Tavistock - the best kept secret in America

The ideology of American foundations was created by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. In 1921, the Duke of Bedford, Marquess of Tavistock, the 11th Duke, gave a building to the Institute to study the effect of shellshock on British soldiers who survived World War I. Its purpose was to establish the "breaking point" of men under stress, under the direction of the British Army Bureau of Psychological Warfare, commanded by Sir John Rawlings-Reese.

Tavistock Institute is headquartered in London. Its prophet, Sigmond Freud, settled in Maresfield Gardens when he moved to England. He was given a mansion by Princess Bonaparte. Tavistock's pioneer work in behavioral science along Freudian lines of "controlling" humans established it as the world center of foundation ideology. Its network now extends from the University of Sussex to the U.S. through the Stanford Research Institute, Esalen, MIT, Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Center of Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown, where State Dept. personal are trained, US Air Force Intelligence, and the Rand and Mitre corporations. The personnel of the corporations are required to undergo indoctrination at one or more of these Tavistock controlled institutions. A network of secret groups, the Mont Pelerin Society, Trilateral Commission, Ditchley Foundation, and the Club of Rome is conduit for instructions to the Tavistock network.

Tavistock Institute developed the mass brain-washing techniques which were first used experimentally on American prisoners of war in Korea. Its experiments in crowd control methods have been widely used on the American public, a surreptitious but nevertheless outrageous assault on human freedom by modifying individual behavior through topical psychology. A German refugee, Kurt Lewin, became director of Tavistock in 1932. He came to the U.S. in 1933 as a "refugee", the first of many infiltrators, and set up the Harvard Psychology Clinic, which originated the propaganda campaign to turn the American public against Germany and involve us in World War II. In 1938, Roosevelt executed a secret agreement with Churchill which in effect ceded U.S. sovereignty to England, because it agreed to let Special Operations Executive control U.S. policies. To implement this agreement, Roosevelt sent General Donovan to London for indoctrination before setting up OSS (now the CIA) under the aegis of SOE-SIS. The entire OSS program, as well as the CIA has always worked on guidelines set up by the Tavistock Institute.

Tavistock Institute originated the mass civilian bombing raids carried out by Roosevelt and Churchill purely as a clinical experiment in mass terror, keeping records of the results as they watched the "guinea pigs" reacting under "controlled laboratory conditions". All Tavistock and American foundation techniques have a single goal---to break down the psychological strength of the individual and render him helpless to oppose the dictators of the World Order. Any technique which helps to break down the family unit, and family inculcated principles of religion, honor, patriotism and sexual behavior, is used by the Tavistock scientists as weapons of crowd control. The methods of Freudian psychotherapy induce permanent mental illness in those who undergo this treatment by destabilizing their character. The victim is then advised to "establish new rituals of personal interaction", that is, to indulge in brief sexual encounters which actually set the participants adrift with no stable personal relationships in their lives, destroying their ability to establish or maintain a family.

Tavistock Institute has developed such power in the U.S. that no one achieves prominence in any field unless he has been trained in behavioral science at Tavistock or one of its subsidiaries. Henry Kissinger, whose meteoric rise to power is otherwise inexplicable, was a German refugee and student of Sir John Rawlings-Reese at SHAEF. Dr. Peter Bourne, a Tavistock Institute psychologist, picked Jimmy Carter for President of the U.S. solely because Carter had undergone an intensive brainwashing program administered by Admiral Hyman Rickover at Annapolis.

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Heratis suspect Iran of cultural sabotage

Trouble is brewing in Herat, the ancient and beautiful city in western Afghanistan that has served as a cultural capital for centuries.   It was once famously said that you could not stick your leg out in Herat without kicking a poet, and the city's 3500 years of history have yielded a rich collection of sites and artefacts that are prized the world over.   But Herat's multi-layered past is in danger of disappearing, victim of the general destruction and lawlessness of the past three decades. Local officials are attempting to place the blame on Iran, a country with which Afghanistan has had a very complicated relationship of late.  According to statistics compiled by the Herat Department for the Preservation of Historic Sites, Herat has lost more than 100 sites or artefacts since the city was added to UNESCO's tentative list of World Heritage Centres in 2004.  Ayamuddin Ajmal, head of the department, told IWPR that over the past few months the city's historical sites and artefacts have been targeted even more than usual, resulting in significant losses.  According to Ajmal, 22 artefacts, some of them more than 3,000 years old, were taken from the National Museum of Herat in late September. Twelve historical sites, including an ancient mosque and engraved headstones in a cemetery, have also been desecrated in recent weeks.  While Ajmal refused to speculate on who might be behind the thefts and vandalism, other government officials have not been so reticent. The target of their ire is Iran, a country that has been accused of meddling in Afghanistan's affairs over the past several years.  Neamatullah Sarwari, head of the Department of Information and Culture Department in Herat, told IWPR that Iran was motivated by competition for UNESCO – the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation – World Heritage Centre status.  “A number of circles and individuals in our neighbouring countries, who share a similar culture with us, want to sabotage the process of Herat province's inclusion on the UNESCO list,” he said.  Once on the list, an historical site is eligible for UNESCO funding and restoration projects. So far in Afghanistan, only Bamian and the Minaret of Jam have acquired the sought after status.  “According to our information, Isfahan, in Iran is also one of the nominees for the UNESCO list,” said Sarwari. “This has raised suspicions that specific individuals in Iran are orchestrating the thefts of historical artefacts and participating in the destruction of historical sites.”  Sarwari cited the recent break-in at the National Museum of Herat, which, he maintained, could not have been accomplished without the assistance of a foreign power.  ~ more... ~  

Adam Curtis - The Living Dead

Part 1: On the Desperate Edge of Now


This episode examined how the various national memories of the Second World War were effectively rewritten and manipulated in the Cold War period. For Germany, this began at the Nuremberg Trials, where attempts were made to prevent the Nazis in the dock—principally Hermann Göring—from offering any rational argument for what they had done. Subsequently, however, bringing lower-ranking Nazis to justice was effectively forgotten about in the interests of maintaining West Germany as an ally in the Cold War. For the Allied countries, faced with a new enemy in the Soviet Union, there was a need to portray WW2 as a crusade of pure good against pure evil, even if this meant denying the memories of the Allied soldiers who had actually done the fighting, and knew it to have been far more complex. A number of American veterans, including the writer Kurt Vonnegut, told how years later they found themselves plagued with the previously-suppressed memories of the brutal things they had seen and done. The title comes from a veteran's description of what the uncertainty of survival while in combat is like.


Part 2 - You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough


In this episode, the history of brainwashing and mind control was examined. The angle pursued by Curtis was the way in which psychiatry pursued tabula rasa theories of the mind, initially in order to set people free from traumatic memories and then later as a potential instrument of social control. The work of Ewen Cameron was surveyed, with particular reference to Cold War theories of communist brainwashing and the search for hypnoprogammed assassins. The programme's thesis was that the search for control over the past via medical intervention had had to be abandoned and that in modern times control over the past is more effectively exercised by the manipulation of history. Some film from this episode, an interview with one of Cameron's victims, was later re-used by Curtis in his The Century of the Self. The title of this episode comes from a paranoid schizophrenic seen in archive film in the programme, who believed her neighbours were using her as a source of amusement by denying her any privacy, like a pet goldfish.


Part 3: The Attic


In this episode, the Imperial aspirations of Margaret Thatcher were examined. The way in which Mrs Thatcher used public relations in an attempt to emulate Winston Churchill in harking back to Britain's "glorious past" to fulfil a political or national end. The title is a reference to the attic flat at the top of 10 Downing Street, which was created during Thatcher's period refurbishment of the house, which did away with the Prime Minister's previous living quarters on lower floors. Scenes from The Innocents (film) the adaptation of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James are intercut with Thatcher's reign.

CEOs “cashed out” prior to economic crisis

Balzac's maxim that "behind every great fortune lies a great crime" may yet prove a fitting epitaph for American capitalism. A recent survey by the Wall Street Journal reveals that CEOs at major US financial and real estate firms converted tens of millions of dollars of overvalued stock into cash prior to the eruption of the current financial crisis, even as many of their corporations approached the precipice.

The Journal analyzed the fortunes of CEOs from 2003 to 2007 based on executive compensation and stock sale data. Fifteen of these CEOs took home more than $100 million in cash during this period. At the high end was Charles Schwab, who made over $816 million from his self-named accounting firm, almost all of it from stock sales.

Of the 120 publicly traded firms the Journal analyzed, CEOs cashed out a total of more than $21 billion. However, data was gathered only from publicly traded companies, and thus does not include similar fortunes that have been made by "hedge fund chiefs, Wall Street traders, and executives who sold their companies outright." Nor did it include data related to exit packages, the multimillion-dollar "golden parachutes" awarded to retiring or fired executives.

The Journal's findings underscore the parasitism and criminality of the US financial elite. Defenders have long justified extravagant CEO pay by claiming that these were the talented "risk-takers" who generated enormous wealth for investors. But the Journal's data shows that there is no correlation between compensation and a firm's success. On the contrary, many CEOs rewarded themselves just as their corporations approached ruin.

These included Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, who transformed his firm's stock into well over $100 million in cash. When added to his salary and bonuses, Fuld pocketed nearly $185 million in the five years before 2008, even as he guided his 150-year-old investment bank to ruin. James Cayne of Bear Stearns did nearly as well at his investment bank, collecting over $163.2 million, the vast majority of which was garnered from selling stock that would soon be scarcely worth the paper upon which it was printed.

Maurice Greenberg of American International Group (AIG) made $132.8 million between 2003 and 2005, when he was forced to resign. Well over $100 million of this came from windfall stock sales of the giant insurer. AIG collapsed in September, but was determined to be "too big to fail" by the federal government, and was bailed out twice in less than one month to the tune of some $120 billion.

In August, the sub-prime mortgage giant Countrywide Financial Group collapsed spectacularly, and was absorbed by Bank of America. In the previous five years, however, Countrywide's CEO, Angelo Mozilo, took home $471 million, over $400 million of which came from sales of the company's soon-to-be-worthless stock.

A look at the sectors of the economy where these richly remunerated executives worked, moreover, demonstrates the advanced rot of the US economy as a whole. Without exception, they represented corporations that engaged in financial speculation—"industries closely tied to the financial crisis," as the Journal puts it—and that produced no real value. These until recently "vibrant" parts of the economy functioned only to siphon off enormous social wealth and deposit it in the bank accounts of the CEOs and big investors.

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Evidence suggests CIA funded experiments at state hospital

Few people in Vermont remember Dr. Robert W. Hyde, but one of his former patients can't forget him. The doctor was involved in one of the nation's darkest chapters in medical science: In the 1950s, Hyde conducted drug and psychological experiments at a Boston hospital through funding that apparently originated with the CIA. Later, he became director of research at the Vermont State Hospital.

The patient, Karen Wetmore, is convinced that Hyde and other researchers subjected her and possibly other patients to experiments paid for by the CIA at the Waterbury facility.

In addition to her claim, new evidence, though incomplete, suggests that such tests might have been conducted at the Vermont State Hospital.

Several books and numerous newspaper accounts have detailed how techniques developed through testing, including on mental health patients at hospitals in other parts of the country, are related to the interrogation methods used in Guantanamo and other locations in the war on terror. These well-known and well-documented drug experiments began in secret after the Korean War and were sponsored by the U.S. government.

News accounts and histories of the experiments have not mentioned the Vermont State Hospital, but a congressional committee concluded that dozens of institutions, some of which have never been identified, were involved in secret experiments for the CIA.


A complicated, disturbing story

Wetmore, who grew up in Brandon and now lives in Rutland, resided at the Vermont State Hospital for extended periods in her teens and early 20s.

Hyde had a long and distinguished career as a psychiatrist and university researcher before he returned to Vermont in the late 1960s. He died in Bakersfield, his birthplace, in 1976.

This story centers on the possible intersection of Hyde's research work and Wetmore's experiences at the state hospital. The strands of the narrative, constructed from government documents and her memory, is complicated, confusing and sometimes disturbing.

Her claim, that the Waterbury hospital was involved in experimentation on patients, has never been reported despite numerous instances in which it could have come to public attention, including a lawsuit that Wetmore settled out of court.

Further complicating matters is Wetmore's severe memory loss, which she says is the result of her treatment at the Vermont State Hospital where she says she was given experimental drugs, experienced repetitive electroshock therapy and was subjected unwittingly to other tests. Her medical records from the Vermont State Hospital, including daily logs and summaries of her treatment support these claims.

Another obstacle for Wetmore is the social stigma of mental illness. She says once a patient is committed to a mental hospital, "the first thing they take away from you is your credibility."

In order to figure out what really happened to her at the Vermont State Hospital and to overcome this credibility gap, Wetmore has spent more than 12 years collecting and analyzing reams of government documents, including state hospital records, declassified CIA paperwork and histories of MK-Ultra, the code name of the CIA's best-known clandestine research projects on mind-control.

At many points Wetmore reached dead ends: The government denied her requests for certain documents and heavily redacted key evidence from others. Some documents were destroyed.

In 1997, Wetmore decided to bring a lawsuit against the state. A psychiatrist and a Rutland lawyer agreed to help her with the case and spent months collecting and poring over evidence. They both came to the conclusion that Wetmore was the subject of drug experiments at the hospital.

 

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