ARTICLE FRANCAIS A DROITE/DEUTSCHER ARTIKEL RECHTS
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Perhaps you just watched Oliver Steeds on the Discovery Channel tonight, Wednesday, February 24, 2010, between 10-11 pm and my appearance on it.
By the way, with four non-white strangers in my living room, and no bodyguards that specific day — the snowstorm kept postponing the Discovery Channel crew’s arrival — and in view of the federal government’s proven proclivity to get into houses posing as someone else (see what happened to the Browns in New Hampshire), I took no chances, and a cocked Walther, with which I am well familiar, located on the edge of my pocket, as I calmly but alertly sit there, is not dangerous.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpIq2dVaYWk
Stay tuned for my YouTube video very soon tonight…….
The show, hosted by peripatetic adventure host Oliver Steeds, was entitled, very sensationistically, “Hitler’s Mummies” –even though I was told when asked for an interview that it would about ancient white emigrants from Europe to the Americas and about the Ice Age! 😉 That is just a bit before Hitler’s time, to be sure, but the Führer always, still, and “more than ever” sells books, TV shows and movies like hotcakes if they just have his name or a swastika on them. 😉
The trailers for the show and featuring me ran twice hourly for days before the show. I was actually eager to see Ollie freak on camera that I as a Second Amendment American own guns… 😉
If you have recorded this show, please send me the audiovisual file as an mp4 if you can.
john@democratic-republicans.us
Here is a clip with me in it: http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/solving-history-with-olly-steeds-armed-white-activist.html
And, just as I expected (remember I said he MIGHT look Aryan unless he had “something lurking in the woodpile” ;-)), our British-accented “Ollie” is revealed as having a “semitic” gene from the Nile — because a DNA test exposed that this supposed impartial journalist is a semite (and I strongly suggest a Jewish semite) on his father’s side and so OF COURSE he will twist and lie about anything the Nazis did!
What’s wrong with looking Aryan? I have two Aryan daughters and they turned out all right. 😉
As you think back to this show — full to the bursting with anti-nazi lies (like Himmler’s “human-bone office chair” –WHAAAT???!! That is actually a TOTALLY NEW FABRICATION), and various distortions and omissions — remember what Mel Gibson shot back at a juish reporter who was pestering him about his “antisemitic outburst in Malibu” three years ago:
“Do you have a dog in this fight?” 😉
My “wrongmeter”‘ kept shrieking throughout the show,smoke began curling out, and finally the wrongmeter exploded with a bang at the last scene at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Steeds, who had basically just admitted via DNA test that he is, ahem, “semitic” via his father, ADMITS that British burned the camp down because the juze who died at that enemy prisoner camp died of DISEASE!
Wait, Ollie, what happened to the supposed deliberate Holocaustic extinction via GAS CHAMBERS??
Isn’t what you just said exactly what Holocaust revisionists say? That juze died at the very end of the war like flies due to Germany collapsing FROM ALLIED CARPET BOMBING, and thus from food and medicine getting critically scarce, and diseases breaking out?
I was actually a bit flabbergasted that there was hardly ONE true fact in that entire show!
Steedowitz did show a Solutrean spearhead from Meadowcroft Rock Shelter and conceded that it wa a good question how a European spearhead could end up in America in 13,000 BC….but then he moved on quickly to more talk about the “Knot-see’s mahstah race theery”….
Then he looks at a clearly blond Guanche mummy in the Canary Islands, just as he did with me in the living room on my computer, and says that a blond hair is NOT blond!
And when he DOES see a clearly blond mummy from ancient Egypt, he sort of ….glosses over that…..’cuz it sort of CONFIRMS what the SS Ahnenerbe he hates so much as a ju was saying.
If there were NO blond Canary Islanders, why DID the Spanish themselves paint this picture?
If no Aryans ever settled the Americas before Columbus, why does the Mayans’ Temple of the Warrior from AD 700 show a BLOND man being sacrified by murderous dark-skinned natives?
If no Aryans ever settled our country before 1605, why did some American Indians have fair hair and eyes?
A German comrade wrote me about :
“Whenever 6 strange men come into my house,…” Das ist super… Jeder Mensch in USA wird das richtig auffassen ! Deine Ausstrahlung und Dein sicheres Auftreten sind unbestreitbar und kommen positiv durch, trotz aller Tricks, die die da drauf haben. Dass die sich ausgerechnet die Pistolengeschichte als “Aufhänger”nehmen, bei all dem interessanten Stoff, den Du üer die Solutrier zu berichten weißt, ist eine Gemeinheit. Aber damit mußte man praktisch rechnen. Trotzdem ! Du kommst nicht nur als ein echter Kerl, sondern auch als Mensch mit Richtungsbewußstsein rüber…es wird den Effekt, Dich als gewaltbereiten, dummen Nazi darzustellen nicht bewirken, sondern nur Deinen Bekanntsheitsgrad steigern.
Translation:
“Whenever 6 strange men come into my house” … That is great! … Every person in the United States will understood you correctly! Your charisma and your poise are undeniable here and come through positively — despite all the tricks they pulled. That they used the pistol segment as the “finisher” — despite all the interesting things you know about, is vulgarity. But this had to be expected. Nevertheless — you come over not only as a real man, but also as a man with a sense of mission … This will not achieve the goal of showing you as a violence-prone, stupid nazi, but can only increase your public profile.
An American comrade of long and high standing wrote:
Just finished watching the Discovery show “Hitler’s Mummies.” Clever editors can take snippets of this and that and spin them any which way they want. Nonetheless, I thought that you came across as reasonable and personable. You gave a cogent summary of the basic WN position concerning looming White extinction, and you did a good job of tying that in to the Solutreans.
The show itself — I balk at dignifying it as a “documentary” — was simple multiracial anti-Aryan boilerplate. As [National Socialist leader and thinker] Matt Koehl has commented, if one denies the existence of the Aryan race, then the questions of Aryan genocide and Aryan extinction become non-issues.
As to the racial identity of your interlocutor, he may indeed have some Semitic genes lurking in his background: Certainly he has a sliminess about his personality that argues for that!
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I received this supportive email:
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Hello Mr. de Nugent,
I just had to share.
With regards to ancient blond (and some reddish -blond) haired, Nordic peoples in America before American Indians (and before Christopher Columbus, as American text books erroneously mislead) they were definitely here. I know there is a lot of hearsay on the web, but I lived in Arizona for a couple of years before moving back to PA. I attach two pictures for you. One is a Phoenician / Roman-looking statue face/head I found hidden 1800 feet a top a sandstone butte. The other is a face obvious (to me) carved on the side of a mountain in Sedona.
Actually, they are all over Sedona. Because of time, and weathering, some are not seen until certain times of the day. Anyhow, I found all kinds of stuff like this out there. Upon my further research, centering the settlements on the Four Corners region (I guess X marks the spot on the U.S. map for a reason) they are in all four states that border there. Upon geological research, I deduced that the region was populated / occupied for the region’s vast copper resources — the primary element needed for any advanced Bronze-age civilization. Even today Arizona is one of the world’s largest producers of copper.
I emailed you today because I had emailed the director of the Smithsonian, asking about any interest or previous research into early civilizations in the U.S. Well, it took about 3 weeks, reply received today, for his assistant to email me back something that seemed to be cut out of a high school text book. Why we can’t know the true history of our country, I will never know.
* * *
Hello again,
I almost forgot — below is what she sent back to me from the Smithsonian.
* * *
—– Original Message —–
From: Burgess, Laurie
To:
Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 11:09 AM
Subject: RE: Ancient Artifacts in Arizona
Dear [sir]:
Thank you very much for sending images of a possible Egyptian/Phoenician statue from the southwest. Your inquiry to Secretary Clough was forwarded to the National Museum of Natural History’s Department of Anthropology for response.
The form visible in your images does indeed have a mummiform shape. Your images also seem to show some sedimentary layers in the form, which may indicate that this is an eroded rock formation, although certainly in a striking shape.
At this point in time, after over a century of intensive archaeological excavations, no archaeological evidence of Egyptian, Roman or Phoenician contact has been found in the Americas, but we have received a number of inquiries on the topic. In part, many of the inquiries refer to a 1909 Arizona Gazette story—which turned out to be a hoax—that told of a discovery of Old World/Egyptian materials in the Southwest. It cited a Smithsonian archaeologist named Dr. Jordan as having made the discovery, but there was no such Smithsonian expedition and we have never had a Dr. Jordan on staff. The Smithsonian’s Department of Anthropology has a long history of expeditions in the Southwest, but they have only encountered evidence of Native American and historic period occupations.
Christopher Columbus’ 1492 arrival in the Americas is still regarded as the earliest contact from Europe and points east, with the exception of Norse travelers who briefly settled in Canada around 1000 A.D. The archaeological site of L’Anse aux Meadows (http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/nl/meadows/index.aspx , which is maintained by the Canadian government, represents the only other documented Pre-Columbian arrival in the Americas.
I do very much appreciate your sending images for our review and if you find yourself in Washington, D.C., you might enjoy our Western Cultures hall, which features some marvelous Egyptian material from the anthropology collections.
Kind regards,
Laurie Burgess
Associate Chair
Department of Anthropology
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
MRC 112
P.O. Box 37012
10th and Constitution Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20013-7012
(202) 633-1915
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I replied:
* * *
Thanks — nice to get these government scumsuckers on record saying that — and thus implying that their own former Director of Anthropology, Dennis Stanford, is a worthless nut!
And that the white skeletons and tools all over his continent are meaningless.
It’s like the Discovery Channel show last night, which by saying Hitler and Nazi 200 times attempted to discredit totally what the DC documentary “Ice Age Columbus.”
The ju understands what is at stake here, the whole white guilt trip.
The problem is often a lack of courage. When even Dennis Stanford was directly asked at a meeting in Ohio in 2008 if Europeans had come to the Americas, he said: “People from Europe.”
Yes, maybe black people or Chinese immigrants to Stone Age France hopped the Concorde from Paris to New York in 20,000 BC!
What an answer — because we have not just Solutrean tools but also Solutrean SKELETONS!
John
* * *
John,
That was outstanding…I imagine they spent 3 or more hours interviewing you with the thought that they could cut and splice a few soundbites to make you sound like a kook. But you managed to get out three critical points…1. We are the target race for extermination, and not the perpetrators of genocide. 2. That Hitler fought against the Jewish monopoly on banking and media which coincidentally thrives in America today 3. An Armed citizenry is harder to enslave…
The most shocking comment came from Ollie.
“You are presenting historical ideas which are continuing to incite racial hatred.”
That statement is the statement of a kook bent on controlling your thought with law…that your educated opinion about a historical event of 10,000 years ago can incite racial hatred…no concern of whether it is factual or not…simply that your opinions on history are wrong because they tend to incriminate a protected group. WHACKED!
* * *
He added in a follow-up email:
* * *
Hello again,
I almost forgot — below is what she sent back to me from the Smithsonian.
* * *
From: Burgess, Laurie
To: mark.s.balbach@gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 11:09 AM
Subject: RE: Ancient Artifacts in Arizona
Thank you very much for sending images of a possible Egyptian/Phoenician statue from the southwest. Your inquiry to Secretary Clough was forwarded to the National Museum of Natural History’s Department of Anthropology for response.
The form visible in your images does indeed have a mummiform shape. Your images also seem to show some sedimentary layers in the form, which may indicate that this is an eroded rock formation, although certainly in a striking shape.
At this point in time, after over a century of intensive archaeological excavations, no archaeological evidence of Egyptian, Roman or Phoenician contact has been found in the Americas, but we have received a number of inquiries on the topic. In part, many of the inquiries refer to a 1909 Arizona Gazette story—which turned out to be a hoax—that told of a discovery of Old World/Egyptian materials in the Southwest. It cited a Smithsonian archaeologist named Dr. Jordan as having made the discovery, but there was no such Smithsonian expedition and we have never had a Dr. Jordan on staff. The Smithsonian’s Department of Anthropology has a long history of expeditions in the Southwest, but they have only encountered evidence of Native American and historic period occupations.
Christopher Columbus’ 1492 arrival in the Americas is still regarded as the earliest contact from Europe and points east, with the exception of Norse travelers who briefly settled in Canada around 1000 A.D. The archaeological site of L’Anse aux Meadows (http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/nl/meadows/index.aspx , which is maintained by the Canadian government, represents the only other documented Pre-Columbian arrival in the Americas.
I do very much appreciate your sending images for our review and if you find yourself in Washington, D.C., you might enjoy our Western Cultures hall, which features some marvelous Egyptian material from the anthropology collections.
Kind regards,
Laurie Burgess
Associate Chair
Department of Anthropology
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
MRC 112
P.O. Box 37012
10th and Constitution Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20013-7012
(202) 633-1915
* * *
I replied:
Thanks — nice to get these government scumsuckers on record saying that — and thus implying that their own former Director of Anthropology, Dennis Stanford, is a worthless nut!
And the white skeletons and tools are meaningless
It’s like the Discovery Channel show last night, which by saying Hitler and Nazi 200 times attempted to discredit totally what the DC’s own documentary, “Ice Age Columbus” said!
The ju understands what is at stake here, the whole white guilt trip.
John
Internet radio journalist William Kennedy of Boston wrote:
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1) The European racial types described in the film were not German ideas. They were developed by Madison Grant in the USA.
2) The belief that Aryans (Indo Europeans) populated the Canary Islands was not based on mummies but rather by the testimonies of Spanish sailors who visited the native population and noted they were blond.
3) The Blond Mummies from Egypt were the rule — many pharaohs were blond- and red-haired. The last great Aryan Pharaoh was the famous Ramses the Great — who had red hair.
4) John de Nugent’s gun collection has nothing to do with archeology. [JdN: Steeds “discovered” an American has guns! Millions do!]
5) The claim that there is no Aryan race to speak of is a bald-faced lie as the scientist in the film well knows. Population demographics cause all sorts of racial mixture — in 1850 there were only 1 billion people on Earth, and now there are 7 billion. This huge leap causes a mix-up of genes and an automatic dispersion of all races due to mixture. {JdN: But that does not mean there was no fair-haired race thousands of years ago! Nor did they have to all look the same? No white nationality even CLAIMS the things Steeds puts on us!]
For solid information on Indo-Europeans (Aryans/ Caucasoids) go to:
http://www.williamhkennedy.com/lostciv.html#aryan
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A college student wrote:
* * *
Dear Mr. de Nugent,
I am curently a college student studying political science. I saw you on an episode of “Solving History with Olly” this evening and I had some questions for you. You said that the Europeans were the ones that civilized the world, have you ever looked into the history of the Japanese and Chinese? Did you know that they used wood floors many years before any European? Did you know they also used eating utensils more “civilized” before the Europeans? I hope you can understand my position on the subject, I am skeptical of any position on any subject until I recieve a good amount of information and proof that the position is true.
Sincerely,
A.S.
* * *
There is no question that the Japanese have some kind of “white blood.” I have met Japanese women who were far whiter in skin than any white woman I have ever dated, especially those from the northern half of Japan, and some are more or less beautiful.
I mean white as in the color of a piece of white paper, really WHITE, not pinkish-bluish-beige, which is what “white” people are. There is of course the Ainu blood some of them have. |
[A comrade wrote me]
John,
The Ainu blood in the Japanese is very well documented – by the Japanese themselves.
Geographical names, DNA tests and 18th, 19th Century records clearly show that the Ainu was historically the dominant population on the Japanese Islands. The Koreans were coming in from the South, pushing the Ainu up toward the North. They ended up on Hokkaido as outcasts. The present Japanese population shows a 20 to 80% Ainu DNA, increasing from the South to the North. The Ainu was the warrior class, the samurais and genetically the Japanese elite tends to show signs of Aryan DNA. The only possible source can be the Ainu.
Around 1860 when we the Europeans established stronger and stronger trading posts in the Far East suddenly the Japanese realised that the Ainu of Hokkaido just might give us a base and they did a 180 degree turn around. From exclusion of the Ainu they switched to forced inclusion, they almost completely melted them down by today.
This is why I often keep arguing on this board that when we examine the Ainu we have to look at their DNA as far as possible in time because of the constant great pressure they were living under for the last ten thousand years.
Here I am looking at the Ainu and the Pericu-Guaycuras of Baja California, two Aryan groups that survived from the ice age in isolation (post No. 2):
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/show…=kennewick+man
Ezra Pound had great respect for the Japanese culture and if there is anybody we can trust when it comes to culture it is Ezra Pound. I was just working to republish his Social Credit last night… seems to be the right time to bring it forward.
How intriguing that the one Asiatic people I found to be very honorable, the Japanese, were the one with the most white blood! |
When I was working on the Ainu article I did not have the money to travel to Hokkaido, which I desired a lot. The second best thing was to buy an original wooden bear on ebay, carved by an Ainu craftsman. I still have it. It is truly a work of art, carved from a single block of wood, around 16 inches long, holding a fish with his teeth.
The bear has a special, privileged position in the Ainu mythology. They often carve it into wood. On the bottom of the right rear and front paws something is written with Japanese characters. So I took the poor teddy down to my favourite sushi restaurant, the best within a hundred miles in South California. There were around four or five Japanese standing there when I handed over the teddy to them to read the remarks. The effect was extraordinary: These jovial guys who were always jolly and drinking sake (hot rice wine) with us suddenly became silent. Their faces turned into grey stone. They remained polite and translated the few words written there but it was obvious: The teddy touched a raw nerve, something very deeply written in their collective soul.
I have also written:
What about race mixing of so-called the better of the two races, the whites and the Japanese? Will such products of race mixing be haunted? |
My experience with the Japanese in peacetime, and my father’s in wartime, have been opposite.
I found them incredibly honorable, honest, clean, neat, punctual and hard-working.
In WWII my father as a combat Marine found them — at Iwo Jima, Saipan and Tinian and in the Philippines — to be brave, yes, very brave, suicidally so — but unspeakable fiends toward our captured Marine and soldier prisoners.
There is no question that the Japanese have some kind of “white blood.” I have met Japanese women who were far whiter in skin than any white woman I have ever dated, especially those from the northern half of Japan, and some are more or less beautiful.
I mean white as in the color of a piece of white paper, really WHITE, not pinkish-bluish-beige, which is what “white” people are.
There is of course the Ainu blood some of them have.
The aristocrats also often have a prominent, un-Asiatic nose — even beaked!
The Chinese are a different story, and they ARE indeed — just as they boast and as one boasted to me — in their anti-values and misbehavior “the Jews of Asia.” That they find this a compliment is appalling.
I remember dining with Dr. David Duke back in 1989 in Baton Rouge around the time of the Beijing student uprising, and a lady comrade asked him what he thought of that Chinese student ferment for “democracy.” He thought it was probably GOOD for the white race, because Jew-”democracy” would weaken and degenerate the Chinese just as it has weakened us.
But of course the Chinese leadership soon after crushed the revolt.
China is a yellow national-socialist country — but unlike Germany, replete with the dishonesty, brutality and corruption that the Chinese themselves have bemoaned to me as permanent traits of their nation.
China is a very great danger, especially in tandem with the Jews.
I think the Japanese might make a good ally. My extensive experiences in the past made me respect them and their word.
* * *
Hello sir,
I was hoping you could help me! I did see the discovery show that you were on! In hearing you speak I became very interested in Aryan blood line! I am a dark blonde with bright blue eyes! Is there a way to track my blood line to see if I am of true Aryan blood? You truly got me thinking about where my blood came from! I can not believe the stupidity of Ollie during your segment. How can he be so small minded when he saw the blond hairs himself! Wow — that’s all I can say! Thank you for your time, sir!
Michael
* * *
I replied:
* * *
From: “mkpr56@yahoo.com” <mkpr56@yahoo.com>
To: “john@democratic-republicans.us” <john@democratic-republicans.us>
Sent: Thursday, February 25, 2010 1:55:27
Subject: Question
============================
Both of the stories below are from totally mainstream, ju-controlled sources. What they ADMIT is mind-blowing.
[source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR2007011001399_pf.html]
New on the Internet: a community of people who believe the government is beaming voices into their minds. They may be crazy, but the Pentagon has pursued a weapon that can do just that.
By Sharon Weinberger
Sunday, January 14, 2007
[source:
IF HARLAN GIRARD IS CRAZY, HE DOESN’T ACT THE PART. He is standing just where he said he would be, below the Philadelphia train station’s World War II memorial — a soaring statue of a winged angel embracing a fallen combatant, as if lifting him to heaven. Girard is wearing pressed khaki pants, expensive-looking leather loafers and a crisp blue button-down. He looks like a local businessman dressed for a casual Friday — a local businessman with a wickedly dark sense of humor, which had become apparent when he said to look for him beneath “the angel sodomizing a dead soldier.” At 70, he appears robust and healthy — not the slightest bit disheveled or unusual-looking. He is also carrying a bag.
Girard’s description of himself is matter-of-fact, until he explains what’s in the bag: documents he believes prove that the government is attempting to control his mind. He carries that black, weathered bag everywhere he goes. “Every time I go out, I’m prepared to come home and find everything is stolen,” he says.
The bag aside, Girard appears intelligent and coherent. At a table in front of Dunkin’ Donuts inside the train station, Girard opens the bag and pulls out a thick stack of documents, carefully labeled and sorted with yellow sticky notes bearing neat block print. The documents are an authentic-looking mix of news stories, articles culled from military journals and even some declassified national security documents that do seem to show that the U.S. government has attempted to develop weapons that send voices into people’s heads.
“It’s undeniable that the technology exists,” Girard says, “but if you go to the police and say, ‘I’m hearing voices,’ they’re going to lock you up for psychiatric evaluation.”
The thing that’s missing from his bag — the lack of which makes it hard to prove he isn’t crazy — is even a single document that would buttress the implausible notion that the government is currently targeting a large group of American citizens with mind-control technology. The only direct evidence for that, Girard admits, lies with alleged victims such as himself.
And of those, there are many.
IT’S 9:01 P.M. WHEN THE FIRST PERSON SPEAKS during the Saturday conference call.
Unsure whether anyone else is on the line yet, the female caller throws out the first question: “You got gang stalking or V2K?” she asks no one in particular.
There’s a short, uncomfortable pause.
“V2K, really bad. 24-7,” a man replies.
“Gang stalking,” another woman says.
“Oh, yeah, join the club,” yet another man replies.
The members of this confessional “club” are not your usual victims. This isn’t a group for alcoholics, drug addicts or survivors of childhood abuse; the people connecting on the call are self-described victims of mind control — people who believe they have been targeted by a secret government program that tracks them around the clock, using technology to probe and control their minds.
The callers frequently refer to themselves as TIs, which is short for Targeted Individuals, and talk about V2K — the official military abbreviation stands for “voice to skull” and denotes weapons that beam voices or sounds into the head. In their esoteric lexicon, “gang stalking” refers to the belief that they are being followed and harassed: by neighbors, strangers or colleagues who are agents for the government.
A few more “hellos” are exchanged, interrupted by beeps signaling late arrivals: Bill from Columbus, Barbara from Philadelphia, Jim from California and a dozen or so others.
Derrick Robinson, the conference call moderator, calls order.
“It’s five after 9,” says Robinson, with the sweetly reasonable intonation of a late-night radio host. “Maybe we should go ahead and start.”
THE IDEA OF A GROUP OF PEOPLE CONVINCED THEY ARE TARGETED BY WEAPONS that can invade their minds has become a cultural joke, shorthanded by the image of solitary lunatics wearing tinfoil hats to deflect invisible mind beams. “Tinfoil hat,” says Wikipedia, has become “a popular stereotype and term of derision; the phrase serves as a byword for paranoia and is associated with conspiracy theorists.”
In 2005, a group of MIT students conducted a formal study using aluminum foil and radio signals. Their surprising finding: Tinfoil hats may actually amplify radio frequency signals. Of course, the tech students meant the study as a joke.
But during the Saturday conference call, the subject of aluminum foil is deadly serious. The MIT study had prompted renewed debate; while a few TIs realized it was a joke at their expense, some saw the findings as an explanation for why tinfoil didn’t seem to stop the voices. Others vouched for the material.
“Tinfoil helps tremendously,” reports one conference call participant, who describes wrapping it around her body underneath her clothing.
“Where do you put the tinfoil?” a man asks.
“Anywhere, everywhere,” she replies. “I even put it in a hat.”
A TI in an online mind-control forum recommends a Web site called “Block EMF” (as in electromagnetic frequencies), which advertises a full line of clothing, including aluminum-lined boxer shorts described as a “sheer, comfortable undergarment you can wear over your regular one to shield yourself from power lines and computer electric fields, and microwave, radar, and TV radiation.” Similarly, a tinfoil hat disguised as a regular baseball cap is “smart and subtle.”
For all the scorn, the ranks of victims — or people who believe they are victims — are speaking up. In the course of the evening, there are as many as 40 clicks from people joining the call, and much larger numbers participate in the online forum, which has 143 members. A note there mentioning interest from a journalist prompted more than 200 e-mail responses.
Until recently, people who believe the government is beaming voices into their heads would have added social isolation to their catalogue of woes. But now, many have discovered hundreds, possibly thousands, of others just like them all over the world. Web sites dedicated to electronic harassment and gang stalking have popped up in India, China, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Russia and elsewhere. Victims have begun to host support meetings in major cities, including Washington. Favorite topics at the meetings include lessons on how to build shields (the proverbial tinfoil hats), media and PR training, and possible legal strategies for outlawing mind control.
The biggest hurdle for TIs is getting people to take their concerns seriously. A proposal made in 2001 by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) to ban “psychotronic weapons” (another common term for mind-control technology) was hailed by TIs as a great step forward. But the bill was widely derided by bloggers and columnists and quickly dropped.
Doug Gordon, Kucinich’s spokesman, would not discuss mind control other than to say the proposal was part of broader legislation outlawing weapons in space. The bill was later reintroduced, minus the mind control. “It was not the concentration of the legislation, which is why it was tightened up and redrafted,” was all Gordon would say.
Unable to garner much support from their elected representatives, TIs have started their own PR campaign. And so, last spring, the Saturday conference calls centered on plans to hold a rally in Washington. A 2005 attempt at a rally drew a few dozen people and was ultimately rained out; the TIs were determined to make another go of it. Conversations focused around designing T-shirts, setting up congressional appointments, fundraising, creating a new Web site and formalizing a slogan. After some debate over whether to focus on gang stalking or mind control, the group came up with a compromise slogan that covered both: “Freedom From Covert Surveillance and Electronic Harassment.”
Conference call moderator Robinson, who says his gang stalking began when he worked at the National Security Agency in the 1980s, offers his assessment of the group’s prospects: Maybe this rally wouldn’t produce much press, but it’s a first step. “I see this as a movement,” he says. “We’re picking up people all the time.”
HARLAN GIRARD SAYS HIS PROBLEMS BEGAN IN 1983, while he was a real estate developer in Los Angeles. The harassment was subtle at first: One day a woman pulled up in a car, wagged her finger at him, then sped away; he saw people running underneath his window at night; he noticed some of his neighbors seemed to be watching him; he heard someone moving in the crawl space under his apartment at night.
Girard sought advice from this then-girlfriend, a practicing psychologist, whom he declines to identify. He says she told him, “Nobody can become psychotic in their late 40s.” She said he didn’t seem to manifest other symptoms of psychotic behavior — he dressed well, paid his bills — and, besides his claims of surveillance, which sounded paranoid, he behaved normally. “People who are psychotic are socially isolated,” he recalls her saying.
After a few months, Girard says, the harassment abruptly stopped. But the respite didn’t last. In 1984, appropriately enough, things got seriously weird. He’d left his real estate career to return to school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was studying for a master’s degree in landscape architecture. He harbored dreams of designing parks and public spaces. Then, he says, he began to hear voices. Girard could distinguish several different male voices, which came complete with a mental image of how the voices were being generated: from a recording studio, with “four slops sitting around a card table drinking beer,” he says.
The voices were crass but also strangely courteous, addressing him as “Mr. Girard.”
They taunted him. They asked him if he thought he was normal; they suggested he was going crazy. They insulted his classmates: When an overweight student showed up for a field trip in a white raincoat, they said, “Hey, Mr. Girard, doesn’t she look like a refrigerator?”
Six months after the voices began, they had another question for him: “Mr. Girard, Mr. Girard. Why aren’t you dead yet?” At first, he recalls, the voices would speak just two or three times a day, but it escalated into a near-constant cacophony, often accompanied by severe pain all over his body — which Girard now attributes to directed-energy weapons that can shoot invisible beams.
The voices even suggested how he could figure out what was happening to him. He says they told him to go to the electrical engineering department to “tell them you’re writing science fiction and you don’t want to write anything inconsistent with physical reality. Then tell them exactly what has happened.”
Girard went and got some rudimentary explanations of how technology could explain some of the things he was describing.
“Finally, I said: ‘Look, I must come to the point, because I need answers. This is happening to me; it’s not science fiction.'” They laughed.
He got the same response from friends, he says. “They regarded me as crazy, which is a humiliating experience.”
When asked why he didn’t consult a doctor about the voices and the pain, he says, “I don’t dare start talking to people because of the potential stigma of it all. I don’t want to be treated differently. Here I was in Philadelphia. Something was going on, I don’t know any doctors . . . I know somebody’s doing something to me.”
It was a struggle to graduate, he says, but he was determined, and he persevered. In 1988, the same year he finished his degree, his father died, leaving Girard an inheritance large enough that he did not have to work.
So, instead of becoming a landscape architect, Girard began a full-time investigation of what was happening to him, often traveling to Washington in pursuit of government documents relating to mind control. He put an ad in a magazine seeking other victims. Only a few people responded. But over the years, as he met more and more people like himself, he grew convinced that he was part of what he calls an “electronic concentration camp.”
What he was finding on his research trips also buttressed his belief: Girard learned that in the 1950s, the CIA had drugged unwitting victims with LSD as part of a rogue mind-control experiment called MK-ULTRA. He came across references to the CIA seeking to influence the mind with electromagnetic fields. Then he found references in an academic research book to work that military researchers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research had done in the 1970s with pulsed microwaves to transmit words that a subject would hear in his head. Elsewhere, he came across references to attempts to use electromagnetic energy, sound waves or microwave beams to cause non-lethal pain to the body. For every symptom he experienced, he believed he found references to a weapon that could cause it.
How much of the research Girard cites checks out?
Concerns about microwaves and mind control date to the 1960s, when the U.S. government discovered that its embassy in Moscow was being bombarded by low-level electromagnetic radiation. In 1965, according to declassified Defense Department documents, the Pentagon, at the behest of the White House, launched Project Pandora, top-secret research to explore the behavioral and biological effects of low-level microwaves. For approximately four years, the Pentagon conducted secret research: zapping monkeys; exposing unwitting sailors to microwave radiation; and conducting a host of other unusual experiments (a sub-project of Project Pandora was titled Project Bizarre). The results were mixed, and the program was plagued by disagreements and scientific squabbles. The “Moscow signal,” as it was called, was eventually attributed to eavesdropping, not mind control, and Pandora ended in 1970. And with it, the military’s research into so-called non-thermal microwave effects seemed to die out, at least in the unclassified realm.
But there are hints of ongoing research: An academic paper written for the Air Force in the mid-1990s mentions the idea of a weapon that would use sound waves to send words into a person’s head. “The signal can be a ‘message from God’ that can warn the enemy of impending doom, or encourage the enemy to surrender,” the author concluded.
In 2002, the Air Force Research Laboratory patented precisely such a technology: using microwaves to send words into someone’s head. That work is frequently cited on mind-control Web sites. Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the research laboratory’s directed energy directorate, declined to discuss that patent or current or related research in the field, citing the lab’s policy not to comment on its microwave work.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed for this article, the Air Force released unclassified documents surrounding that 2002 patent — records that note that the patent was based on human experimentation in October 1994 at the Air Force lab, where scientists were able to transmit phrases into the heads of human subjects, albeit with marginal intelligibility. Research appeared to continue at least through 2002. Where this work has gone since is unclear — the research laboratory, citing classification, refused to discuss it or release other materials.
The official U.S. Air Force position is that there are no non-thermal effects of microwaves. Yet Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, tagged microwave attacks against the human brain as part of future warfare in a 2001 presentation to the National Defense Industrial Association about “Future Strategic Issues.”
“That work is exceedingly sensitive” and unlikely to be reported in any unclassified documents, he says.
Meanwhile, the military’s use of weapons that employ electromagnetic radiation to create pain is well-known, as are some of the limitations of such weapons. In 2001, the Pentagon declassified one element of this research: the Active Denial System, a weapon that uses electromagnetic radiation to heat skin and create an intense burning sensation. So, yes, there is technology designed to beam painful invisible rays at humans, but the weapon seems to fall far short of what could account for many of the TIs’ symptoms. While its exact range is classified, Doug Beason, an expert in directed-energy weapons, puts it at about 700 meters, and the beam cannot penetrate a number of materials, such as aluminum. Considering the size of the full-scale weapon, which resembles a satellite dish, and its operational limitations, the ability of the government or anyone else to shoot beams at hundreds of people — on city streets, into their homes and while they travel in cars and planes — is beyond improbable.
But, given the history of America’s clandestine research, it’s reasonable to assume that if the defense establishment could develop mind-control or long-distance ray weapons, it almost certainly would. And, once developed, the possibility that they might be tested on innocent civilians could not be categorically dismissed.
Girard, for his part, believes these weapons were not only developed but were also tested on him more than 20 years ago.
What would the government gain by torturing him? Again, Girard found what he believed to be an explanation, or at least a precedent: During the Cold War, the government conducted radiation experiments on scores of unwitting victims, essentially using them as human guinea pigs. Girard came to believe that he, too, was a walking experiment.
Not that Girard thinks his selection was totally random: He believes he was targeted because of a disparaging remark he made to a Republican fundraiser about George H.W. Bush in the early 1980s. Later, Girard says, the voices confirmed his suspicion.
“One night I was going to bed; the usual drivel was going on,” he says. “The constant stream of drivel. I was just about to go to bed, and a voice says: ‘Mr. Girard, do you know who was in our studio with us? That was George Bush, vice president of the United States.'”
GIRARD’S STORY, HOWEVER STRANGE, reflects what TIs around the world report: a chance encounter with a government agency or official, followed by surveillance and gang stalking, and then, in many cases, voices, and pain similar to electric shocks. Some in the community have taken it upon themselves to document as many cases as possible. One TI from California conducted about 50 interviews, narrowing the symptoms down to several major areas: “ringing in the ears,” “manipulation of body parts,” “hearing voices,” “piercing sensation on skin,” “sinus problems” and “sexual attacks.” In fact, the TI continued, “many report the sensation of having their genitalia manipulated.”
Both male and female TIs report a variety of “attacks” to their sexual organs. “My testicles became so sore I could barely walk,” Girard says of his early experiences. Others, however, report the attacks in the form of sexual stimulation, including one TI who claims he dropped out of the seminary after constant sexual stimulation by directed-energy weapons. Susan Sayler, a TI in San Diego, says many women among the TIs suffer from attacks to their sexual organs but are often embarrassed to talk about it with outsiders.
“It’s sporadic, you just never know when it will happen,” she says. “A lot of the women say it’s as soon as you lay down in bed — that’s when you would get hit the worst. It happened to me as I was driving, at odd times.”
What made her think it was an electronic attack and not just in her head? “There was no sexual attraction to a man when it would happen. That’s what was wrong. It did not feel like a muscle spasm or whatever,” she says. “It’s so . . . electronic.”
Gloria Naylor, a renowned African American writer, seems to defy many of the stereotypes of someone who believes in mind control. A winner of the National Book Award, Naylor is best known for her acclaimed novel, The Women of Brewster Place, which described a group of women living in a poor urban neighborhood and was later made into a miniseries by Oprah Winfrey.
But in 2005, she published a lesser-known work, 1996, a semi-autobiographical book describing her experience as a TI. “I didn’t want to tell this story. It’s going to take courage. Perhaps more courage than I possess, but they’ve left me no alternatives,” Naylor writes at the beginning of her book. “I am in a battle for my mind. If I stop now, they’ll have won, and I will lose myself.” The book is coherent, if hard to believe. It’s also marked by disturbing passages describing how Jewish American agents were responsible for Naylor’s surveillance. “Of the many cars that kept coming and going down my road, most were driven by Jews,” she writes in the book. When asked about that passage in a recent interview, she defended her logic: Being from New York, she claimed, she can recognize Jews.
Naylor lives on a quiet street in Brooklyn in a majestic brownstone with an interior featuring intricate woodwork and tasteful decorations that attest to a successful literary career. She speaks about her situation calmly, occasionally laughing at her own predicament and her struggle with what she originally thought was mental illness. “I would observe myself,” she explains. “I would lie in bed while the conversations were going on, and I’d ask: Maybe it is schizophrenia?”
Like Girard, Naylor describes what she calls “street theater” — incidents that might be dismissed by others as coincidental, but which Naylor believes were set up. She noticed suspicious cars driving by her isolated vacation home. On an airplane, fellow passengers mimicked her every movement — like mimes on a street.
Voices similar to those in Girard’s case followed — taunting voices cursing her, telling her she was stupid, that she couldn’t write. Expletive-laced language filled her head. Naylor sought help from a psychiatrist and received a prescription for an antipsychotic drug. But the medication failed to stop the voices, she says, which only added to her conviction that the harassment was real.
For almost four years, Naylor says, the voices prevented her from writing. In 2000, she says, around the time she discovered the mind-control forums, the voices stopped and the surveillance tapered off. It was then that she began writing 1996 as a “catharsis.”
Colleagues urged Naylor not to publish the book, saying she would destroy her reputation. But she did publish, albeit with a small publishing house. The book was generally ignored by critics but embraced by TIs.
Naylor is not the first writer to describe such a personal descent. Evelyn Waugh, one of the great novelists of the 20th century, details similar experiences in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Waugh’s book, published in 1957, has eerie similarities to Naylor’s.
Embarking on a recuperative cruise, Pinfold begins to hear voices on the ship that he believes are part of a wireless system capable of broadcasting into his head; he believes the instigator recruited fellow passengers to act as operatives; and he describes “performances” put on by passengers directed at him yet meant to look innocuous to others.
Waugh wrote his book several years after recovering from a similar episode and realizing that the voices and paranoia were the result of drug-induced hallucinations.
Naylor, who hasn’t written a book since 1996, is now back at work on an historical novel she hopes will return her to the literary mainstream. She remains convinced that she was targeted by mind control. The many echoes of her ordeal she sees on the mind-control forums reassure her she’s not crazy, she says.
Of course, some of the things she sees on the forum do strike her as crazy. “But who I am to say?” she says. “Maybe I sound crazy to somebody else.”
SOME TIS, SUCH AS ED MOORE, A YOUNG MEDICAL DOCTOR, take a slightly more skeptical approach. He criticizes what he calls the “wacky claims” of TIs who blame various government agencies or groups of people without any proof. “I have yet to see a claim of who is behind this that has any data to support it,” he writes.
Nonetheless, Moore still believes the voices in his head are the result of mind control and that the U.S. government is the most likely culprit. Moore started hearing voices in 2003, just as he completed his medical residency in anesthesiology; he was pulling an all-nighter studying for board exams when he heard voices coming from a nearby house commenting on him, on his abilities as a doctor, on his sanity. At first, he thought he was simply overhearing conversations through walls (much as Waugh’s fictional alter ego first thought), but when no one else could hear the voices, he realized they were in his head. Moore went through a traumatic two years, including hospitalization for depression with auditory hallucinations.
“One tries to convince friends and family that you are being electronically harassed with voices that only you can hear,” he writes in an e-mail. “You learn to stop doing that. They don’t believe you, and they become sad and concerned, and it amplifies your own depression when you have voices screaming at you and your friends and family looking at you as a helpless, sick, mentally unbalanced wreck.”
He says he grew frustrated with anti-psychotic medications meant to stop the voices, both because the treatments didn’t work and because psychiatrists showed no interest in what the voices were telling him. He began to look for some other way to cope.
“In March of 2005, I started looking up support groups on the Internet,” he wrote. “My wife would cry when she would see these sites, knowing I still heard voices, but I did not know what else to do.” In 2006, he says, his wife, who had stood by him for three years, filed for divorce.
Moore, like other TIs, is cautious about sharing details of his life. He worries about looking foolish to friends and colleagues — but he says that risk is ultimately worthwhile if he can bring attention to the issue.
With his father’s financial help, Moore is now studying for an electrical engineering degree at the University of Texas at San Antonio, hoping to prove that V2K, the technology to send voices into people’s heads, is real. Being in school, around other people, helps him cope, he writes, but the voices continue to taunt him.
Recently, he says, they told him: “We’ll never stop [messing] with you.”
A WEEK BEFORE THE TIS RALLY ON THE NATIONAL MALL, John Alexander, one of the people whom Harlan Girard holds personally responsible for the voices in his head, is at a Chili’s restaurant in Crystal City explaining over a Philly cheese steak and fries why the United States needs mind-control weapons.
A former Green Beret who served in Vietnam, Alexander went on to a number of national security jobs, and rubbed shoulders with prominent military and political leaders. Long known for taking an interest in exotic weapons, his 1980 article, “The New Mental Battlefield,” published in the Army journal Military Review, is cited by self-described victims as proof of his complicity in mind control. Now retired from the government and living in Las Vegas, Alexander continues to advise the military. He is in the Washington area that day for an official meeting.
Beneath a shock of white hair is the mind of a self-styled military thinker. Alexander belongs to a particular set of Pentagon advisers who consider themselves defense intellectuals, focusing on big-picture issues, future threats and new capabilities. Alexander’s career led him from work on sticky foam that would stop an enemy in his or her tracks to dalliances in paranormal studies and psychics, which he still defends as operationally useful.
In an earlier phone conversation, Alexander said that in the 1990s, when he took part in briefings at the CIA, there was never any talk of “mind control, or mind-altering drugs or technologies, or anything like that.”
According to Alexander, the military and intelligence agencies were still scared by the excesses of MK-ULTRA, the infamous CIA program that involved, in part, slipping LSD to unsuspecting victims. “Until recently, anything that smacked of [mind control] was extremely dangerous” because Congress would simply take the money away, he said.
Alexander acknowledged that “there were some abuses that took place,” but added that, on the whole, “I would argue we threw the baby out with the bath water.”
But September 11, 2001, changed the mood in Washington, and some in the national security community are again expressing interest in mind control, particularly a younger generation of officials who weren’t around for MK-ULTRA. “It’s interesting, that it’s coming back,” Alexander observed.
While Alexander scoffs at the notion that he is somehow part of an elaborate plot to control people’s minds, he acknowledges support for learning how to tap into a potential enemy’s brain. He gives as an example the possible use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, for lie detection. “Brain mapping” with fMRI theoretically could allow interrogators to know when someone is lying by watching for activity in particular parts of the brain. For interrogating terrorists, fMRI could come in handy, Alexander suggests. But any conceivable use of the technique would fall far short of the kind of mind-reading TIs complain about.
Alexander also is intrigued by the possibility of using electronic means to modify behavior. The dilemma of the war on terrorism, he notes, is that it never ends. So what do you do with enemies, such as those at Guantanamo: keep them there forever? That’s impractical. Behavior modification could be an alternative, he says.
“Maybe I can fix you, or electronically neuter you, so it’s safe to release you into society, so you won’t come back and kill me,” Alexander says. It’s only a matter of time before technology allows that scenario to come true, he continues. “We’re now getting to where we can do that.” He pauses for a moment to take a bite of his sandwich. “Where does that fall in the ethics spectrum? That’s a really tough question.”
When Alexander encounters a query he doesn’t want to answer, such as one about the ethics of mind control, he smiles and raises his hands level to his chest, as if balancing two imaginary weights. In one hand is mind control and the sanctity of free thought — and in the other hand, a tad higher — is the war on terrorism.
But none of this has anything to do with the TIs, he says. “Just because things are secret, people tend to extrapolate. Common sense does not prevail, and even when you point out huge leaps in logic that just cannot be true, they are not dissuaded.”
WHAT IS IT THAT BRINGS SOMEONE, EVEN AN INTELLIGENT PERSON, to ascribe the experience of hearing disembodied voices to government weapons?
In her book, Abducted, Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy examines a group that has striking parallels to the TIs: people who believe they’ve been kidnapped by aliens. The similarities are often uncanny: Would-be abductees describe strange pains, and feelings of being watched or targeted. And although the alleged abductees don’t generally have auditory hallucinations, they do sometimes believe that their thoughts are controlled by aliens, or that they’ve been implanted with advanced technology.
(On the online forum, some TIs posted vociferous objections to the parallel, concerned that the public finds UFOs even weirder than mind control. “It will keep us all marginalized and discredited,” one griped.)
Clancy argues that the main reason people believe they’ve been abducted by aliens is that it provides them with a compelling narrative to explain their perception that strange things have happened to them, such as marks on their bodies (marks others would simply dismiss as bruises), stimulation to their sexual organs (as the TIs describe) or feelings of paranoia. “It’s not just an explanation for your problems; it’s a source of meaning for your life,” Clancy says.
In the case of TIs, mind-control weapons are an explanation for the voices they hear in their head. Socrates heard a voice and thought it was a demon; Joan of Arc heard voices from God. As one TI noted in an e-mail: “Each person undergoing this harassment is looking for the solution to the problem. Each person analyzes it through his or her own particular spectrum of beliefs. If you are a scientific-minded person, then you will probably analyze the situation from that perspective and conclude it must be done with some kind of electronic devices. If you are a religious person, you will see it as a struggle between the elements of whatever religion you believe in. If you are maybe, perhaps more eccentric, you may think that it is alien in nature.”
Or, if you happen to live in the United States in the early 21st century, you may fear the growing power of the NSA, CIA and FBI.
Being a victim of government surveillance is also, arguably, better than being insane. In Waugh’s novella based on his own painful experience, when Pinfold concludes that hidden technology is being used to infiltrate his brain, he “felt nothing but gratitude in his discovery.” Why? “He might be unpopular; he might be ridiculous; but he was not mad.”
Ralph Hoffman, a professor of psychiatry at Yale who has studied auditory hallucinations, regularly sees people who believe the voices are a part of government harassment (others believe they are God, dead relatives or even ex-girlfriends). Not all people who hear voices are schizophrenic, he says, noting that people can hear voices episodically in highly emotional states. What exactly causes these voices is still unknown, but one thing is certain: People who think the voices are caused by some external force are rarely dissuaded from their delusional belief, he says. “These are highly emotional and gripping experiences that are so compelling for them that ordinary reality seems bland.”
Perhaps because the experience is so vivid, he says, even some of those who improve through treatment merely decide the medical regimen somehow helped protect their brain from government weapons.
Scott Temple, a professor of psychiatry at Penn State University who has been involved in two recent studies of auditory hallucinations, notes that those who suffer such hallucinations frequently lack insight into their illness. Even among those who do understand they are sick, “that awareness comes and goes,” he says. “People feel overwhelmed, and the delusional interpretations return.”
BACK AT THE PHILADELPHIA TRAIN STATION, Girard seems more agitated. In a meeting the week before, his “handlers” had spoken to him only briefly — they weren’t in the right position to attack him, Girard surmises, based on the lack of voices. Today, his conversation jumps more rapidly from one subject to the next: victims of radiation experiments, his hatred of George H.W. Bush, MK-ULTRA, his personal experiences.
Asked about his studies at Penn, he replies by talking about his problems with reading: “I told you, everything I write they dictate to me,” he says, referring again to the voices. “When I read, they’re reading to me. My eyes go across; they’re moving my eyes down the line. They’re reading it to me. When I close the book, I can’t remember a thing I read. That’s why they do it.”
The week before, Girard had pointed to only one person who appeared suspicious to him — a young African American man reading a book; this time, however, he hears more voices, which leads him to believe the station is crawling with agents.
“Let’s change our location,” Girard says after a while. “I’m sure they have 40 or 50 people in here today. I escaped their surveillance last time — they won’t let that happen again.”
Asked to explain the connection between mind control and the University of Pennsylvania, which Girard alleges is involved in the conspiracy, he begins to talk about defense contractors located near the Philadelphia campus: “General Electric was right next to the parking garage; General Electric Space Systems occupies a huge building right over there. From that building, you could see into the studio where I was doing my work most of the time. I asked somebody what they were doing there. You know, it had to do with computers. GE Space Systems. They were supposed to be tracking missile debris from this location . . . pardon me. What was your question again?”
Yet many parts of Girard’s life seem to reflect that of any affluent 70-year-old bachelor. He travels frequently to France for extended vacations and takes part in French cultural activities in Philadelphia. He has set up a travel scholarship at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the name of his late mother, who attended school there (he changed his last name 27 years ago for “personal reasons”), and he travels to meet the students who benefit from the fund. And while the bulk of his time is spent on his research and writing about mind control, he has other interests. He follows politics and describes outings with friends and family members with whom he doesn’t talk about mind control, knowing they would view it skeptically.
Girard acknowledges that some of his experiences mirror symptoms of schizophrenia, but asked if he ever worried that the voices might in fact be caused by mental illness, he answers sharply with one word: “No.”
How, then, does he know the voices are real?
“How do you know you know anything?” Girard replies. “How do you know I exist? How do you know this isn’t a dream you’re having, from which you’ll wake up in a few minutes? I suppose that analogy is the closest thing: You know when you have a dream. Sometimes it could be perfectly lucid, but you know it’s a dream.”
The very “realness” of the voices is the issue — how do you disbelieve something you perceive as real? That’s precisely what Hoffman, the Yale psychiatrist, points out: So lucid are the voices that the sufferers — regardless of their educational level or self-awareness — are unable to see them as anything but real. “One thing I can assure you,” Hoffman says, “is that for them, it feels real.”
IT LOOKS ALMOST LIKE ANY OTHER SMALL POLITICAL RALLY IN WASHINGTON. Posters adorn the gate on the southwest side of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, as attendees set up a table with press materials, while volunteers test a loudspeaker and set out coolers filled with bottled water. The sun is out, the weather is perfect, and an eclectic collection of people from across the country has gathered to protest mind control.
There is not a tinfoil hat to be seen. Only the posters and paraphernalia hint at the unusual. “Stop USA electronic harassment,” urges one poster. “Directed Energy Assaults,” reads another. Smaller signs in the shape of tombstones say, “RIP MKULTRA.” The main display, set in front of the speaker’s lectern has a more extended message: “HELP STOP HI-TECH ASSAULT PSYCHOTRONIC TORTURE.”
About 35 TIs show up for the June rally, in addition to a few friends and family members. Speakers alternate between giving personal testimonials and descriptions of research into mind-control technology. Most of the gawkers at the rally are foreign tourists. A few hecklers snicker at the signs, but mostly people are either confused or indifferent. The articles on mind control at the table — from mainstream news magazines — go untouched.
“How can you expect people to get worked up over this if they don’t care about eavesdropping or eminent domain?” one man challenges after stopping to flip through the literature. Mary Ann Stratton, who is manning the table, merely shrugs and smiles sadly. There is no answer: Everyone at the rally acknowledges it is an uphill battle.
In general, the outlook for TIs is not good; many lose their jobs, houses and family. Depression is common. But for many at the rally, experiencing the community of mind-control victims seems to help. One TI, a man who had been a rescue swimmer in the Coast Guard before voices in his head sent him on a downward spiral, expressed the solace he found among fellow TIs in a long e-mail to another TI: “I think that the only people that can help are people going through the same thing. Everyone else will not believe you, or they are possibly involved.”
In the end, though, nothing could help him enough. In August 2006, he would commit suicide.
But at least for the day, the rally is boosting TI spirits. Girard, in what for him is an ebullient mood, takes the microphone. A small crowd of tourists gathers at the sidelines, listening with casual interest. With the Capitol looming behind him, he reaches the crescendo of his speech, rallying the attendees to remember an important thing: They are part of a single community.
“I’ve heard it said, ‘We can’t get anywhere because everyone’s story is different.’ We are all the same,” Girard booms. “You knew someone with the power to commit you to the electronic concentration camp system.”
Several weeks after the rally, Girard shows up for a meeting with a reporter at the stately Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where he has stayed frequently over the two decades he has traveled to the capital to battle mind control. He walks in with a lit cigarette, which he apologetically puts out after a hotel employee tells him smoking isn’t allowed anymore. He is half an hour late — delayed, he says, by a meeting on Capitol Hill. Wearing a monogrammed dress shirt and tie, he looks, as always, serious and professional.
Girard declines to mention whom on Capitol Hill he’d met with, other than to say it was a congressional staffer. Embarrassment is likely a factor: Girard readily acknowledges that most people he meets with, ranging from scholars to politicians, ignore his entreaties or dismiss him as a lunatic.
Lately, his focus is on his Web site, which he sees as the culmination of nearly a quarter-century of research. When completed, it will contain more than 300 pages of documents. What next? Maybe he’ll move to France (there are victims there, too), or maybe the U.S. government will finally just kill him, he says.
Meanwhile, he is always searching for absolute proof that the government has decoded the brain. His latest interest is LifeLog, a project once funded by the Pentagon that he read about in Wired News. The article described it this way: “The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read. All of this — and more — would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audiovisual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual’s health.”
Girard suggests that the government, using similar technology, has “catalogued” his life over the past two years — every sight and sound (Evelyn Waugh, in his mind-control book, writes about his character’s similar fear that his harassers were creating a file of his entire life).
Girard thinks the government can control his movements, inject thoughts into his head, cause him pain day and night. He believes that he will die a victim of mind control.
Is there any reason for optimism?
Girard hesitates, then asks a rhetorical question.
“Why, despite all this, why am I the same person? Why am I Harlan Girard?”
For all his anguish, be it the result of mental illness or, as Girard contends, government mind control, the voices haven’t managed to conquer the thing that makes him who he is: Call it his consciousness, his intellect or, perhaps, his soul.
“That’s what they don’t yet have,” he says. After 22 years, “I’m still me.”
Sharon Weinberger is a Washington writer and author of Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld.
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Britain’s secret torture centre
The interrogation camp that turned prisoners into living skeletons
German spa became a forbidden village where Gestapo-like techniques were used
Curled up on a bed in a hospital in Rotenburg, near Bremen, was a cadaverous shadow of a human being. “The man literally had no flesh on him, his state of emaciation was incredible,” wrote Morgan-Jones. This man had weighed a little over six stones (38kg) on admission five weeks earlier, and “was still a figure which may well have been one of the Belsen inmates”. At the base of his spine “was a huge festering sore”, and he was clearly terrified of returning to the prison where he had been brought so close to death. “If ever a man showed fear – he did,” Morgan-Jones declared.
Adolf Galla, 36, a dental technician, was not alone. A few beds away lay Robert Buttlar, 27, a journalist, who had been admitted after swallowing a spoon handle in a suicide attempt at the same prison. He too was emaciated and four of his toes had been lost to frostbite.
The previous month, January 1947, two other inmates, Walter Bergmann, 20, and Franz Osterreicher, 38, had died of malnutrition within hours of arriving at the hospital. Over the previous 13 months, Major Morgan-Jones learned, 45 inmates of this prison, including several women, had been dumped at Rotenburg. Each was severely starved, frostbitten, and caked in dirt. Some had been beaten or whipped.
The same week that Major Morgan-Jones was submitting his report, a British doctor called Jordan was raising similar concerns at an internment camp 130 miles away. Dr Jordan complained to his superiors that eight men who had been transferred from the same prison “were all suffering gross malnutrition … one in my opinion dying”.
They included Gerhard Menzel, 23, a 6ft German former soldier who weighed seven stones, and was described as a living skeleton. Another, admitted as Morice Marcellini, a 27-year-old Frenchman, later transpired to be Alexander Kalkowski, a captain in the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. He weighed a little over eight stones, and complained that he had been severely beaten and forced to spend eight hours a day in a cold bath.
Prisoners complained thumbscrews and “shin screws” were employed at the prison and Dr Jordan’s report highlighted the small, round scars that he had seen on the legs of two men, “which were said to be the result of the use of some instrument to facilitate questioning”. One of these men was Hans Habermann, a 43-year-old disabled German Jew who had survived three years in Buchenwald concentration camp.
All of these men had been held at Bad Nenndorf, a small, once-elegant spa resort near Hanover. Here, an organisation called the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) ran a secret prison following the British occupation of north-west Germany in 1945.
CSDIC, a division of the War Office, operated interrogation centres around the world, including one known as the London Cage, located in one of London’s most exclusive neighbourhoods. Official documents discovered last month at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, show that the London Cage was a secret torture centre where German prisoners who had been concealed from the Red Cross were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with execution or with unnecessary surgery.
As horrific as conditions were at the London Cage, Bad Nenndorf was far worse. Last week, Foreign Office files which have remained closed for almost 60 years were opened after a request by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act. These papers, and others declassified earlier, lay bare the appalling suffering of many of the 372 men and 44 women who passed through the centre during the 22 months it operated before its closure in July 1947.
They detail the investigation carried out by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward, following the complaints of Major Morgan-Jones and Dr Jordan. Despite the precise and formal prose of the detective’s report to the military government, anger and revulsion leap from every page as he turns his spotlight on a place where prisoners were systematically beaten and exposed to extreme cold, where some were starved to death and, allegedly, tortured with instruments that his fellow countrymen had recovered from a Gestapo prison in Hamburg. Even today, the Foreign Office is refusing to release photographs taken of some of the “living skeletons” on their release.
Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS, rounded up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi insurgency. A significant number, however, were industrialists, tobacco importers, oil company bosses or forestry owners who had flourished under Hitler.
By late 1946, the papers show, an increasing number were suspected Soviet agents. Some were NKVD officers – Russians, Czechs and Hungarians – but many were simply German leftists. Others were Germans living in the Russian zone who had crossed the line, offered to spy on the Russians, and were tortured to establish whether they were genuine defectors.
One of the men who was starved to death, Walter Bergmann, had offered to spy for the British, and fell under suspicion because he spoke Russian. Hayward reported: “There seems little doubt that Bergmann, against whom no charge of any crime has ever been made, but on the contrary, who appears to be a man who has given every assistance, and that of considerable value, has lost his life through malnutrition and lack of medical care”.
The other man who starved to death, Franz Osterreicher, had been arrested with forged papers while attempting to enter the British zone in search of his gay lover. Hayward said that “in his struggle for existence or to get extra scraps of food he stood a very poor chance” at Bad Nenndorf.
Many of Bad Nenndorf’s inmates were there for no reason at all. One, a former diplomat, remained locked up because he had “learned too much about our interrogation methods”. Another arrived after a clerical error, and was incarcerated for eight months. As Inspector Hayward reported: “There are a number against whom no offence has been alleged, and the only authority for their detention would appear to be that they are citizens of a country still nominally at war with us.”
Today, the older people of Bad Nenndorf talk about August 1 1945, the day the British arrived, with undisguised bitterness. A convoy of trucks pulled into the village, and the Tommies took over from an easygoing US infantry division. Within hours, the British had ordered everybody in the centre of the village to pack their belongings and leave. Bad Nenndorf was heaving with refugees from the bomb-ravaged ruins of Hanover, 18 miles to the east: hundreds of people were given 90 minutes to pack some food and valuables, and get out.
“We thought everyone would be allowed back in a few days,” recalls Walter Münstermann, now a retired newspaperman, but then a 14-year-old. “Then the soldiers started putting barbed wire fences around the centre of the village, and slowly we began to realise that this was going to be no ordinary camp.”
Walter and his neighbours realised that the centre of their village was being transformed into a prison camp when they heard that the British were converting a large, 40-year-old bath-house, ripping out the baths and installing heavy steel doors to turn each cubicle into a cell. They saw the first batch of prisoners arrive in the back of a truck. Later groups arrived at the village railway station in cattle trucks.
Ingrid Groth, then a seven-year-old, said locals claimed that if you crept up to the barbed wire at night, you could hear the prisoners’ screams. Mr Münstermann, who passed the main gate on his way to school each day, insists that the opposite was true: that it was a sinister place precisely because “you never, ever saw anyone, and you never heard a sound”. Among the people of Lower Saxony, Bad Nenndorf became known as das verbotene dorf – the forbidden village.
The commanding officer was Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens, 45, a monocled colonel of the Peshawar Division of the Indian Army who had been seconded to MI5 in 1939, and who had commanded Camp 020, a detention centre in Surrey where German spies had been interrogated during the war.
An authoritarian and a xenophobe with a legendary temper, Stephens boasted that interrogators who could “break” a man were born, and not made. Of the 20 interrogators ordered to break the inmates of Bad Nenndorf, 12 were British, a combination of officers from the three services and civilian linguists. The remaining eight included a Pole and a Dutchman, but were mostly German Jewish refugees who had enlisted on the outbreak of war, and who, Inspector Hayward suggested, “might not be expected to be wholly impartial”.
Most of the warders were soldiers barely out of their teens. Some had endured more than a year of combat, at the end of which they had liberated Belsen. Some represented the more unruly elements of the British Army of the Rhine, sent to Bad Nenndorf after receiving suspended sentences for assault or desertion. Often, Hayward said, they were the sort of individuals “likely to resort to violence on helpless men”.
The inmates were starved, woken during the night, and forced to walk up and down their cells from early morning until late at night. When moving about the prison they were expected to run, while soldiers kicked them. One warder, a soldier of the Welsh Regiment, told Hayward: “If a British soldier feels inclined to treat a prisoner decently he has every opportunity to do so; and he also has the opportunity to ill-treat a prisoner if he so desires”.
The Foreign Office briefed Clement Attlee, the prime minister, that “the guards had apparently been instructed to carry out physical assaults on certain prisoners with the object of reducing them to a state of physical collapse and of making them more amenable to interrogation”.
Former prisoners told Hayward that they had been whipped as well as beaten. This, the detective said, seemed unbelievable, until “our inquiries of warders and guards produced most unexpected corroboration”. Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture and murder their wives and children were considered “perfectly proper”, on the grounds that such threats were never carried out.
Moreover, any prisoner thought to be uncooperative during interrogation was taken to a punishment cell where they would be stripped and repeatedly doused in water. This punishment could continue for weeks, even in sub-zero temperatures.
Naked prisoners were handcuffed back-to-back and forced to stand before open windows in midwinter. Frostbite became common. One victim of the cold cell punishment was Buttlar, who swallowed the spoon handle to escape. An anti-Nazi, he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. “I never in all those two years had undergone such treatments,” he said.
Kalkowski, the NKVD officer, claimed that toenails were ripped out and that he had been hung from his wrists during interrogation, with weights tied to his legs. British NCOs, he alleged, would beat him with rubber truncheons “while the interrogating officers went for lunch”. Hayward concluded, however, that “there was not a shred of evidence to support these allegations”.
Whatever was happening during the interrogations must have been widely known among many of the camp’s officers and men. In common with every CSDIC prison, each cell was bugged, so that the prisoners’ private utterances could be matched against their “confessions”.
Inspector Hayward’s investigation led to the courts martial of Stephens, Captain John Smith, Bad Nenndorf’s medical officer, and an interrogator, Lieutenant Richard Langham. The hearings were largely held behind closed doors. A number of sergeants – men who had carried out the beatings – were told they would be pardoned if they gave evidence against their officers.
Langham, who had been born in Munich and fled to England with his parents in 1934, at the age of 13, denied that he had mistreated prisoners and was acquitted. Charges of manslaughter against Smith were dropped but, after a court martial held entirely in secret, he was found guilty of the neglect of inmates and sentenced, at the age of 49, to be dismissed the service.
It is unclear whether any of Stephens’s superiors knew, or condoned, what had happened at Bad Nenndorf, although his lawyers said they were prepared to spread the blame among senior army officers and Foreign Office officials. Before his court martial began there was nervous debate among ministers and government officials about how to avoid the repercussions which would follow, should the truth become known.
Ministers were anxious that nobody should learn that CSDIC was running a number of similar prisons in Germany. There was also what the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Frank Pakenham, later to become Lord Longford, described as “the fact that we are alleged to have treated internees in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps”. The army, meanwhile, said it was determined the Soviets should not discover “how we apprehended and treated their agents”, not least because some would-be defectors might have second thoughts.
Finally, there was the inevitable fall-out for Attlee’s Labour government. As Hector McNeill, foreign minister, pointed out in a memo to Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary: “I doubt if I can put too strongly the parliamentary consequences of publicity. Whenever we have any allegations to make about the political police methods in Eastern European states it will be enough to call out in the House ‘Bad Nenndorf’, and no reply is left to us.”
Stephens was eventually court martialled behind closed doors. Amid complaints of a half-hearted prosecution, he was acquitted of two charges, two others were withdrawn, and he was free to apply to rejoin MI5.
In Bad Nenndorf, the remaining prisoners were shipped out, the wire ripped down, and the prison shut down. The baths were reinstalled in the cubicles and, gradually, the spa returned to its traditional business of catering for the health needs of elderly German tourists.
The closure of Bad Nenndorf was not the end of the story, however. The archives reveal that three months later a custom-built interrogation centre, with cells for 30 men and 10 women, was opened near to the British military base at Gütersloh. The inmates were to be suspected Soviet spies, and would be medically examined before interrogation.
When Frank Pakenham complained that most of the interrogators had been at Bad Nenndorf, and demanded that “drastic methods” should not be employed, Major-General Sir Brian Robertson, the military governor, put his foot down.
Why, he exclaimed, if the military authorities were required to justify the arrest of each inmate, and then handle them according to the standards “enforced by the prison commissioners in our own enlightened country”, there was little point in having an interrogation centre at all.
Death subterfuge
One of the most bizarre episodes at Bad Nenndorf followed the death of a former SS officer called Abeling. He had been so severely beaten during his arrest in January 1947 that he was unconscious on arrival at the prison, and died shortly afterwards.
The camp’s officers instructed a local gravedigger to prepare a grave for a British officer who had died of an infectious disease. Abeling’s corpse was sewn into a blanket, lowered in, and covered with quicklime. A firing party was on hand to ensure that the dead man was buried with full British military honours, and a white wooden cross with a false name was erected over the grave.
The reasons for such subterfuge are made clear in declassified Foreign Office papers at the National Archives. Abeling, formerly a member of an “annihilation squad” in Warsaw, had been working as an agent for the Americans at the time of his death, spying on his old Nazi comrades under the codename Slim.
The report notes that the Americans “insisted that ‘Slim’s’ death must be kept a very closely guarded secret, because of the fact that the US authorities had been employing him in the full knowledge that he was wanted by the Polish government as a major war criminal”.
Today the wooden cross over Abeling’s grave has been replaced with a gravestone. It still bears the name of the man that local people believe to be buried there: John X White, born 1.8.1911, died 17.1.1947.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
=============HUMOR
A French comrade reading my blog picked up on the little juish inside joke going on in the press of the English-speaking white world, echoing Dr. Goebbels’ observation that “Times” spelled backward is indeed “Semit.” He sent me this jpeg….. (Note the news story on the right)….
Another bit of humor….where the joke is on US goyishe koppen:
* * *
Why Are Americans Jobless ?
John Smith started the day early having set his alarm clock (MADE IN JAPAN ) for 6 a.m.
While his coffeepot (MADE IN CHINA ) was perking, he shaved with his electric razor (MADE IN PHILIPPINES ) .
He put on a dress shirt (MADE IN SRI LANKA ), designer jeans (MADE IN SINGAPORE ) and tennis shoes (MADE IN
VIETNAM). After cooking his breakfast in his new electric skillet (MADE IN INDIA ), then he sat down with his calculator (MADE IN MEXICO ) to see how much he could spend today.
After setting his watch (MADE IN TAIWAN ) to the radio (MADE IN INDIA ), he got in his car (MADE IN GERMANY ) filled it with GAS (from Saudi Arabia ) and continued his search for a good paying AMERICAN JOB.
At the end of yet another discouraging and fruitless day checking his computer (MADE IN MALAYSIA ), John decided to relax for a while. He put on his sandals (MADE IN BRAZIL ) poured himself a glass of wine (MADE IN FRANCE ) and turned on his TV (MADE IN KOREA ), and then wondered why he can’t find a good paying job in AMERICA .
AND NOW HE’S HOPING HE CAN GET HELP FROM HIS PRESIDENT (MADE IN KENYA)
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