Wartime Mind Control Tactics – A Survivor Speaks

Something’s been bothering me lately. It isn’t my concern about the war – I don’t have any loved ones who are serving in Iraq. It isn’t about the constant terror alerts, because I frankly haven’t seen or heard anything yet that indicates that I should be more afraid of a terrorist attack than of being killed in an automobile accident. My fear stems from the awareness that a successful campaign is being waged through much of the media to shut down logic and critical thinking in the minds of most Americans.

One of the reasons this frightens me is that I am one of many hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of awakening survivors of the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control programmes. I was a victim of mind-control techniques and related brutality for more than three straight decades. I am one of the original “guinea pigs” who was relentlessly tested and experimented on, from early childhood, to become a severely dissociated human robot who would do whatever my handlers desired. (See my personal website, http://kathleen-sullivan.com,or http://parc-vramc.tierranet.com for more information.)

What are the signs I’ve found, that indicate to me that such a campaign is still being waged against the collective mind of the American public?

Because I live in Tennessee, I scan the daily editorial section of our local newspaper, the Chattanooga Times/Free Press. Chattanooga is a lovely, albeit conservative, right-wing community. We have many Southern Baptist and Pentecostal churches, as well as several religious colleges that add to the effect. I’m accustomed to reading letters to the editor that express conservative beliefs that seem to be the warp and woof of our community. I am not accustomed, however, to reading letters that insist that anyone who disagrees with the President, and his decision to invade Iraq, are flat-out wrong and unpatriotic.

Several letters each day claim that we are “unpatriotic” and are “not supporting the troops” if we openly oppose the war. The authors don’t seem understand that our current administration is the entity that is not supporting the troops – because it is sending them into harm’s way! And in reality, those who protest the war are probably more concerned about our troops than those who wave the American flag while cheering the troops into battle. (I’ve often wondered if such flag-wavers are vicariously fighting their own “bad guys” through the troops.)

The letters also state that we should “stand behind our president, our commander-in-chief,” regardless of our personal beliefs and convictions, now that we’ve gone to war. They errantly suggest that there is a magical, invisible “war” line that we’ve crossed over, beyond which there is no room left for dissent or analytical thinking. Being at war doesn’t negate our right to continue to openly oppose the war.

Fox News reported last night that anti-war demonstrations being held in various cities throughout America are causing local police to attend to the “disruptive” protestors, thereby diverting those officers from attending to their regular duties, and from attending to “homeland security.” Fox News added that such diversions of police services are costing one large city $900,000. In reality, the war that the protestors are expressing their opposition to will probably cost our country hundreds of billions of dollars. Which actions are more costly?

We are told by the President, Rumsfeld, and other politicians that Hussein’s regime is brutal and despicable. Why? Because its soldiers have executed imprisoned US troops and have used trickery – via phony “surrendering” Iraqi soldiers – to attack some of our troops. I am not in any way condoning what has been done to our troops. Such tactics are inhumane. But isn’t our committing cold-blooded murder equally inhumane? Our president’s first major action as commander-in-chief was to order unsuccessful surgical strikes, sent from a sterile and long-range distance, to murder Hussein and some of his closest political associates. Isn’t this equally brutal and despicable?

In the past several days, our leaders have heaped derision on Hussein’ s military for using guerilla warfare – as if such tactics are immoral or unprofessional. We’ve already forced Hussein to give up many of his most effective weapons through the weapons inspections that our leaders knew would not stop the war from taking place. What choice did we leave Hussein and his forces, other than trickery, guerilla warfare, and street fighting? What military and defense tactics would we use if we were protecting ourselves from invaders having such a disproportionate amount of high-tech weaponry?

For several years, we have been alerted to the presence of “weapons of mass destruction” that are reportedly being developed or stockpiled by other governments, particularly by Hussein and North Korea. We have repeatedly been advised that this was the primary reason why our military must wage a war against Hussein’s regime. And yet, our president withholds the critical information that the U.S. government directly aided Hussein’s government, in the 1980s, in procuring biochemical weaponry. It came from us; and yet, because Hussein has such weapons, he and his administration are evil. And although it came from us, and although we continue to stockpile huge amounts of our own, we are good. This kind of illogical mental reversal is on par with Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Before the war began, our president, Colin Powell, and other high-ranking officials tried to convince us and the rest of the world that they wanted peace and really, really wanted to cooperate with the UN. Then the President claimed that diplomatic efforts with the U.N. didn’t work. Perhaps he and his administration never intended it to work. According to a 3/19/03 editorial in the Chattanooga Times/Free Press, “The Bush administration apparently also will pursue an audacious and provocative plan for rebuilding Iraq, again shunning U.N. and traditional relief agencies – this time in favor of privately bid-and-awarded U.S. contracts to for-profit U.S. companies. The plan, revealed through confidential contract documents outlined in an exclusive Wall Street Journal report … further confirms that the administration planned the Iraqi overthrow months ago, underscoring the notion that the U.N. process was doomed from the start … One big winner, according to the Journal’s report, is the Kellogg, Brown and Root subsidiary of Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company. Of the $1.5 billion in contracts for Iraqi work now offered to private U.S. companies, just $50 million has been carved out so far for groups such as CARE and Save the Children” (B8).

Some of my “right-wing” friends living in Chattanooga religiously parrot Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. In the past couple of days, they’ve begun to express their moral outrage that other countries that had opposed the war, such as France and Germany, are offering their services in the rebuilding of Iraq. “They didn’t support us, so to hell with them – we don’ t need their help.” I respect my friends’ right to believe what they are being told, but I also have to wonder if perhaps the public is being encouraged to feel this way because certain U.S. corporations want to carve up the golden goose for their own private gain.

The media, and certain officials in the current administration, initially indicated that the war in Iraq would end quickly. This encouraged many people to feel better about not opposing it. But now, our president states that the war will continue for “however long it takes.” It seems that the administration expects us to agree to whatever it tells us, without argument. And just in case any of us do want to argue against the war, the President tells us that the war is now about “freeing the Iraqi people.” In other words, anyone who openly expresses their opposition to the war is now is opposed to our freeing an oppressed population. Shame on us!

I recently expressed a radical thought to my husband, a retired Army sergeant major and veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars. The thought bothers him considerably: “Why is it right and just for the United States to stockpile weapons of mass destruction (biochemical agents and nuclear materials), and yet it is not right for smaller countries like Iraq and North Korea to do so? And who really has the moral authority to decide which administration is ‘evil’ and which is not? Is it not evil to attempt to cold-bloodedly murder a group of politicians after taking away a large portion of their ability to defend themselves against us?” The more he thinks about what these issues, the less he can answer me. We’re both troubled, now – because we’re coming out of our media-induced, brainwashed trance states and are beginning to regain our use of critical thinking.

What our administration doesn’t want the U.S. public to recognize is that we are being terrorized on a near-daily basis – not by perceived enemies operating outside the States, but by our government. How? It issues one terror alert after another, playing the color (alert status) game, keeping us in a constant state of fear. We are kept on the edge of our seats, waiting for the first biochemical or nuclear attack to occur. What do the alerts and warnings do to our state of mind? First, they generate a layer of anger hidden beneath the fear. We are angry because we don’t want to be aroused from our sense of safety and security! And then the administration tells us where to direct our anger – onto the “enemies” we are now warring against – even though there has been no substantial proof that the Iraqis were in any way connected to the 9-11 attacks! (And yet, a surprising number of letters to the editor state that we must go after the Iraqi terrorists who attacked us.)

Another thought: even if some of the alerts are factually based and intervention took place before the attacks occurred, would such attempts have been as likely to occur if our administration hadn’t chosen to invade Iraq, thereby angering so many terrorist groups and governments that perhaps had, until now, still given us some benefit of the doubt?

Our president, Rumsfeld, and other officials have worked hard to try to convince us that Hussein is a brutal dictator, that he is evil incarnate, that he is a murderer. Although much of this may be true, they omit information that is more factually based: that our own government has secretly been sending captured terrorists to other countries to be brutally tortured and interrogated. Further, we haven’t been told that several of them died as a direct result of the interrogations. (This story can be found at http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=384604 or at http://www.rense.com/general35/beat.htm).

Our country may appear pristine and freedom-loving and democratic on the surface, but for some unfortunate citizens, it is as much a torturous and brutal regime as Hussein’s. Many American survivors of mentally controlled slavery, sponsored especially by the CIA (of which our president’ s father was a director), can tell you that many of the same atrocities that our president says have been committed by Iraq’s government, particularly towards the Kurds, have also been committed against US citizens and military personnel by our government. These crimes against humanity include biochemical experimentation, torture, false imprisonment, terror tactics, being mentally broken and forced to commit crimes against our will, and manslaughter – if not outright murder.

As long as our government influences us to look outward at other governments and the atrocities they commit, we are unlikely to take a long, hard look at what employees working within our own federal government and agencies have perpetrated against US citizens – including young children. (The CIA and other involved federal agencies have denied, and will continue to deny, the survivors’ claims. Their response should be expected; most accused criminals don’t throw their hands up in the air and say, “Hey, I did it – please punish me!”)

I wonder if perhaps our president is unconsciously displacing his fear and hatred of a former U.S. dictator onto Saddam Hussein. I wonder if he is being skillfully and psychologically manipulated into waging war against Iraq by his father’s former advisors and associates, perhaps for their own eventual financial gain. This is one of many questions that might be answered, at least in part, after the war is over and the sand settles.

I fully empathize with those of you who feel a need to believe that our current Administration – including our president, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell, are telling us the truth from beginning to end. It is human to want to see our government, and Great Britain’s as the good guys wearing white Stetson hats. We don’t want to consider the possibility that the government of our perceived enemies is no more “evil” than our own. Knowledge of our need to feel good about ourselves may be the primary reason why our current administration constantly heaps negative labels, based on purely emotional standards, onto our perceived enemies. It’s nearly impossible to argue against such emotion, or to rein it in and help it to transition back into logic and critical thinking. And heaven only knows how many people are displacing their own anger against bad guys from their personal past, onto Hussein!

Until this war is over, most people are going to stay glued to their television screens, emotionally frozen by fear (of being attacked) and fueled by aggressive anger (towards our perceived enemies). Staying emotional unfortunately keeps us from tapping into the part of our brains that enable us to use critical thinking, and to question and logically analyze what our leaders tell us.

I have a dream. In it, our government and the public at large will choose painful honesty over group delusion. We will take a close look at our government’s many hidden crimes and blatant flaws, and choose to fix it (instead of trying to “fix” the flaws of other governments.) Admitting our own government’s nasty flaws in public takes much more courage than diverting attention away from it and onto the nasty flaws of other governments. My prayer is that, despite his understandable loyalty to his father, our current president will find the courage to do what is right and honorable. And if not, I pray that a future administration will.

- Kathleen A. Sullivan

By Kathleen Sullivan, author of The Programmed Assassin: A True Story of Trauma-Based Mind Control, to be published by Dandelion Books in the fall of 2003. This article was originally published by gooff.com

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