Brain Research, Nanotech and the Military
http://www.counterpunch.org/thieme07032007.html
<http://www.counterpunch.org/thieme07032007.html>
Mind Wars
By RICHARD THIEME

"What we don't know is so much bigger than we are."

Haitian Proverb

Oh, how I wish that reviewing a book like this were simple and
straightforward! That would mean we live in a world of transparency,
government accountability to citizens, easy access to sources, primary
sources willing to go on the record, and data trails that lead readers
to those same sources so everyone can see for themselves.

But alas, we do not live in such a world.

Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932594167/counterpunchmaga> by
Jonathan D. Moreno is a broad but necessarily incomplete overview of
neuroscience, nanotechnology and related areas applied to the arts of
war, with an examination of ethical issues raised by this work, all
considered in a historical context by a scholar who has researched the
field.

The key to decoding the book, however, is on page 4 of the introduction.

"I am no loose cannon," writes Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph. D., the Emilie
Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Professor and Director of the Center for
Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia. "I am deeply entrenched
in the non-threatening, even boring, academic establishment. I've taught
at major research universities, hold an endowed chair at an institution
not known as a hotbed of radicalism " and on the disclaimer goes, a plea
to the reader to recognize that the author is no kook, no "conspiracy
theorist," but a respectable, conventional man.

Moreno sounds those notes again, on p. 107, for example, when he states
that he has considerable "experience with government-on the staffs of
presidential advisory committees, in [giving] congressional testimony,
and so forth."

Those qualifications define the subtext of this work and in many ways
the subtext is the primary content. They also suggest one reason why the
exploration of the frontiers of military research and development and
the penetration of the military-industrial-academic-scientific-media
complex is so difficult these days. Insiders know but can't tell;
outsiders can tell, but don't often know, and when they do know,
ridicule and other forms of disinformation can make what they know seem
like fanciful speculation. So they err on the side of extreme caution.

Jonathan Moreno is qualified, without a doubt, to survey what is in the
public domain about neuro-weapons and diverse applications of numerous
branches of research that blur the distinctions between government,
military, and medical, technological and scientific research, and he is
also qualified to discuss the ethical implications of this research. So
why does he need to insist that he is qualified? Because black budget
(clandestinely funded) science and technology is so large a percentage
of all scientific R&D and so hidden from public view that even to
approach the subject is to enter a force field of distortion and
paranoia. One might as well explore UFOs or time travel-domains of
actual research, in fact, but which must be discussed with a wink or, as
Moreno's disclaimers indicate, the trumpeting of one's credentials,
above all credentials of character-respectability and conventionality-so
that one is not marginalized by the mere fact that one has chosen to
explore the domain.

Inevitably, researchers of exotic technologies experience a condition
called "strangeness," a kind of cognitive dissonance, and have to push
against it to reestablish clear boundaries.

Why has this come about?

Because a national security state has evolved since World War 2 and is
now the water in which we all swim. Moreno describes the history of that
evolution and shows that a great deal of research, including research in
the behavioral sciences, has been determined by a perception of military
necessity. Access to the research is determined by the "need to know"
and most readers of this book are "outsiders." Moreno himself is an
insider of sorts, having served as an expert for numerous government
venues, but his credibility depends on continued access and access
depends on behaving rightly. Saying the right things in the right way
defines correct behavior; hence disclaimers that distance him from
fringe thinkers without institutional support or structural authority,
like this reviewer.

Steven H. Miles, M.D., the author of "Oath Betrayed/Torture, Medical
Complicity, and the War on Terror," states that he is often asked if he
fears for his life because he discussed public documents, thirty five
thousand pages of them, which reveal that medical complicity. That he is
even asked such a question, Miles says, "is an epiphenomenon of being a
torturing society. A torturing society is a society that is abraded by
the process of dehumanization. In that process, we essentially create
our own mirrored netherworlds."

A mirrored netherworld is exactly what is signified by Moreno's repeated
insistence on credentials that ought to be obvious. His netherworld is a
force field of distortion that attends any venture through the
looking-glass of security clearances to explore areas that are exotic,
dangerous, and mostly secret. That force field is an epiphenomenon of
the national security state.

Moreno's history of post-WW2 research begins with identifying the
transformation of America into a "garrison state," a nation that views
the world as a dangerous place that requires the United States to
project power everywhere in and increasingly out of the world to be
secure. National Security Council document NSC-68, published in 1950,
defined this strategy which is still pursued today. "It is mandatory
that in building up our strength, we enlarge upon our technical
superiority by an accelerated exploitation of the scientific potential
of the United States and our allies," the document states. Currently,
academic research receives several billion dollars a year, with MIT
receiving half a billion, the largest single share. Much of the research
is dual use, with commercial as well as military applications, but would
not have been funded were it not for the latter.

"Mind Wars" surveys current research that has come to light. I was not
surprised by any of the details of this book, although someone with less
of a fetish for the subject might well be.

Moreno asks what novel ethical questions are raised by the emergence of
new applications for war which will alter human identity by modifying
memory, cognition, and core physical, emotional and spiritual
capabilities. The enhancement of cognitive processes such as memory, for
example, raises questions about why we evolved as we have. We forget
things for good reasons-it is not helpful to be tormented, and our
brains would be overwhelmed if we remembered everything, including
masses of irrelevant data. Near-total recall would pose new problems as
would enhancement of affective processes related to religious
experience-e.g., how many mystics do we need? Evolution of the species
suggests that a few mystics per thousand are plenty. But if genetic,
chemical, and technological enhancements can trigger mystical
experiences, might too many people bliss out in ecstatic contemplation
of the One? Would too many of us become mice pressing buttons connected
to pleasure centers and die happily rather than eat? Would enhancements
of memory and cognition give an unfair advantage to the children of the
rich much as steroids give big-headed baseball players the ability to
hit the long ball?

Moreno was hampered in his research because many scientists "clammed up"
when asked about their work which means that we can only speculate about
many of the projects. Their silence means that while we know we don't
know, we don't know what we don't know. Hence, cognitive dissonance.

That dissonance never left as I read this book. It's what happens when I
read the fiction of Philip K. Dick. Dick no longer reads like
speculative science fiction smacking of paranoia because the landscape
he describes is the world we now inhabit, a moebius-strip world in which
distortions feed back into the perception of everyday life. The world we
encounter in "Mind Wars" is like the world in Dick's "A Scanner Darkly,"
in which a policeman discovers that the subject he pursues is himself.
In "Mind Wars," Moreno is a participant in the world he describes as
well as an objective observer; the edge of the glass curves and returns
a distorted image.

His own emotions, for example, when he communicates the shock of certain
discoveries, transform his feelings into subject matter the reader must
consider. He communicates his surprise when he learned that Ted
Kaczynski, the Unabomber, participated in "a Harvard study aimed at
psychic deconstruction by humiliating undergraduates and thereby causing
them to experience severe stress." (p. 69) Moreno does not
simplistically attribute all of Kaczynski's behaviors to this event, but
he does speculate on the impact of "a psychological experiment that
involved psychological torment and humiliation that could have left deep
scars" over a period of three years.

I had a similar reaction when I learned of a formative episode in the
life of Donald Defreeze, a.k.a. Cinque, leader of the Symbionese
Liberation Army. DeFreeze and other members of the SLA kidnapped Patty
Hearst and subjected her to brainwashing using classical mind control
techniques. It is seldom asked how DeFreeze learned to brainwash so
effectively. Colin A. Ross, M.D. in "Bluebird," a study of the
deliberate creation of multiple personalities, notes that DeFreeze,
while an inmate at Vacaville State Prison, was "a subject in an
experimental behavior modification program run by Colston Westbrook, a
CIA psychological warfare expert and advisor to the Korean CIA."
(Bluebird, p.212). Westbrook returned to the United States from working
undercover in Viet Nam and "entered Vacaville State Prison under cover
of the Black Cultural Association and there designed the seven-headed
cobra logo of the SLA and gave DeFreeze his African name, Cinque."
(Bluebird, p. 212)

The accounts of both Kaczinski and DeFreeze suggest that their crimes
might have been "blowback," unintended consequences of covert
intelligence operations that rebound on perpetrators.

If those accounts were not public, however, and we speculated in that
vein about DeFreeze and Kaczinski, it would be easy to dismiss our
speculation as "conspiracy theories" or sloppy thinking. We know those
two accounts are not the only experiments that might have backfired, but
prudence suggests we not extrapolate from the known data, lest we be
ridiculed. That's what respectability in a world of strangeness
requires. But in light of those accounts, it is not unreasonable to ask,
what other rough beasts have slouched out of covert research to be born?

So there is often a disconnect between the history that we know and
discussions of current research sanitized by willful innocence. This is
crazy-making. I understand why Moreno does not want to be found on the
wrong side of the looking glass. Yet Moreno wrote an excellent history
of how "informed consent" evolved from the horrors of our own history.
There is a parallax view of the stick of history which enters the water
but seems to be discontinuous rather than a straight line. The distance
of a historical account disinfects the moral dimension of events; we may
be shocked when we read of the torturous experiments of Ewen Cameron and
Sidney Gottleib, for example, doctors who participated in MKULTRA, a
series of CIA experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shock, and
sensory deprivation, but because those experiments ended in the
seventies, they read like scripts for a horror movie instead of a daily
newspaper. Moreno's discussion of ethical issues is similarly sanitized
and sane, appropriate to the seminar room on a college campus, with its
warmth, light, and comfortable chairs, but far from the trenches in
which experiments takes place. His calls for accountability sound
eminently reasonable but are theoretical and abstract because the
details we need in order to explore ethical implications in a real
historical context, one with flesh-and-blood men and women feeling real
emotions, are hidden in darkness.

As a result, readers remain outsiders because we do not "need to know."
We learn afterward some of what has taken place, when details filter
into the light of ordinary day, but the ethical imperatives of a
quickened public conscience can not be applied retroactively. The secret
deeds are already done.

The technology of hypersonic sound (HSS) illustrates how the worlds of
scientific researchers and outsiders bifurcate, creating an
epistemological divide when we outsiders try to understand what is
happening on a basic level.

Hypersonic sound is "a column of sound that does not spread out like
conventional sound but stays locked like a sonic laser." (p. 147). If
you enter the column, you hear it, but outside it, you do not. HSS can
be used to target individuals while ensuring that those around them hear
nothing.

It does not take a devious mind to imagine a variety of uses for
hypersonic sound, nor to imagine its misuse, even as a trivial
amusement. Some accounts of HSS describe pedestrians on sunny days
walking into a column of sound in which they hear a waterfall. Seconds
later, the sound is gone. The demonstrator laughed, watching the
non-consenting public try to puzzle out experiences for which they had
no prior frame.

More pernicious uses of the technology suggest themselves. At the siege
of Waco, David Koresh of the Branch Davidians reported hearing voices in
his head. He was crazy, we are told. But without the key pieces to the
puzzle how do we know?

Moreno states that he has spoken for years with people who claim to have
been targeted by this or similar technologies which put voices into
their heads or use them unknowingly to test beam, particle and
electromagnetic weapons. I have spoken to such people, too.

Yes, hearing voices that are not there is a symptom of illness. But
hearing a voice that no one else hears does not mean, now that we know
about HSS, that the voices do not exist.

Enter strangeness once again. Moreno concludes that the claims of these
people are not credible. But Moreno had already reviewed by that point
in the discussion the abuse of medical and psychological testing by
intelligence professionals in the past.

We know about those earlier experiments only because CIA Director
Richard Helm's order in 1973 to destroy all documents related to MKULTRA
were carried out-except for financial documents stored in obscure
places. Had they known those boxes existed, they too would have been
destroyed, but because they were overlooked, researchers could connect
some dots, at least, and describe a maze of funding sources, dummy
companies fronting for intelligence agencies, and significant numbers of
respectable medical establishments funded in whole or in part by the
CIA.

The parallax view.

So here's the dilemma: Secret experiments were carried out by
well-intentioned patriots working under the cover of security who
tortured non-consenting adults, then covered up the events. There was no
transparency or outside accountability for what they did. The same kinds
of people today authorize experiments and weapons testing, and in the
absence of accountability, they too report only to themselves. The light
from inside bends back at the surface and we see only a black hole.

Had Moreno spoken to victims of MKULTRA and related projects in the
fifties or sixties, before those documents were discovered, had he heard
people subjected to electroshock therapy or drugs or isolation who told
him in horrendous detail what had been done to them, don't you think he
would have made the same statement? That the sane conventional
respectable response by a man of the establishment would be that they
were deluded?

So why are such claims today unworthy of investigation?

Because to conduct such investigations in the absence of transparency,
accountability, and meaningful legislative oversight is to subject
oneself to ridicule and career suicide.

/ /An aside about/ /hypersonic sound John Alexander, the author of
"Future War," told me that a major motivation for developing hypersonic
sound was to communicate with covert agents in dangerous places. Someone
about to be taken down can not answer a cell phone call but can attend
to a voice in the head that tells them to "get out now."

Moreno doesn't mention that application-not a serious flaw, but an
indicator that one depends on one's sources for this sort of research
and many of Moreno's sources are unnamed. Moreno has confidence in them,
as I often do in mine, but without an objective way to evaluate what
they say /How do we know?/

That question is left on the table when we finish this book. "Mind Wars"
surveys much of what has become public about military applications of
brain and mind science and reviews the historical context. Ethical
issues are articulated at length. But in the end, what we don't know is
still much larger than what we do know.

The national security state, with millions of classified documents and
billions of dollars in black research, freezes the average citizen out
of the loop. Like enemies, real and imagined, we do not "need to know."
Classification, of course, covers mistakes and malfeasance and protects
political bases in addition to ensuring security. So we ought to feel
uneasy when we finish this book. "Mind Wars" is not an antidote to
"strangeness." We can't blame Dr. Moreno, who wants doors to continue to
open, calls to be returned. But our dissonance persists. We don't know
what we don't know, only that those who do know ask us to trust.

Trust, yes, but verify, as the old Cold Warrior said. If it was good
enough for him, it ought to be good enough for us.

Richard Thieme speaks and writes about the challenges raised by
technology, science, and globalization in the 21st century. He can be
reached at: rthieme@... <mailto:rthieme@...>

Works cited:

Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932594167/counterpunchmaga> by
Jonathan D. Moreno, Dana Press (The Dana Foundation: New York and
Washington DC) 2006

Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/140006578X/counterpunchmaga> by
Steven H. Miles, M. D., Random House: New York. 2006.

Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0970452519/counterpunchmaga> by
Colin A. Ross, M.D., Manitou Communications: Richardson Texas. 2000.

Future War: Non-Lethal Weapons in Twenty-First-Century Warfare
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312267398/counterpunchmaga> by
John B. Alexander, St. Martin's Griffin: 2000.

*This review (edited) was originally published by the National Catholic
Reporter <http://www.natcath.com/> .



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