-Caveat Lector-
Mind Control
by Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright (c) 1991, Napa Sentinel
One of the fascinating aspects of the scandals that plague the
U.S. Government is the fact that so often the same names appear
from scandal to scandal. From the origins of Ronald Reagan's
political career, as Governor of California, Dr. Earl Brian and
Edward Meese played key advisory roles.
Dr. Brian's name has been linked to the October Surprise and is a
central figure in the government's theft of PROMIS soft ware from
INSLAW. Brian's role touches from the Cabazon Indian scandals to
United Press International. He is one of those low-profile key
figures.
And, alas, his name appears again in the nation's behavior
modification and mind control experiments. Dr. Brian was Reagan's
Secretary of Health when Reagan was Governor. Dr. Brian was an
advocate of state subsidies for a research center for the study
of violent behavior. The center was to begin operations by
mid-1975, and its research was intended to shed light on why
people murder or rape, or hijack aircraft. The center was
to be operated by the University of California at Los Angeles,
and its primary purpose, ac cording to Dr. Brian, was to unify
scattered studies on anti-social violence and possibly even touch
on socially tolerated violence, such as football or war. Dr.
Brian sought $1.3 million for the center.
It certainly was possible that prison inmates might be used as
volunteer subjects at the center to discover the unknowns which
triggered their violent behavior. Dr. Brian's quest for the
center came at the same time Governor Reagan concluded his plans
to phase the state of California out of the mental hospital
business by 1982. Reagan's plan is echoed by Governor Pete Wilson
today, to place the responsibility of rehabilitating young
offenders squarely on the shoulders of local communities.
But as the proposal became known more publicly, a swell of
controversy surrounded it. It ended in a fiasco. The inspiration
for the violence center came from three doctors in 1967, five
years before Dr. Brian and Governor Reagan unveiled their plans.
Amidst urban rioting and civil protest, Doctors Sweet, Mark and
Ervin of Harvard put forward the thesis that individuals who
engage in civil disobedience possess defective or damaged brain
cells. If this conclusion were applied to the American Revolution
or the Women's Rights Movement, a good portion of American
society would be labeled as having brain damage.
In a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association,
they stated: "That poverty, unemployment, slum housing, and
inadequate education underlie the nation's urban riots is well
known, but the obviousness of these causes may have blinded us to
the more subtle role of other possible factors, including brain
dysfunction in the rioters who engaged in arson, sniping and
physical assault.
"There is evidence from several sources that brain dysfunction
related to a focal lesion plays a significant role in the violent
and assaultive behavior of thoroughly studied patients.
Individuals with electroencephalographic abnormalities in the
temporal region have been found to have a much greater frequency
of behavioral abnormalities (such as poor impulse control,
assaultiveness, and psychosis) than is present in people with a
normal brain wave pattern."
Soon after the publication in the Journal, Dr. Ervin and Dr. Mark
published their book Violence and the Brain, which included the
claim that there were as many as 10 million individuals in the
United States "who suffer from obvious brain disease". They
argued that the data of their book provided a strong reason for
starting a program of mass screening of Americans.
"Our greatest danger no longer comes from famine or communicable
disease. Our greatest danger lies in ourselves and in our fellow
humans...we need to develop an 'early warning test' of limbic
brain function to detect those humans who have a low threshold
for impulsive violence...Violence is a public health problem, and
the major thrust of any program dealing with violence must be
toward its prevention," they wrote.
The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funded the doctors
$108,000 and the National Institute of Mental Health kicked in
another $500,000, under pressure from Congress. They believed
that psychosurgery would inevitably be performed in connection
with the program, and that, since it irreversibly impaired
people's emotional and intellectual capacities, it could be used
as an instrument of repression and social control.
The doctors wanted screening centers established throughout the
nation. In California, the publicity associated with the doctors'
report, aided in the development of The Center for the study and
Reduction of Violence. Both the state and LEAA provided the
funding. The center was to serve as a model for future facilities
to be set up throughout the United States.
The Director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute and chairman of
the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA, Dr. Louis Jolyon West was
selected to run the center. Dr. West is alleged to have been a
contract agent for the CIA, who, as part of a network of doctors
and scientists, gathered intelligence on hallucinogenic drugs,
including LSD, for the super-secret MK-ULTRA program. Like
Captain White (see part three of the series), West conducted LSD
experiments for the CIA on unwitting citizens in the safehouses
of San Francisco. He achieved notoriety for his injection of a
massive dose of LSD into an elephant at the Oklahoma Zoo, the
elephant died when West tried to revive it by administering a
combination of drugs.
Dr. West was further known as the psychiatrist who was called
upon to examine Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin. It was
on the basis of West's diagnosis that Ruby was compelled to be
treated for mental disorders and put on happy pills. The West
examination was ordered after Ruby began to say that he was part
of a right-wing conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy. Two
years after the commencement of treatment for mental disorder,
Ruby died of cancer in prison.
After January 11, 1973, when Governor Reagan announced plans for
the Violence Center, West wrote a letter to the then Director of
Health for California, J. M. Stubblebine.
"Dear Stub:
"I am in possession of confidential in formation that the Army is
prepared to turn over Nike missile bases to state and local
agencies for non-military purposes. They may look with special
favor on health-related applications.
"Such a Nike missile base is located in the Santa Monica
Mountains, within a half-hour's drive of the Neuropsychiatric
Institute. It is accessible, but relatively remote. The site is
securely fenced, and includes various buildings and improvements,
making it suitable for prompt occupancy.
"If this site were made available to the Neuropsychiatric
Institute as a research facility, perhaps initially as an adjunct
to the new Center for the Prevention of Violence, we could put it
to very good use. Comparative studies could be carried out
there, in an isolated but convenient location, of experimental or
model programs for the alteration of undesirable behavior.
"Such programs might include control of drug or alcohol abuse,
modification of chronic anti-social or impulsive aggressiveness,
etc. The site could also accommodate conferences or retreats for
instruction of selected groups of mental-health related
professionals and of others (e.g., law enforcement personnel,
parole officers, special educators) for whom both demonstration
and participation would be effective modes of instruction.
"My understanding is that a direct request by the Governor, or
other appropriate officers of the State, to the Secretary of
Defense (or, of course, the President), could be most likely to
produce prompt results."
Some of the planned areas of study for the Center included:
*Studies of violent individuals.
*Experiments on prisoners from Vacaville and Atascadero, and
hyperkinetic children.
*Experiments with violence-producing and violent inhibiting
drugs.
*Hormonal aspects of passivity and aggressiveness in boys.
*Studies to discover and compare norms of violence among
various ethnic groups.
*Studies of pre-delinquent children.
It would also encourage law enforcement to keep computer files on
pre-delinquent children, which would make possible the treatment
of children before they became delinquents.
The purpose of the Violence Center was not just research. The
staff was to include sociologists, lawyers, police officers,
clergymen and probation officers. With the backing of Governor
Reagan and Dr. Brian, West had secured guarantees of prisoner
volunteers from several California correctional institutions,
including Vacaville. Vacaville and Atascadero were chosen as the
primary sources for the human guinea pigs. These institutions
had established a reputation, by that time, of committing some of
the worst atrocities in West Coast history. Some of the
experimentations differed little from what the Nazis did in the
death camps.
...
Dr. Earl Brian, Governor Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Health, was
adamant about his support for mind control centers in California.
He felt the behavior modification plan of the Violence Control
Centers was important in the prevention of crime.
The Violence Control Center was actually the brain child of
William Herrmann as part of a pacification plan for California. A
counter insurgency expert for Systems Development Corporation and
an advisor to Governor Reagan, Herrmann worked with the Stand
Research Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the Hoover Center
on Violence. Herrman was also a CIA agent who is now serving an
eight year prison sentence for his role in a CIA counterfeiting
operation. He was also directly linked with the Iran-Contra
affair according to government records and Herrmann's own
testimony.
In 1970, Herrmann worked with Colston Westbrook as his CIA
control officer when Westbrook formed and implemented the Black
Cultural Association at the Vacaville Medical Facility, a
facility which in July experienced the death of three inmates who
were forcibly subjected to behavior modification drugs. The Black
Cultural Association was ostensibly an education program designed
to instill black pride identity in prisons, the Association was
really a cover for an experimental behavior modification pilot
project designed to test the feasibility of programming unstable
prisoners to become more manageable.
Westbrook worked for the CIA in Vietnam as a psychological
warfare expert, and as an advisor to the Korean equivalent of the
CIA and for the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia. Between 1966 and
1969, he was an advisor to the Vietnamese Police Special Branch
under the cover of working as an employee of Pacific Architects
and Engineers.
His "firm" contracted the building of the interrogation/torture
centers in every province of South Vietnam as part of the CIA's
Phoenix Program. The program was centered around behavior
modification experiments to learn how to extract information from
prisoners of war, a direct violation of the Geneva Accords.
Westbrook's most prominent client at Vacaville was Donald
DeFreeze, who be tween 1967 and 1969, had worked for the Los
Angeles Police Department's Public Disorder Intelligence unit and
later became the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Many
authorities now believe that the Black Cultural Association at
Vacaville was the seedling of the SLA. Westbrook even designed
the SLA logo, the cobra with seven heads, and gave De Freeze his
African name of Cinque. The SLA was responsible for the
assassination of Marcus Foster, superintendent of School in
Oakland and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.
As a counterinsurgency consultant for Systems Development
Corporation, a security firm, Herrmann told the Los Angeles Times
that a good computer intelligence system "would separate out the
activist bent on destroying the system" and then develop a master
plan "to win the hearts and minds of the people". The San
Francisco-based Bay Guardian, recently identified Herrmann as an
international arms dealer working with Iran in 1980, and possibly
involved in the October Surprise. Herrmann is in an English
prison for counterfeiting. He allegedly met with Iranian
officials to ascertain whether the Iranians would trade arms for
hostages held in Lebanon.
The London Sunday Telegraph confirmed Herrmann's CIA connections,
tracing them from 1976 to 1986. He also worked for the FBI. This
information was revealed in his London trial.
In the 1970's, Dr. Brian and Herrmann worked together under
Governor Reagan on the Center for the Study and Reduction of
Violence, and then, a decade later, again worked under Reagan.
Both men have been identified as working for Reagan with the
Iranians.
The Violence Center, however, died an agonizing death. Despite
the Ervin Senate Committee investigation and chastation of mind
control, the experiments continued. But when the Watergate
scandal broke in the early 1970's, Washington felt it was too
politically risky to continue to push for mind control centers.
Top doctors began to withdraw from the proposal because they felt
that there were not enough safeguards. Even the Law Enforcement
Assistance Agency, which funded the program, backed out, stating,
the proposal showed "little evidence of established research
ability of the kind of level necessary for a study of this cope".
Eventually it became known that control of the Violence Center
was not going to rest with the University of California, but
instead with the Department of Corrections and other law
enforcement officials. This information was released publicly by
the Committee Opposed to Psychiatric Abuse of Prisoners. The
disclosure of the letter resulted in the main backers of the
program bowing out and the eventual demise of the center.
Dr. Brian's final public statement on the matter was that the
decision to cut off funding represented "a callous disregard for
public safety". Though the Center was not built, the mind
control experiments continue to this day.
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
