Four Prominent Experts Weigh In on the 2005 Government Mind Control Debate

by Gloria Naylor, mindjustice.org
April 14th 2005

William Arkin's 2005 book Code Names is a succinct and impressive account of the post 9-11 system of U.S. government secrecy. The New York Review of Books, May 26th, 2005 stated; "Arkin believes that the classification system has developed a momentum of its own, uncoupled from the legitimate demands of operational secrecy, and become a life support system for policies and activities-like the invasion of Iraq-which would not hold up under the light of public or congressional scrutiny."

Seymour Hersh, the well-known investigative reporter wrote; "William Arkin makes amateurs of all of us who think we know something about America's constantly expanding hidden world. Code Names is quite simply a stunning array of secrets and super-secrets that Arkin has put together in a way that makes it easy for any citizen to comprehend..."

In the mid 1990s, as a student majoring in government at California State University, Sacramento, I networked with William Arkin, then a Human Rights Watch Arms Project analyst. I sent Arkin several russian newspaper articles on mind control and the proposed russian legislation to ban russian mind control weapons which became available as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Arkin reviewed the information and advised me to find government documents or solid scientific evidence before a group such as Human Rights Watch could take on the issue of mind control weapons and illegal government experiments.

Arkin's book excerpts and Democracy Now interview excerpts below provide a reliable explanation for how mind control weapons would be classified

Page 13;

As I have learned in compiling this directory, most genuine secrets ironically remain secret. Enormous segments of the activities of the military and Intelligence Community remain safely under wraps and represent an even more staggeringly complex secret world.

Page 14;

Yet Abu Ghraib is like every other national security surprise: We cannot know who the players are or what they are up to until after disaster strikes." [Arkin lists disasters including] "...domestic spying operations, illegal weapons developments, and human experimentation".

Arkin's book corroborates the 1991 Guardian article and Ronson's book. Page 13;

...Beyond the ridiculous, though, there is a rapidly growing army of secret "special mission units" that are beyond scrutiny and increasingly a law unto themselves. SAPs, moreover, include a fair share of weapons and capabilities that are secret only because they might be perceived as repugnant (high-powered microwaves or blinding lasers), illegal (domestic programs that obscure the lines restricting what the military and Intelligence Community can do inside the United States), or downright dangerous (capabilities being developed to go beyond nuclear weapons in cyber-warfare and directed-energy weaponry to nullify enemy weapons- perfectly logical on the one hand, but potentially destabilizing if Russia or some other nuclear power ever perceived that they were part of a "first strike" program).

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now 2005 Interview William Arkin

Thursday, January 27th, 2005. More information available at codenames.org. Complete interview at democracynow.org.

...We speak with military analyst, William Arkin, author of the new book Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World. ...I began by asking him why he published the book.

WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, I'm in a position as a journalist and a military expert to collect a lot of this information. I guess it has been a passion of mine to follow the secret and not-so-secret meanderings of the military over the years.

It seemed to me that there was an incredible explosion of secrecy after 9/11, and I guess I just felt compelled to do what it is that I was asking the government to do, which is to put it out there. I felt like if I had hoarded that information or kept it for my own use, then I would be no better than what I'm criticizing the government for doing.

And I also believe that, you know, there are secrets and there are secrets, and merely because the government stamps something classified or claims that it is secret doesn't make it so. And I wanted to challenge the trivial secrecy because it seemed to me that was also the area where we got into the most trouble.

Scandal follows secrecy like night follows day. And to me, I felt compelled, both as a citizen and then as an expert, to put as much out there as I could, so that people would be able to understand better the kind of world that we are building after 9/11.

...

WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, I have been doing this for a long time. I think one of the first jobs I had was working for a little non-profit in Washington, DC called the Center for Defense Information. This was in the early 1980's. And I was -- I worked on an article relating to where all the nuclear weapons were in Germany, US nuclear weapons. And I pieced it together by looking at telephone books and various military manuals. And I promptly was fired from my job. You know, big deal. In a way, I can't work somewhere that's not going to support the notion of openness.

As I say in the introduction to the book, you either believe in democracy or you don't. You believe in openness or you don't. There's no way I'm going to convince you of it if you don't believe in it.

So I have been doing this now for almost 30 years. I wrote a book in the 1980's that revealed where all the nuclear weapons were around the world. The Reagan administration was not very happy about it and came down on me pretty hard. And --

AMY GOODMAN: How?

WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, they threatened to throw me in jail. And it took many months of negotiations with the Reagan administration to convince them that I had not used any access to classified information in order to compile that book. That was the key that they would have used as the excuse to put me in jail. So it took many, many months to do that. It was quite a hairy time.

...

AMY GOODMAN: William Arkin, let's step back for a minute to the Pentagon's so-called "black budget." How much of it is secret? How much of it is there congressional overview?

WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, you know, when you look at a guide book of 3,000-plus code names, 600 of which have never been in the public domain before, which means they're not in the budget, they're not in newspaper articles, they've never been published, you know, one of the things that you got to conclude from that is: How can anybody in Congress monitor and oversee all of this activity? I mean, I've spent years on this and have a very tentative grasp upon all of these secrets.

So, I know that there is a statutory requirement for the Pentagon to report the existence of special access programs to the Congress on an annual basis. But most people would be surprised to know that that's done in the form of, literally, a report.

A list of names gets sent forward with a one or two-line description of what the program is, and there are literally a half dozen people within the entire U.S. Congress who have a high enough clearance to read that report.

So, when you're talking about hundreds of programs, and then you're talking about layers of different types of special access programs, I think we can all agree they don't get very effective oversight.

So, you have the double problem of the compartmentalization itself used as a way of avoiding oversight within the Defense Department and within the government.

Lawyers or others don't have access to all these programs; and then you have Congress which is only sort of perfunctorily made aware of the existence of these programs as well.

So, I would conclude, as we've watched again and again and again during the Abu Ghraib scandal or during the whole debate over the handling of prisoners in Guantanamo, that Congress is not effectively monitoring what's going on.

They have a tentative grasp upon the totality of U.S. military and intelligence activities around the world and one of the devices that's used to ensure that the Congress isn't able to monitor it is this alphabet soup of code names which is basically employed to keep it secret.

Arkin described the significant changes of a vast and Byzantine cold war government secrecy system in the post 9-11 world of secrecy. At a minimum, what is lacking today, are public commentaries and discussions on mind control weapons and their characteristics and dangers which go beyond the atomic bomb.

Arkin's book raises the likelihood of developing mind control weapons completely lacking in accountability and oversight. Arkin predicted future scandals as a result of this out-of-control massive secrecy system, including illegal weapons development and human experiments.

Original Page: http://mindjustice.org/experts_6-05.htm

Shared from Read It Later

אל