-Caveat Lector-
from Compuserve, 7/93, (c) 1993 by Ross & Green
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WHAT IS THE CULT AWARENESS NETWORK
AND WHAT ROLE DID IT PLAY IN WACO?
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INTRODUCTION
As a lobbying firm concerned with the preservation and
expansion of democracy both at home and abroad, we are
writing to draw your attention to the activities of the
Cult Awareness Network (CAN). The Cult Awareness Network
described itself as a "national non-profit organization
founded to educate the public about the harmful effects of
mind control as used by destructive cults." In fact, as the
following evidence documents, CAN has played a major role
in propagating an atmosphere of intolerance and violence
against new, smaller, non-mainstream religions (as well as
psychological movements and political groups); moreover, it
has functioned as an indirect referral agency, facilitating
"concerned" families getting touch with individuals who can
be hired to use coercion (including forcible abductions) to
remove individuals from groups of which CAN disapproves.
The influence of the Cult Awareness Network was made clear
by the role it played in influencing media coverage of the
siege and subsequent massacre of the Branch Davidians in
Waco, Texas earlier this year, and the role CAN-associated
"deprogrammers" played as advisors to the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the FBI during the siege.
"DEPROGRAMMERS"
CAN, originally called the Citizens Freedom Foundation
(CFF), was founded in 1974 by Ted Patric, who, according to
Gerald Arenberg, writing in `The Chief of Police' magazine,
already had a "career of kidnapping young adults from young
and little understood churches in exchange for handsome fees
from distraught or overbearing parents" (Arenberg, 1993).
Information from a number of sources indicates that over the
past 19 years, persons within the CAN network have been
involved in thousands of abductions or other coercive
actions, which the perpetrators euphemistically call
"deprogrammings." "Deprogrammers" charge between $5,000 and
$20,000 for a kidnapping. The payment is usually made in
cash, so there will be no record of the transaction
(Blocksom, 1992, p. 2). According to the organization's own
figures, reported at its national conference in Los Angeles
last year, CAN-connected "deprogrammers" were involved in
more than 1,800 "deprogrammings" in 1992 alone (Robertson,
1993, p. 3).
On the record, CAN condemns forcible kidnappings and
maintains that it receives no financial benefits from
referring families to kidnappers. However, John Myles
Sweeney, Jr., a former national director of CAN's
predecessor, the Citizens Freedom Foundation, in a
declaration dated March 17, 1992 charged:
Because of the large amount of money they make
due to referrals received from CFF members,
deprogrammers usually kick back money to the CFF
member who gave the referral... The kickbacks
would either be in cash or would be hidden in
the form of a tax-deductible "donation" to the
CFF (Sweeney, 1992, p. 1).
Former "deprogrammer" Johnathon Lee Nordquist has charged
that in the mid-eighties CAN, through Mary Krone, then CAN's
director of information and referrals, paid for the living
expenses of Nordquist and his partner. "All that I had to
do... was make infrequent speeches at Cult Awareness Network
affiliate meetings and receive phone call from people who
wanted to hear negative propaganda about the Hare Krishna
religion" (Nordquist, 1991, p. 24).
In addition, expense reports seized by the FBI and entered
as evidence in a court case reveal that at least one
"deprogrammer," convicted kidnapper Galen Kelly, was paid a
regular retainer of $1,500 a week in 1992 by the Cult
Awareness Network (U.S. vs. Smith, Kelly, Point and Moore,
1992).
CAN operates its indirect referral system in a manner
intended to avoid incurring criminal or civil liability from
the activities of the "deprogrammers" in its network. Mark
Blocksom, who worked as a "deprogrammer" from 1979 to 1989,
reports:
The standard method by which I received
referrals for involuntary deprogrammings was via
phone call the "good ole boy" network (CFF, and
later, CAN members or affiliates), who would
then refer the caller to a non-CFF/non-CAN
person (usually a family member of a prior
successful case), who would then call me and
arrange the deprogramming. This "cut out"
system was created to insulate CFF/CAN from
legal liabilities (Blocksom, 1992, pp. 1-2).
Blocksom also reports that he often consulted with CAN
officials (including the current director, Cynthia Kisser)
in the course of "deprogrammings" for the purpose of
"obtaining additional assistance, or with obtaining written
materials about a particular group" (Blocksom, 1992, p. 4).
Former CFF director Sweeney warns: "CAN still attempts to
convince the public that it is not now, nor has it ever
been, connected with deprogrammers. This is an absolute lie
and should never be accepted as true" (Sweeney, 1992, p. 3).
A special report in `The Chief of Police,' the official
publication of the National Association of Chiefs of Police,
notes that "During the 1970's and `80's, mercenary
deprogrammers like Patrick kidnapped hundreds of adults from
a wide spectrum of organizations including Catholic,
Episcopal, Evangelical Christian, Mormon, Amish, political
and even karate classes. While the deprogrammers celebrated
their growing profits, for the victims, it was a story of
terror" (Arenberg, 1993, p. 60).
The terror includes not only the abduction itself, for the
"deprogramming" is not complete (and the victims are not
released) until she or he agrees to leave their religion or
political organization. According to former "deprogrammer"
Mark Blocksom: "Some deprogrammers used techniques of sleep
and food deprivation, humiliation, ridicule, deprivation of
privacy, and in some cases, physical abuse and restraint to
accomplish their goal of altering a person' religious views"
(Blocksom, 1992, p. 2).
A number of former "deprogrammers" and CAN officials have
reported, in sworn affidavits, that some of the CAN-
affiliated "deprogrammers" have had sex with individuals
they held captive (Nordquist, 1991, p. 63; Sweeney, 1992, p.
2). Dr. Lowell Streiker, the former executive director of
the Freedom Counseling Center in Burlingame, California,
reports that "deprogrammer" Cliff Daniels "...said that he
used the `sex thing' as a testing board to see whether the
girl was completely out of the cult. If she consented, then
he knew that she was completely out. If she did not
consent, then he knew that he had more work to do"
(Streiker, 1992, p. 3).
What is remarkable, given the large number of abductions
that allegedly have been carried out by CAN-associated
"deprogrammers," is how few prosecutions--and even fewer
convictions--have resulted from their activities. This
virtual immunity from legal liability has resulted in a high
level of arrogance among "deprogrammers." U.S. Attorney
Lawrence Leiser, who successfully prosecuted Galen Kelly,
told the Times Herald Record in Middletown, New York: "Mr.
Kelly thinks he has the right to go out, because someone
pays him, and kidnap someone. That's incredible, and he'd
been doing it for 10 or 15 years. He admitted on the stand
that he has abducted 30 to 40 people" (Hall, 1993).
This ability to get away with breaking the law has to do
with the success CAN has had in demonizing non-mainstream
religions and political organizations, as well as the policy
employed by "deprogrammers" of involving family members in
the kidnapping process, which tends to inhibit the victim's
willingness to press charges. As former "deprogrammer"
Blocksom says:
I have been arrested at least five times for
kidnapping-related charges. I have never even
gone to trial in even one of these cases, due
largely to the fact that it was my policy to get
the family directly involved in the actual
kidnapping. This would make it much harder for
the target to want to pursue criminal
prosecution, since it would mean they would also
have to prosecute a family member (Blocksom,
1992, p. 3).
Despite these precautions, the last year has seen a few
cracks in the wall of virtual immunity which has surrounded
CAN-associated "deprogrammers." On May 27, 1993 Galen Kelly-
-chief of security at the CAN convention in November 1990--
was convicted for kidnapping a Washington, D.C. woman in May
1992 (he is still awaiting sentencing). Another well known
"deprogrammer," Randall Burkey, was convicted on similar
charges in Madison, Wisconsin earlier this year. Other CAN-
connected "deprogrammers" who have recently faced criminal
charges are Joseph Szimhart and Mary Alice Chrnalogar who
were charged with kidnapping a 39-year-old mother of four in
Boise, Idaho (Robertson, 1993, p. 3), while Rick Ross, who
acted as an advisor to ATF in Waco and has boasted of more
than 200 "deprogrammings," was arrested at the end of June
on charges of kidnapping an illegal imprisonment of a
Kirkland, Washington teenager in 1991 (Holt, 1993).
PSYCHOLOGISTS AND PSYCHIATRISTS
A handful of psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists,
some of whom serve on CAN's board of advisors, provide
pseudo-scientific cover for these activities. They give
talks at CAN events, write articles, mostly in their own
publication, Cultic Studies Journal, and provide quotes to
the media when a "cult expert" is needed. Many of these
individuals also earn money testifying as "expert witnesses"
in kidnapping cases, litigation in which disaffected ex-
members are suing their former group or group leaders, and
conservatorship cases in which parents are seeding legal and
financial control of grown children who have joined so-
called "cults."
Among these individuals, the two most high-profile are
psychiatrist Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West, chairman of the
Department of Psychiatry and Biobehaviorial Sciences at
UCLA's School of Medicine, and Margaret Singer, a clinical
psychologist with a private practice in Berkeley, California
and a former adjunct professor in the Department of
Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley.
West currently serves on the advisory board of CAN and a
similar group called the American Family Foundation. He has
been a keynote speaker at CAN conferences for more than 15
years. In a 1983 speech to a CFF convention, West called
for the development of a "medical model" for the elimination
of what he considered "fake" religions.
A good approach if you were interested in curing
a cancer is to find a chemical that kills the
malignant cells and spares those that are
healthy. What would be the effect of a device
or technique which, when applied by society to
any organization calling itself religious, would
have no untoward effect upon bona fide
religions, but would be deadly to the fakes?
...Malignant cells or fake religions wouldn't
survive it. Healthy cells or bona fide
religions and altruistic organizations would not
be harmed (West, 1983).
While West today purports to be repulsed by the "mind
control" and "brainwashing" supposedly practiced by some of
the new religions ("cults"), in the 1950s and `60s he was
involved, through the CIA-funded Geschickter Fund for
Medical Research, in experiments employing LSD as a means of
mind control. During these experiments the CIA used ethnic
and racial minorities as human guinea pigs. At the
Lexington, Kentucky federal prison, for example, African
Americans were singled out and used as test subjects for
various mind control experiments (Citizens Commission on
Human Rights, 1985).
Questioned about his relationship with CIA "mind control"
expert Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, in 1977 West told the New York
Times: "As far as the Geschickter Fund was concerned, what
Dr. Gottlieb told me was that he was an employee of the CIA
and that they had an interest in this problem [the area of
LSD research], which I could see they did and possibly
should have at that time" (Horrock, 1977).
After the riots in Watts in 1965, West, then head of the
Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI) at UCLA, was an outspoken
proponent of the view that violence was tied to genetic
factors, and that those most prone to violence were young
Black urban males. West and his associates at NPI
recommended that some violent offenders could be treated by
psychosurgery and chemical castration through the use of
cyproterone acetate (West, 1972).
West's advocacy of chemical castration--this time on
prisoners and "appropriate non-Institutionalized clinical
subjects" (Restak, 1975)--surfaced again when he proposed
the establishment of a Center for the Study and Reduction of
Violence; based on the premise that violence is caused
primarily by genetic or chemical factors, the Center would
conduct various chemical and biosurgical experiments. In
may respects the Center prefigured the Youth Violence
Initiative recently proposed by the National Institute of
Mental Health.
Nearly all of the studies West had in mind for the Center
involved women, minority groups--of the two high schools he
proposed for violence studies, one was in a Black community
and one in a Chicano area (West 1972)--prisoners or others
who couldn't defend themselves, such as autistic children
and the mentally retarded. Examples of the treatments
proposed by West at this time included psychosurgery,
"curing" hyperactive children with unproven drugs, and
implanting electronic monitoring or homing devices into the
brain (California State Senate Health and Welfare Committee
Transcript, 1973). Funding for the Center was opposed in a
series of protests in California in 1974; they succeeded not
only in stopping the Center, but in getting federal and
state funds for the NPI reduced. In 1989 West resigned as
director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute after the LA
Weekly published an expose of financial wrongdoings in
relation to research grants he and his staff had obtained
from the National Institute of Mental Health (Shae, 1988).
The principle psychologist identified with CAN is Margaret
Singer. Unlike West, who is a fixture of the academic
psychology establishment, Singer has never held a full-time,
tenure-track position; in the words of her attorney Michael
Flomenhaft, she "derives a substantial portion of her income
from consultancies and work as an expert witness based on
specialized knowledge in the area of social influence"
(Singer vs. APA, 1992).
Singer is suing the American Psychological Association for
$125 million, claiming that the Association's refusal to
endorse her views on so-called mind-control and
"brainwashing" have caused "injury to her business and
professional reputation" and caused her "mental anguish and
distress" (Singer vs. APA, 1992).
The Singer suit (which she filed with Berkeley sociologist
Richard Ofshe in August of 1992) is instructive both in
revealing where CAN-associated psychologists and
psychiatrists stand in relation to the psychological
mainstream, and in clarifying how sharply psychological
professionals differ over concepts such as "cults,"
"brainwashing" and "coercive persuasion," which CAN uses to
rationalize its activities.
Singer's suit was filed under provisions of the Racketeer
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). In it she
contends that the APA and several of its leaders and members
have engaged in a "pattern of racketeering activity"
designed to ruin her career as an "expert witness." The
only concrete evidence offered to prove the alleged harm to
her career is a ruling by a judge disqualifying Singer as an
expert witness in a case in which an ex-adherent of the
International Society for Krishna Consciousness was suing
the organization for "false imprisonment" despite the
plaintiff's admission that she was never physically
restrained, confined or threatened by the Society for
Krishna Consciousness and despite further admission on the
stand that she adopted Krishna Consciousness following a
genuine religious conversion.
In disqualifying Singer, who was called in to testify that
the plaintiff had been a victim of "brainwashing," Judge
Jensen explained:
Although the record before the Court is replete
with declarations, affidavits and letters from
reputable psychologists and sociologists who
concur with the thought reform theories
propounded by Dr. Singer and Dr. Ofshe, the
government has submitted an equal number of
declarations, affidavits and letters from
reputable psychologists and sociologists who
disagree with their theories...A more
significant barometer of prevailing views within
the scientific community is provided by
professional organizations such as the American
Psychological Association ("APA") and the
American Sociological Association ("ASA"). The
evidence before the Court, which is detailed
below, shows that neither the APA nor the ASA
has endorsed the views of Dr. Singer and Dr.
Ofshe on thought reform...At best, the evidence
establishes that psychiatrists, psychologists
and sociologists disagree as to whether or not
there is agreement regarding the Singer-Ofshe
thesis. The Court therefore excludes
defendants' proffered testimony (U.S. vs.
Fishman, 1989).
While Singer's testimony had been accepted at numerous
trials before and since, the Jensen ruling has been used as
a precedent in subsequent cases in which Singer and other
CAN allies were called in as expert witnesses.
The dispute between Singer and the APA leadership goes back
at least seven years. In 1986, at Singer's initiative, the
APA's Board of Social And Ethical Responsibility for
Psychology (BSERP) set up a Task Force on Deceptive and
Indirect Methods of Persuasion and Control which was headed
up by Singer. The 69-page report produced by the Task Force
openly attempted to make CAN's definitions of "cults,"
"brainwashing," etc. official APA usage. The APA's
rejection of the report, dated May 1987, read in part:
BSERP...is unable to accept the report of the
Task Force. In general, the report lacks the
scientific rigor and evenhanded critical
approach necessary for APA imprimatur. The
report was carefully reviewed by two external
experts and two members of the Board. They
independently agreed on the significant
deficiencies in the report...The Board cautions
the Task Force members against using their past
appointment to imply BSERP or APA support or
approval of the positions advocated in the
report. BSERP requests that Task Force members
not distribute or publicize the report without
indicating that the report was unacceptable to
the Board. Finally, after much consideration,
BSERP does not believe that we have sufficient
information available to guide us in taking a
position on this issue (BSERP, 1987).
At dispute in the Task Force report--and within the
psychological community before and since--are the underlying
concepts justifying CAN's activities. The term
"brainwashing," for example, was coined by Edward Hunter, a
CIA propagandist who worked under cover as a journalist
(Marks, 1991). In the early fifties Hunter used the term to
explain communist influence over American POWs in Korea and
western civilian prisoners in Communist China (Hunter,
1953). Hunter defines the result of "brainwashing" as
changing "a mind radically so that its owner becomes a
living puppet--a human robot" (Hunter, 1956, p. 309).
Robert Lifton, in Thought Reform and the Psychology of
Totalism (1961), one of the pioneering scholarly works in
the field, writes:
Behind this web of semantic (and more than
semantic) confusion lies an image if
"brainwashing" as a n all-powerful,
irresistible, unfathomable, and magical method
of achieving total control over the human mind.
It is of course none of these things and this
loose usage makes the word a rallying point for
fear, resentment, urges toward submission,
justification for failure, irresponsible
accusation, and for a wide gamut of emotional
extremism. One may justly conclude that the
term has a far from precise meaning and a
questionable usefulness (Lifton, 1961, p.4)
Singer maintains that the theory of "brainwashing" upon
which her "expert witness" career depends is based on
studies conducted on repatriated prisoners after the Korean
War, as well as the Russian purge trials of the 1930s and
the "revolutionary universities" of the People's Republic of
China.
However, examination of the facts by mainstream scholars
contradict her arguments. A total of 7,190 American
servicemen were captured during the Korean War. Of that
number only 21 declined to return to the United States. Of
those who returned only 14 were ever court-martialed on the
grounds of "going-over" to the enemy and only 11 convictions
were obtained. Thus Singer's contention that communist
"brainwashing" succeeded on a large scale just doesn't hold
up (Secretary of Defense's Advisory Committee on Prisoners
of War, 1955, pp. 78-81).
Furthermore, of the POWs who did make pro-communist
statements during the war, most had not changed their
ideological framework, i.e., "converted" to communism at
all; they were speaking in the shadow of incarceration and
physical maltreatment, rather than as the result of any sort
of exotic psychotechnology. Thus Lunde and Wilson conclude
in "Brainwashing as a Defense to Criminal Liability: Patty
Hearst Revisited:"
[T]he much-ballyhooed Communist program of
`brainwashing' was really more an intensive
indoctrination program in combination with very
heavy-handed techniques of undermining the
social structure of the prisoner group, thereby
eliciting collaboration that in most cases was
not based on ideological change of any sort
(Lunde and Wilson, 1977, p. 348).
Finally, the handful of Americans who actually did go over
to the communist side during the Korean War have been shown
to have already been predisposed to communist politics when
they were drafted (Schein, 1961, pp. 104-110; Lifton, 1961,
pp. 117-132, 207-222).
Unlike Singer and other CAN "expert witnesses," the
overwhelming majority of scholars have rejected the attempt
to extend the experiences of Korean POWs to the practices of
new religious movements. ("absurd to compare this
[recruiting practice of new religions] to the fear of death
in prisoners held by the Chinese and North Koreans" (James,
1986, pp. 241, 254); the comparison "cannot be taken
seriously" (Barker, 1984, p. 134); the "model of the Chinese
prisoner of war camp...is highly deficient since members of
the religious movements are not abducted or physically
detained" (Saliba, 1987); a "far-fetched comparison"
(Anthony and Robbins, 1990, p. 263).)
Although the term "brainwashing" has never been accepted
within the scientific community, it has become commonplace
in the media and is the basis of a number of other concepts
of significance to CAN. For example the term
"deprogramming" clearly implies that human minds can be
"programmed" like computers (or robots) in the first place--
an assumption questioned in much research (James, 1986;
Saliba, 1987; Anthony and Robbins, 1990; Reich, 1976).
Moreover, the very existence of "cults" defined (vaguely) by
Singer and other CAN supporters as groups which organize
through "deception" and which practice "brainwashing" and
"mind control" on their members, is disputed by the majority
of scholars, many of whom point out that the "coercive
processes" that Singer and others attribute to "cult"
organizations could be applied equally to college
fraternities, Catholic orders, self-help organizations such
as Alcoholics Anonymous, the armed services, psychoanalytic
training institutions, mental hospitals and conventional
childrearing practices (Lifton, 1961, pp. 141, 435-436, 451;
Schein, 1961, pp. 202, 260-261, 270-276, 281-283).
What Singer's arguments come down to is that the only
conceivable way that a sane person might choose to believe
in or adhere to religious and/or political views outside the
perimeters of the mainstream is if they are "deceived." And
from this it follows that deceived or "brainwashed" people
are incapable of making sane, responsible judgments and
should therefore have their civil and Constitutional rights
revoked.
But "deception" is a hopelessly subjective term. Perception
and deception are two sides of the same coin. As Judge T.S.
Ellis III declared on December 31, 1992 in regard to an
unsuccessful kidnapping prosecution brought against CAN-
associated "deprogrammer" Galen Kelly, "One man's cult is
another man's community, however wacky you or I may think
that is" (U.S. vs. Smith, Kelly, Point and Moore, 1992).
Who among us in a democratic society would dare to impose
his or her perception as the only true one?
CONTINUED...
.
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