February 14, 2009
from
ArtificialTelepathy Website
George Orwell introduced the
concept of the "Thought
Police" in his dystopian novel
1984.
According to Kathleen Taylor in her own book,
Brainwashing: The
Science of Thought Control (2006),
"It is
the job of the Thought Police to uncover and punish thought-crime and
thought-criminals, using psychology and omnipresent surveillance
from telescreens to find and eliminate members of society who were
capable of the mere thought of challenging ruling authority."
Does such a system exist in the United States today? Signs point to
yes.
Granted, the United States remains a republic, and it has just
completed a new cycle of elections. Its liberal constitution and
principles of democratic representation seem to be standing firmly
in place.
Its flag waves proudly.
But there is a growing body of evidence that this country, once
"conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men
are created equal," has devolved into a paranoid police state, much
like the authoritarian state described by George Orwell in 1984.
One may find, simply by searching the internet, plenty of evidence
that the United States government is actively involved in all the
basic activities of the "Thought Police" exactly as listed above:
-
The uncovering and punishment of thought crime and thought
criminals
-
The use of psychology to profile
and identify "potential" criminals, terrorists and
subversives within society
-
The use of "omni present surveillance from telescreens" to create
what Harlan Girard calls "an Electronic Concentration Camp System"
- a grid or matrix from which no person can escape
In each of these activities, the new mind-invasive technologies
known collectively as artificial telepathy play a key role.
Uncovering and Punishing Thought Crime
As documented in many other posts on this blog, mind-invasive
technologies have begun to play a key role in the uncovering and
punishment of "thought-crime."
The prime example is the Department of Homeland Security's new
Malintent program mentioned in the previous post.
By scanning
the faces of people at airports and reading other vital signs like
heart rate, temperature and blood pressure, new sensors and computer
algorithms can be used to read the intentions of airplane passengers
- and presumably to prevent "potential terrorists" from boarding
planes by means of "pre-emptive arrest."
One must emphasize here that reading a person's intentions with a
camera and a computer is probably not much more reliable than a
classic lie detector test, and very little scientific evidence
exists to support the claims that these machines are accurate. The
important thing to note is that the Department of Homeland Security
seriously intends to use these machines as a pretext for pre-emptive
arrest - that is, they intend to arrest people for crimes not yet
committed.
Arresting a person for a crime not yet committed, on the basis of
perceived intent, amounts to arresting people for thought crimes.
Use of Psychological Profiling to Detect and Detain "Potential"
Criminals
As Jim Marrs points out in his new book
The Rise of The Fourth
Reich - The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America
(2008), these "mind reading" computer systems are,
"reminiscent of prewar Nazi plans to preempt crime and dissent."
(p.
333)
For example, Nazi psychologists used pseudo-scientific examinations
and the doctrine of preemption to remove "uneducable" children from
grade schools. If a number of symptoms indicated that a child was
"bad student material," their name would be registered on a list.
It
was stated that "genetic and national health considerations
recommend their preventative registration."
"Of course," says Marrs, "such registration led to the euthanasia
centers."
Marrs rightly calls "disturbing" the new trend to identify and
detain potential troublemakers before they have actually committed a
crime.
Terrorist Watch List - or Black List?
In its efforts to intercept "suspected terrorists," the Department
of Homeland Security has added more than one million names to its
terrorist watch list. The American Civil Liberties Union suggests
this number is way too high.
"Terrorist watch lists," it says, "must be tightly focused on true
terrorists who pose a genuine threat. Bloated lists are bad because
they ensnare many innocent travelers as suspected terrorists, and
because they waste screeners' time and divert their energies from
looking for true terrorists."
Among the individuals whose names were found on the list by 60
Minutes and other media organizations:
Now one must admit that certain children really are terrible brats,
who ought to be watched more closely by their parents, but,
-
Is it
really necessary for the secret police to become involved?
-
And if a
United States Senator can be listed as a "suspect," then who is
above suspicion?
A "terrorist" watch list that includes the names of more than one
million people seems to be clear evidence that the Department of
Homeland Security is either a) very paranoid indeed, or b) very
interested in using terrorism as a pretext for spying on U.S.
citizens who have committed no crimes.
That is, they have established a system that allows them to,
"find
and eliminate members of society who are capable of the mere thought
of challenging existing authority."
FTAC - The Fixated Threat Assessment Center
Psychological profiling, black listing and preemptive arrests are
"Thought Police" tactics used in Europe, too, not just in the U.S.
The British have their own system, called FTAC.
In a chapter titled "Psychology and Public Control," Jim Marrs
writes:
"The British government, in May 2007, responding to news
accounts, acknowledge it had secretly established a new national
antiterrorist unit to protect VIPs by first profiling, then
arresting persons considered to be potentially dangerous. Amazingly,
this power to detain suspects even before they actually committed a
crime was based on mental health laws."
Marrs cites a news story by London Times reporter Joanna Bale. She
reports that,
"until now it has been up to mental health
professionals to determine if someone should be forcibly detained,
but the new unit uses the police to identify suspects, increasing
fears that distinctions are being blurred between criminal
investigations and doctors' clinical decisions."
Experts believe that this arrangement,
"is set to reignite
controversy over the detention of suspects without trial."
"There is grave danger of this being used to deal with people where
there is insufficient evidence for a criminal prosecution," said
Gareth Crossman, policy director for Britain's National Council for
Civil Liberties.
"This blurs the line between medical decisions and police actions.
If you are going to allow doctors to take people's liberty away,
they have to be independent. That credibility is undermined when the
doctors are part of the same team as the police. This raises serious
concerns. First, that you have a unit that allows police
investigation to lead directly to people being sectioned without any
kind of criminal proceedings. Secondly, it is being done under the
umbrella of antiterrorism at a time when the government is looking
for ways to detain terrorists without putting them on trial."
Scotland Yard has refused to discuss how many suspects have been
forcibly hospitalized by the team, because of "patient
confidentiality."
Meanwhile, conservative members of the British
government have hailed FTAC as the first joint mental health -
police unit in the United Kingdom and a "prototype for future joint
services" in other areas.
They are introducing legislation to
broaden the definition of mental disorders to give doctors - and
now police - more power to detain people.
Mass Surveillance and the 'Electronic Concentration Camp'
Jim Marrs worries that joint psychologist-police units like the FTAC
in Britain might serve as a prototype for similar units in the U.S.
"Is this coming to America soon?" Marrs asks.
Harlan Girard would probably answer:
"It's already here!"
Mr. Girard is the Managing Director of the International Committee
Opposing Microwave Weapons (ICOMW), and he firmly
believes that the United States government has already established
what he calls an Electronic Concentration Camp System (ECCS).
Essentially, the ECCS is a network of microwave towers and broadcast
centers that can virtually imprison any citizen of the United States
that the Thought Police wish to target. It's a people zapping
system, used to track, torture and psychologically harass
inconvenient people who, for one reason or another, have been placed
on the government's long list of enemies.
To support this claim, Girard has amassed an impressive collection
of documents, posted at
the website's archive.
The documents in this archive clearly indicate that the U.S.
government has no need of the small FTAC units used by the British
Government. The number of peace protestors and politically
"inconvenient" people who have suddenly begun to hear voices in
their heads strongly suggests that the U.S. government has built and
fielded something much bigger, much more powerful, and much more
scary: a fully developed and fully operational Electronic
Concentration Camp System.
If the secret police, operating under the umbrella of
counterterrorism, wish to "section" an inconvenient citizen "without
any criminal proceedings," they simply enroll that individual into
the ECCS.
Technically, the "Targeted Individuals" remain free, but they are
tortured 24/7 with microwave weapons, often to the point of losing
their minds.
They hear voices and experience a wide variety of
horrible sensations. If they voluntarily turn themselves in to a
psychiatric hospital, they are immediately diagnosed as
schizophrenic and sectioned. Thus they are discredited and
stigmatized for life. Those who turn to mainstream media are openly
mocked.
In 2007, The Washington Post did a profile on Mr. Girard and other
voice hearers,
who are commonly called "wavies."
While the reporter kept a skeptical distance from Mr. Girard, she
did at least do some background research on mind-invasive
technologies. The Post filed an FOIA request with the U.S. Air Force
and did manage to obtain documents showing that the Air Force
Research Laboratory (AFRL) has conducted several "voice to skull"
experiments during the past decade.
It may be interesting to note that AFRL is also one of the primary
research sponsors (along with the Navy) for the High-Frequency
Active Auroral Reasearch Project (HAARP) - a 35-acre antenna farm
near Fairbanks, Alaska, that is powerful enough to focus microwave
beams anywhere on the face of the earth.
According to Dr. Nick Begich, author of the book
Angels Don't Play
This HAARP, the Air Force can broadcast
from these antennae at frequencies that match the frequency range of
the human brain.
In Chapter 23 "Psychocivilized Society and the CIA," Dr. Begich
explores "the use of electromagnetic waves for mind manipulation,"
and concludes that it would be very possible to use HAARP as a
non-lethal weapon that could be rationalized as an alternative to
military force.
Whether HAARP acts as the hub of the ECCS is another question. HAARP
certainly operates as part of the Air Force's "Star Wars" ballistic
missile early warning system, scanning for Soviet Missile launches.
That means it is a subordinate wing of NORAD, the North American
Air-Defense Command - an underground city buried beneath Cheyenne
Mountain near Colorado Springs.
NORAD is a "hardened" and extremely secure underground site,
equipped with supercomputers and direct uplinks to a wide variety of
top secret space platforms and space-based beam weapons. It makes an
excellent candidate for the HQ of the kind of "Electronic
Concentration Camp" that Harlan Girard has envisioned.
NORAD certainly does have full access to the kinds of spy satellites
and laser beams that worry the "wavies."
It may incorporate many
other systems besides HAARP, and it may be no accident that the
Sci-Fi series "Stargate" is supposedly set in NORAD's underground
bunker.
Given NORAD's vast array of high-tech toys and its direct links to
the Pentagon and
the NSA, the possibility that it might be HQ for a
top secret "Thought Police" unit does not seem to be entirely out of
the question.
Total Information Awareness
Civil liberties groups cried "Thought Police" in 2002 when they
first discovered the U.S. Defense Department's Information Awareness
Office and its Total Information Awareness doctrine.
Run for the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) by former Vice
Adm. John Poindexter, the TIA "counterterrorism" program caused
quite a brouhaha because it advocated pre-emptive policing through
use of a massive data mine that would interconnected a wide array of
powerful surveillance systems:
DARPA's own website tells us that,
"The goal of the Total Information
Awareness program is to revolutionize the ability of the United
States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists - and
decipher their plans - and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely
action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts."
http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm
See also "Homegrown
Terrorism Prevention Act" from Project Censored (The Top
25 Censored Stories of 2009)
Under this act, which became law in 2007, local police departments
have been given legal cover for the use of nonlethal, mind-invasive
technology against their own populace. They can now zap "suspects"
in the name of preventing "homegrown terror."
Indeed, pre-emptive policing can be used to rationalize almost every
form of privacy violation. One need simply argue that the rights of
the individual can and must be overridden by police in order to
protect and defend the physical safety of society as a whole.
It's
for the greater good.
Conclusion
What Orwell did was simply to carry the twin doctrines of total
information awareness and preemptive policing to their logical
extreme. He imagined a world in which no one had any right to
privacy whatever. None. All personal privacy is sacrificed on the
altar of national security - for the greater good.
In the sacred name of "national security," the technocrats who run
the nightmarish police state of 1984 arrogantly assume the right to
invade the inner sanctum of the mind itself. They read the thoughts
of every citizen, dabble their fingers in the stuff that souls are
made of, and sit in arrogant, authoritarian judgment over all.
Perhaps the vision of such a police state being realized in 1984 may
cause people to smirk. That was, after all, more than 25 years ago,
and we don't have such a police state now, do we?
To those who smirk, however, I would call attention to the many
patents on mind-invasive technology that may be found listed in the
left-hand column of this blog. I would also point out that the U.S.
Department of Defense did not necessarily do away with DARPA's Information Awareness Office or its
Total Information Awareness
doctrine.
As with most black programs that are discovered by Congress and the
media, these programs have been given new names and parked under the
camouflage of other departments within the intelligence community.
They still exist.
Now consider this:
If the doctrines of pre-emptive policing and
total information awareness remain in place, can the massive use of
mind-invasive technology be far behind?
Orwell may have been off by a few years. But his understanding of
the basic arrogance of intelligence agencies and his vision of a
nightmarish police state were frightfully accurate.
With the quiet
advent of mind-reading technologies, the chilling age of the Thought
Police has secretly, stealthily and finally arrived.
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