herbert Rosedale,}} president of the American
Family Foundation, is a partner in the New York law firm
of Parker, Flatau, Chapin and Klimpl, chief representative of
Israeli-owned Bank Leumi and Bank Hapoalim. Rosedale sent
a letter praising Galen Kelly, to help get Kelly out of
jail after his Kidnappers, Inc. arrest.

- Where does CAN get its money? -
The Cult Awareness Network is incorporated in
California and lists 2421 W. Pratt Blvd., Chicago, Illinois as
its address, but this is just a mail drop. CAN's real
headquarters is at 301 East Main St., Barrington, Ill.
CAN has tax-exempt status from the IRS, and lists its
annual income at around $250,000. The associated American
Family Foundation reports about the same amount of
income. The funding for CAN and the AFF comes from
families who hire their deprogrammers, and from donations
from establishment foundations. The Crestlea Foundation of
Wilmington, Delaware, which is the personal foundation of
E. Newbold and Margaret du Pont Smith, parents of intended
kidnap/deprogramming victim Lewis du Pont Smith,
contributes over $10,000 a year to CAN.
The American Family Foundation has been funded, for
the most part, by a handful of top Wall Street family
foundations. Among them are the Scaife Family Foundation,
the J.M. Foundation, and the Pew Foundation. In recent
years, the San Francisco-based Swig Foundation has
provided crucial support. Foundation trustee Melvin Swig
is a national commission member of the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL), and a national executive board member of the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
The single largest financial promoters of the AFF for
the past decade have been the Bodman Foundation and the
Achellis
Foundation. The Bodman and Achellis foundations combined
to grant over a half-million dollars to the AFF during the first decade of its
existence. The two separate foundations have overlapping
trustees and officers and are both housed in the New York
City law offices of Morris and McVeigh, which also acts as
general counsel for both foundations. Both the Bodman and
Achellis Foundations and the Morris and McVeigh law firm
are chock-full of New York-based intelligence and banking
families, who generally avoid the political limelight,
preferring to shape national, political, and cultural
policy through private foundation grants.


To obtain the book {Travesty, A True Crime Story} contact Ben
Franklin Bookseller's at 703-777-3661.

The above article was from Executive Intelligence Review V20, #12.
 
There seems some overlap with Barbara Boyd's article here, but there's some new info and a good overview of the AFF in the below article.

http://larouchepub.com/other/2002/2915aff_docum.html

Who Are the American Family Foundation
Mind-Controllers Targetting LaRouche?

by Jeffrey Steinberg
A recent spate of physical assaults, and one threatened kidnapping, of political associates of Democratic Party Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche, has prompted counterintelligence investigators for Executive Intelligence Review to reopen the file on the American Family Foundation (AFF)—the organization linked to the pattern of attacks.

While promoting itself as a leading organization "combatting cults," the American Family Foundation is actually a privatized successor to the notorious 1950s-70s U.S. and British governments' secret experiments with mind control, employing a wide range of pharmacological and brainwashing methods. Some techniques employed by AFF "deprogrammers" were previously the subject of war crimes prosecutions during the Nuremberg Trials of the infamous "Nazi doctors."

Speaking to a 1961 conference sponsored by the Voice of America, at California Medical School in San Francisco, Aldous Huxley, the British New Age guru and close collaborator of several AFF professional brainwashers, spilled the beans on the overall effort, when he boasted, "There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."

Huxley's remarks are far closer to the truth about the mission of AFF, than the group's own doublespeak.

Terrorists for Hire

The AFF's stable of "Reesian psychiatric shock troops" (after the British Tavistock Institute's Dr. John Rawlings Rees) operate in tandem with a number of known terrorist and mercenary-for-hire agencies, which at one time constituted perhaps the largest professional kidnapping ring in modern American history. Those kidnapping operations have often intersected the activities of criminalized segments of the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence community, and this complication allowed some members of the criminal enterprise to escape prosecution.

Members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), an organization whose Israeli affiliates are on the U.S. State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, constitute one hard-core terrorist capability that has been employed by AFF "deprogrammers" to kidnap their victims. Although JDL head Irv Rubin is presently in jail, without bail, pending Federal prosecution on charges of plotting the murder of a California Congressman and other terrorist acts, other JDL members and associates have been implicated in recent physical assaults on LaRouche associates in California, and, possibly, in New York City. The Lubavitcher sect, the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, and former U.S. Green Beret and British Special Air Services (SAS) commandos have also been employed in kidnapping operations by the American Family Foundation and its affiliates, like the Cult Awareness Network (CAN).

After a series of kidnapping prosecutions and convictions of top CAN operators (see Travesty—A True Crime Story, by an EIR investigative team, Washington, D.C.: 1995); and after one high-profile CAN kidnapper, Rick Ross, was implicated in setting up the 1993 massacre of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, CAN was formally dissolved. In a lawsuit, the group's name and assets were taken over by the Church of Scientology. The original CAN has now been reconstituted as the Leo J. Ryan Education Foundation, with more or less the same personnel, and the same close ties to the AFF.

Indeed, in one recent targetting of LaRouche political associates, Rick Ross personally surfaced in connection with a possible kidnap team.

An 'Urban Legend'

According to its "official" history, the American Family Foundation was launched in 1979, in response to the threat posed by violent cults, particularly in the aftermath of the purported mass suicide by the Peoples Temple of Rev. Jim Jones, in Guyana, in 1978. In contemporary lingo, this version of the AFF's founding is an "urban legend." To understand the actual circumstances of the launching of AFF, two seminal events of the 1970s must be first summarized.

The first was the widespread exposure of criminal activities by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, through the mid-1970s efforts of the U.S. Senate Church Committee, chaired by Frank Church (D-Idaho), and other investigative bodies and news exposés. Among the most damning revelations was the CIA's 25-year history of secret experimentation with mind-altering drugs, mass psychological manipulation, North Korean-style brainwashing and torture techniques, under the rubric of Operation MK-ULTRA, and other programs. As for the FBI, it was revealed to have conducted an equally long-term illegal domestic program, targeting political and civil rights groups, churches, and labor unions under its Counterintelligence Program ("Cointelpro").

Among the Cointelpro documents ultimately made public was a 1973 memorandum to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, from the Special Agent in Charge of the New York City FBI Field Office, soliciting the Director's OK to orchestrate an assassination of Lyndon LaRouche, employing FBI assets infiltrated into the leadership of the Communist Party U.S.A. The idea of the FBI colluding with the Communist Party to carry out an assassination of a domestic political figure, indicates both the depth of corruption of the FBI, and the extent to which Lyndon LaRouche had already, back as far as 1973, been labeled as a potential threat to the Wall Street Eastern Establishment, which often employed the FBI as its quasi-private political police agency.

In the aftermath of the Church Committee revelations, which received widespread media attention, the CIA formally shut down all work on mind control, psychedelic drugs, etc., and the FBI formally dismantled its Cointelpro operations in 1977.

What happened, in reality, is that all the operations were continued under private auspices. The FBI established a quasi-formal sub-contractual relationship with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL), to spy on and disrupt the same domestic political activists and organizations that had been the targets of Cointelpro.

The ADL's illegal spying and dirty tricks operations reached such proportions that the FBI itself was forced to launch an investigation in 1992, when the ADL's chief West Coast spook, Roy Bullock, was caught funneling FBI classified documents to agents of the South African government. An investigation by the San Francisco police revealed a massive domestic spying operation by the ADL, on a scale approaching the FBI's earlier Cointelpro, and collusion in the 1985 bombing-murder of Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee official Alex Odeh (see EIR, April 12, 2002, "ADL Settles Spying Case").

A mid-1980s directive from then-Director William Webster to all FBI field offices in the United States, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), ordered local Bureau civil rights unit chiefs to establish liaison with ADL offices—confirming the FBI/ADL collusion.

Executive Order 12333

The FBI brought other organizations into this off-channel relationship, including the William F. Buckley-centered network of radical "Carlist" Catholics, Protestant "Christian Zionists," and political rightists, through such agencies as the Heritage Foundation, the Religious Roundtable, the Council on National Policy, and Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Committee. These operations were no longer financed through taxpayers' money directly. Rather, they were bankrolled by a tightly knit network of tax-exempt foundations, led by the Richard Mellon Scaife foundations, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and the Bradley Foundation. All of these tax-exempt "charities" have more recently been associated with the Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Bernard Lewis and Samuel P. Huntington drive for a "Clash of Civilizations" between the West and the Islamic world.

The ADL had its own independent sources of tax-exempt funding, largely associated with the Meyer Lansky-led National Crime Syndicate, through such donors as Edgar Bronfman, Max Fisher, Morris Dalitz, and Roy M. Cohn; and, later, Edmond Safra, Michael Milken, and Meshulam Riklis.

Occasionally, as, for example, in the case of British-transplant spook John Rees (not to be confused with the Tavistock Institute's Dr. John Rawlings Rees, mentioned above), the Mellon-Scaife and related networks were simultaneously funded by the ADL. Rees' Malden Institute received regular financing from the ADL and from the Mellon-Scaife-run Carthage Foundation. Sharonist propagandists Steve Emerson and Daniel Pipes fit the same profile of shared-assets of the right-wing Zionist Lobby, and of the U.S. neo-conservative funding conduits.

This employment of private agencies and individuals as assets of U.S. Federal law enforcement and intelligence sevices, was codified with the Reagan Administration's Executive Order 12333, which was signed on Dec. 4, 1981, but had been drafted by an American Bar Association task force on law and national security in 1979.

These illegal arrangements were also exposed. The 1986 crash of a cargo plane over Nicaragua, loaded with weapons for the Contra "rebels," unravelling what became known as the "Iran-Contra" scandal, which brought several years of Congressional hearings, scores of criminal indictments, and as much notoriety as the Cointelpro and MK-ULTRA scandals of the 1970s.

This time, the government was caught colluding with international drug-trafficking organizations, to sponsor terrorist insurgencies in Central America and in Central Asia. FBI Deputy Director Oliver "Buck" Revell was deeply implicated in the Iran-Contra tangle. Not surprisingly, he was also a pivotal figure in the 1982-launched "Get LaRouche Task Force," which brought together the same concert of private-sector and governmental agencies in a criminal frame-up.

The Growing Worldwide Influence of LaRouche

The second event of the late 1970s that set the circumstances for launching the American Family Foundation, was the growing worldwide prominence of Lyndon LaRouche. During 1975-76, LaRouche had won significant backing, particularly among developing-sector leaders, for the creation of a new International Development Bank, to replace the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and for an international debt moratorium. LaRouche's proposals were widely debated in the Middle East, particularly following his visit to Baghdad in 1975, and his subsequent New York City meetings with top Israeli government officials on the need for a comprehensive Mideast peace and development plan.

LaRouche also drew widespread attention, for his election-eve 1976 half-hour prime-time TV campaign broadcast, in which, as the U.S. Labor Party Presidential candidate, he warned voters about the menace of a Trilateral Commission-run Jimmy Carter Administration. LaRouche's dire warnings of a global confrontation and economic crisis, in the event of a Carter victory, set the groundwork for international resistance to the Zbigniew Brzezinski-run Carter regime.

Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, his fellow Harvard protégé of Nashville Agrarian William Yandell Elliott, would shortly launch a witchhunt against LaRouche, on behalf of the "British-American-Canadian" (BAC) oligarchy. They drew heavily on the hooligan resources of the ADL, the Carlist and Friedrich von Hayek boosters associated with the Mont Pelerin Society, and the AFF. That witchhunt would play out over the next decade, leading to an Oct. 6-7, 1986 paramilitary assault on LaRouche's publishing offices and home, and LaRouche's railroad-prosecution and incarceration from 1989-94. Altogether, over a dozen of his associates were railroaded to Federal and state prison between 1989-92.

The launching of the American Family Foundation in 1979 unleashed the MK-ULTRA mind-benders, on an expanded scale, as part of the "Get LaRouche" operation.

The AFF Team

Although American Family Foundation promotional material describes it as "the leading professional organization concerned about cults and psychological manipulation," this boast hardly squares with the fact that, throughout its 20 years of operation, AFF's psychiatric "professionals" have been dominated by three of the most notorious mind-controllers ever associated with MK-ULTRA and related government secret projects in mass psychological manipulation. This may be the ultimate case of "the pot calling the kettle black."

The three leading AFF brainwashers are the late Dr. Louis Jolyon West (who died in 1999), Dr. Margaret Singer, and Dr. Robert J. Lifton. All three were associated with AFF from its inception, and Singer and Lifton remain active to the present day. In fact, the entire AFF approach to "deprogramming" centers on two documents authored by Singer and Lifton, modeled on CIA Korean War-era studies of "Chinese brainwashing."

Dr. West's imprint on the AFF was dramatic, and he personified the unbroken continuity from MK-ULTRA to AFF "deprogramming." West was one of the earliest participants in the CIA's secret experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs to achieve forms of individual and group mind control. During the 1950s and early 1960s, he headed the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma, and conducted secret experiments with LSD-25, for the Federal government. He was a close associate of Aldous Huxley, one of the earliest proponents of the "mind-altering" properties of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. At Huxley's urging, Dr. West experimented on human guinea-pigs, combining heavy doses of LSD-25 with hypnotism, in an effort, in Huxley's words, to induce "post-hypnotic suggestions aimed at orienting the drug-induced experience in some desired direction."

West was part of the team assembled by the Federal government, to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He interrogated Jack Ruby, the assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald, and declared Ruby to be in "a paranoid state manifested by delusions, visual and auditory hallucinations, and suicidal impulses." In other words, that Ruby was out of his mind at the time he killed Oswald, and would be unable to provide information of use to the Warren Commission or any other investigative body. The Commission's coverup was directed by Allen Dulles—former CIA head, one of the earliest boosters of the Agency's mind-control experimentation—and John J. McCloy, who oversaw some private-sector bankrolling of the CIA's mind-bending, as the head of the Ford Foundation.

In the 1960s, in addition to his CIA work, Dr. West also participated, along with Dr. Margaret Singer, in a U.S. Air Force project at Stead Air Force Base, aimed at assessing various forms of torture, in order to devise behavior modification techniques to enable American prisoners of war to resist.

In 1967, Dr. West left Oklahoma and set up shop in San Francisco, during the famous "Summer of Love," during which time millions of LSD doses, produced by the government, were distributed to the hippies, in the largest secret-government test of mass drugging of a population in history. West and Singer again joined forces to assess the impact of the LSD flood. In this effort, they also came to work closely with Dr. Gregory Bateson, who ran secret LSD-25 experiments at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital, in parallel to West's earlier work in Oklahoma.

West next became chairman of the department of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angelees, and director of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute, a major center for experimentation in mass social control, employing drugs, hypnosis, electro-shock, and other techniques.

In 1970, Dr. West pushed to Gov. Ronald Reagan, the idea of a Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, to track criminals, "pre-delinquent hyperkinetic children," and others profiled as allegedly likely to engage in violence. Among the controversial techniques he proposed: chemical castration, and implanting electrodes into subjects' brains to control violent impulses and "political activity."

In 1977, when the Church Committee revelations about the CIA's tests of drug-induced mind control grabbed headlines, the New York Times ran a front-page story, singling out Dr. West as one of the CIA's top MK-ULTRA mind-destroyers. The Times obtained a West-authored memo advocating the use of LSD in social control. The memo, the paper reported, read in part, "This method, foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), has the governing element employing drugs selectively to manipulate the governed in various ways. In fact, it may be more convenient and perhaps even more economical to keep the growing number of chronic drug users (especially of the hallucinogens) fairly isolated and also out of the labor market, with its millions of unemployed. To society, the communards with their hallucinogenic drugs are probably less bothersome—and less expensive—if they are living apart, than if they are engaging in alternative modes of expressing their alienation, such as active, organized, vigorous political protest and dissent."

West, Lifton, and Singer have, throughout their careers, been obsessed with early detection and prevention of the emergence of any independent political movement with a strong leader, in the Socratic-Platonic tradition of the "philosopher-king."

Lifton and Singer

Dr. Robert J. Lifton is one of the leading American experts in brainwashing and mind-control. As an Air Force psychiatrist at the close of the Korean War, Lifton was sent to South Korea on a team assigned to interrogate American prisoners of war, who had been subjected to North Korean brainwashing. He stayed on in Hong Kong for several years after his Air Force service, on unspecified "grants" to study the more intensive forms of "thought-reform" conducted by the Chinese.

In a Nov. 2, 1999 interview with Harry Kreisler, Lifton bragged that his career, from that point on, was shaped by cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, both of whom were leading participants in a Josiah Macy Foundation project known as the "Cybernetics Group." The project ran from 1942 up through the late 1950s, and it provided one of the private-sector foundation covers for the CIA's MK-ULTRA operations (see "From Cybernetics to Littleton: Techniques of Mind Control," EIR, May 5, 2000). Along with Mead, Erikson, and Gregory Bateson, the Cybernetics Group included such notorious brainwashers as Dr. Kurt Lewin, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Dr. Harold Abramson. Dr. Abramson was a top CIA scientist, involved in the secret LSD-25 research.

After studying Chinese brainwashing, Lifton did a detailed profile of the impact of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb attacks on the survivors. This placed him at the center of Bertrand Russell's efforts to terrorize world leaders, and populations, into accepting world government as a preferred alternative to mass nuclear extermination. He described this in a 1999 interview: "As human beings, we are the animals or the creatures who know that we die, however we fend off that knowledge. And being part of something larger than ourselves is what I call the symbolization of immortality. And that can be done through biologically our children, or our works, our influences in the world, or through being bound up with eternal nature. And also through some sort of religious belief system. But all these are in some way called into question, both by the rapidity of historical change where we lose a clear sense of value structures or belief systems, and also through the existence of ultimate weapons or what I call 'imagery of extinction' that accompanies ultimate weapons. Every adult in the world has some sense that he or she might be obliterated at any time by these weapons that we have created.... And I think that's why we tend to then embrace what I took to be a fifth form, which is the experience of transcendence or seeking high states whether it's through meditation or drugs or something that takes us beyond ourselves or into something like what we call 'ecstasy'.... I think nuclear weapons have something to do with it, importantly, and so does the speed and confusions of historical change."

After more than 20 years as the Foundations' Fund Research Professor of Psychology at Yale, Lifton moved to New York and assumed the Distinguished Professors Chair in Psychiatry and Psychology at the City University of New York and John Jay College. He also became the Director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival, where he penned dozens of studies on mind-control, including, most recently, a profile of the Aum sect in Japan.

Margaret Singer, the third mind-bender veteran of MK-ULTRA, who has been an AFF icon since the group's inception, was Dr. West's partner in the Haight Ashbury studies in the late 1960s, and remained in the San Francisco Bay Area, as professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. She got her start as an Army psychiatrist studying Korean War veterans and former prisoners of war. Her writings were cited by the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, Inc., also exposed as a CIA front during the MK-ULTRA exposés. The Society for the Study of Human Ecology was bankrolled by the Josiah Macy Foundation.

Although she prides herself as an expert in "mind control or coercive persuasion," Singer was not allowed to testify as an expert witness in a 1990 Federal court case. In his ruling rejecting Singer's expertise, U.S. Judge Lowell Jensen said, "The evidence before the court ... shows that neither the APA [American Psychological Association] nor the ASA [American Sociological Association] has endorsed the views of Dr. Singer.... Her proffered testimony in this case has been challenged by the scientific community on grounds of both scientific merit and methodological rigor." In 1992 she filed a RICO suit against these two organizations for refusing to sanction her work!

The Macy and Mob Connections

If one piece of "smoking gun" evidence proves that the AFF is the continuation of MK-ULTRA under a new masthead, it is to be found in the New York City law offices of Morris and McVeigh, which also house the Bodman and Achellis Foundations. The two foundations are administered by senior partners in the firm, and they have overlapping directorates. In the first decade of AFF's existence, the Bodman and Achellis Foundations, combined, provided it more than a half-million dollars, by far its largest source of funding. (Since 1969, the Bodman Foundation has been a major donor to the Temple of Understanding at the UN, formerly known as the Lucis Trust—an outright Satanic sect, founded in London in 1922, under the more poetic and revealing name, Lucifer Trust. Cybernetics Group leader Margaret Mead was a founding director of the Temple of Understanding.)

More to the point: The founding partner of Morris and McVeigh, Charles Senff McVeigh, was president of Bodman Foundation, an officer and trustee of the Achellis Foundation, and was a director of the Josiah Macy Foundation, during the entire period that Macy was housing the Cybernetics Group and the CIA's secret MK-ULTRA mind control and psychedelics project.

The AFF is also closely aligned with the organized crime- and espionage-tainted Anti-Defamation League. The founder and president of the American Family Foundation is attorney Herbert Rosedale, of the law firm Parker, Chapin, Flattau, and Klimpl. The firm's founder, Albert Parker, was the vice chairman of the New York ADL Appeal, the organization's fundraising arm. The law firm represents the ADL's Sterling National Bank, and has also represented Republic National Bank of the late Edmond Safra. AFF is funded as well by the San Francisco-based Swig Foundation. Melvin Swig, a trustee of the foundation, has been ADL national commissioner and an executive board member of American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the official Israeli Lobby in America.

AFF's Advisory Board has included the director of the Task Force on Missionaries and Cults from the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of New York. Established in 1981 under JCRC director Malcolm Hoenlein and with the assistance of the Office of the Interior Minister for the State of Israel, the task force established an intelligence-gathering war-room to track political adversaries. Hoenlein has been identified as a key operative for the Mega Group, the private club of Zionist billionaires, established in 1991 by brothers Edgar and Charles Bronfman, hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt, and Max Fisher.

Galen Kelly, for decades the leading kidnapper, knuckledragger, and "deprogrammer" within AFF's orbit, has collaborated directly with ADL intelligence hand Mira Lansky Boland, and has used terrorist Jewish Defense League members for his kidnappings. According to documents filed with the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, when Kelly was arrested in October 1992 for kidnapping, AFF president Rosedale sent a letter to the court testifying to Kelly's character. Rosedale wrote he had worked with Kelly for more than ten years, and that his "credibility and trustworthiness have been evident and exemplary.... I wholeheartedly vouch for him." Kelly's years of service to this network landed him on the board of directors of Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), in Washington, D.C.

In 1980, during its first months of existence, AFF was involved in the attempted kidnapping and "deprogramming" of LaRouche associate Rogelio Maduro. Maduro was kidnapped and held against his will for several days, before he was able to escape, with the help of local police in Charlotte, North Carolina. The 1992 attempt to kidnap another LaRouche associate, Lewis du Pont Smith, led to a series of criminal prosecutions, and a media spotlight that badly scarred the AFF's reputation, and contributed mightily to the shutdown and "reinvention" of its Cult Awareness Network.
 
Thanks for all that info, Shane.
Cult-Info still exists and it overlaps with one of the AFF legal fronts, EDUCFUND not (anymore), but there is a "Foundation for Religious Freedom" in LA which could fit in here.
What I'd like to know is, if Galen Kelly is the same person as one Joe Kelly who is associated with the ICSA and the general milieu of CAN/AFF.


I find it entertaining in the extreme to read how Scientology beat into pieces the AFF/CAN, and how the AFF/CAN/ICSA and associated groups still go after Scientology, the Moonies etc, while ALL of these groups on either side of the controversy are widely known or believed to be CIA fronts. The other thing that I find interesting is that, while this network is "Christian"-flavored, many of the individuals involved can be identified as jews, most prominent amont them Rick Ross, and thus theorized to be working for the mossad through fronts such as ADL ... perhaps just to know what is going on and see how they can exploit situations for their own purposes.


That they would go after Larouche or certain medical practices or even looks to me to in line with attacking Laura's work and this forum - sow confusion, cause troubles and divisiveness for anything and anybody who questions the status-quo and who could even potentially change it.


@Lisa
Coming from a comparable background, reading your story left me thinking "and I thought that _my_ family sucked". My astonishment is because you would even deign to talk to them after all that because I compared your story to my own experience. One small antecedent is that at around age 4, about when that photo on the left was shot, somebody dropped me at an orphanage and somebody else went to take me back a day or so later, and the following years were mainly downhill. I dropped them and skipped country when I could because I knew that a crime could have happened if I stayed around.
About that last article of yours, where I live it is something of an open secret that many doctors do all kind of drugs - doctors in hospitals here work in shifts of 3-4 days a time with only minimal sleep during that time. They make more money than other people but their hourly salaries are low, and doctors who have their own practice have to put up with crazy amounts of patients from social security to make a living. People working as nurses (mostly women) and care for the elderly/invalid ... mostly burn out after about 10 years in that profession. The difference to the US would be that society here is still mostly intact and the level of economic pressures on families are less as there is still something of a network of social institutions which the EU has not yet destroyed.
 
Until now Szimhart the only one among the many people involved in this thing who I have found who has connections to ALL of the significant nodes of the network, historc as well as current: Jolly West, AFF, CAN, MKULTRA, ICSA. And then there is his work story as published on his website: It appears he has passed through more horrible places than any normal human could tolerate.
One of his work references is the "Pennhurst State Institution for mentally retarded" (1970-1972) where he supposedly worked as a "Therapeutic Activities Worker II". Wikipedia see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennhurst_State_School_and_Hospital. Whatever "therapeutic activities" might mean can probably be understood from the following short quote
Wikipedia said:
In 1968, conditions at Pennhurst were exposed in a five-part television news report anchored by local CBS10 correspondent Bill Baldini. "Suffer the Little Children".

In 1983, nine employees were indicted on charges ranging from slapping and beating patients (including some in wheelchairs) to arranging for patients to assault each other.

The Halderman Case, which resulted in the closure of the institution, also detailed widespread patient abuse.
(bold mine).


Here are the "Halderman Case" documents: http://www.clearinghouse.net/detail.php?id=490
Here some choice quotes from that class action suit which overlap the time when Szimhart was there according to his own website (all bolds mine):
Halderman Case said:
Plaintiff George Sorotos entered Pennhurst in 1970 at the age of seven. In the seven years that George has been at Pennhurst, his former foster mother, Marion Caranfa, testified that in her weekly visits to Pennhurst there have been only four occasions when George was not injured. (N.T. 12-63). During this period, he has suffered from numerous reported injuries, including bites, scratches, black eyes and loss of teeth. In addition, Mrs. Caranfa testified that she recently observed what appeared to be cigarette burns on George's chest.
Halderman Case said:
Many of the residents have suffered physical deterioration and intellectual and behavioral regression during their residency at Pennhurst. Terri Lee Halderman, the original plaintiff in this action, was admitted to Pennhurst in 1966 when she was twelve years of age. During her eleven years at Pennhurst, as a result of attacks and accidents, she has lost several teeth and suffered a fractured jaw, fractured fingers, a fractured toe and numerous lacerations, cuts, scratches and bites. Prior to her admission to Pennhurst, Terri Lee could say "dadda", "mamma", "noynoy" (no), "baba" (goodby) and "nana" (grandmother). She no longer speaks. (Halderman, N.T. 9-69, 9-71, 9-78, 9-87, 9-88).
Terri Lee Halderman's medical records contain a listing of over forty reported injuries.
Halderman Case said:
Plaintiffs Robert and Theresa Sobetsky were admitted to Pennhurst on November 29, 1971. They were placed on extremely overcrowded wards where beds were placed in the aisles. Robert was never assigned to a particular bed ... During his residency at Pennhurst, Robert Sobetsky suffered from bruises, bites, scratches, welts and he smelled of urine ... His record shows a number of reported injuries, some of which, though labeled minor injuries, represented bruises that were three to five inches in length. Theresa also suffered such injuries.
On the definition of "voluntary":
Halderman Case said:
Approximately 21 of the 45 living units at Pennhurst are locked (Matthews, Deposition at 34) to prevent individuals from leaving their living units. (Uphold, Deposition at 139). Those individuals over the age of 18 who have been "voluntarily" admitted to Pennhurst are theoretically free to leave the institution at any time.
Would those be the definitions of "voluntary" and "therapeutic" also used at the CMES?


Here is a link to a memorial site: http://www.preservepennhurst.com/default.aspx?pg=6 and which has some people who could known more about Szimhart (above quotes taken from this website).
Here is a link to "sketches done by Joe Szimhart and community residents" apparently taken down: http://home.dejazzd.com/jszimhart/pennhurst%20sketches.htm


This site reminds me of the Petenanguishene institution in Canada, where they'd bind inmates together and fill them up with drugs, and where there is also a class action suit by formet "patients" involved.


Geographically, Pennhurst is across the river from both Pottstown (where Szimhart currently lives) and the CMES.
Google Maps: http://goo.gl/maps/AvQ7S


Here is another site about Pennhurst. The area was turned over to the US ANG and in part to a commercial developer who turned their part into a "horror themed park". Their website: _http://pennhurstasylum.com/flash/index.htm. It's a flash application so I cant copy the text. Click on "History" in the menu and see what these people have to say. According to that site, Pennhurst was designed to hold up to 10.000 "patients", and its population was half recruited from people sent there by court and half sent by either parents or foster guardians.


Here is another site with historic info on the Pennhurst Asylum: http://www.elpeecho.com/pennhurst/pennhurst.htm
 
This is interesting. One of the C.A.N. "deprogrammers" crew members, Paul Martin (deceased in 2009), has the following in his obituary:
Wellspring Retreat Website said:
He served as an Expert Witness in 29 legal/court cases as a psychologist who testified to the role of "brainwashing" causing behavioral changes, including the Muhammed/Malvo DC sniper trial and the recent terrorist legal case of Zacharias Moussaoui. He also worked with several special intelligence projects.
Quoted from _http://wellspringretreat.org/paul_martin/Pauls_obit.htm
 
name said:
This is interesting. One of the C.A.N. "deprogrammers" crew members, Paul Martin (deceased in 2009), has the following in his obituary:
Wellspring Retreat Website said:
He served as an Expert Witness in 29 legal/court cases as a psychologist who testified to the role of "brainwashing" causing behavioral changes, including the Muhammed/Malvo DC sniper trial and the recent terrorist legal case of Zacharias Moussaoui. He also worked with several special intelligence projects.
Quoted from _http://wellspringretreat.org/paul_martin/Pauls_obit.htm

Very interesting. That's what these deprogrammers really are - torturers for the modern inquisition.
 
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