Dear Survivors, HEALers, (& Friends):
The following is a quote taken from The COINTELPRO
Papers by Churchill and Vander Wall. The
entire book is a look at egregious abuses of the federal government using
federal documents obtained through FOIA requests to evidence the statements
made in the book. I have to read this
book for the Junior Seminar class at the Univ. of WA that I told you
about. It is assigned reading for a
college course. It is not some wing-nut
conspiracy theory. Okay!? Okay...
Now, for you survivors, you will recognize the methods described in the
"experimental prisons" as the same used on us in behavior
modification programs.
"In some ways more to the point of what is occurring is the nature
of the prison facilities the federal system has begun to spawn. Based generally on the "Stammhein
Model" perfected by West Germany during the early 1970's, these include
the Marion "super-max" prison for men in southern Illinois, and the
Marianna prison's high security unit (HSU) for women in northern Florida. The Marianna facility was piloted at the
federal women's prison at Lexington, Kentucky during the 1980's. Its purpose was unabashedly political as is
demonstrated in the U.S. Bureau of Prison's official criteria for
incarceration:
[A] prisoner's past or present affiliation, association or membership in
an organization which has been demonstrated as being involved in acts of violence,
attempts to disrupt or overthrow the government of the U.S. or whose published
ideology include advocating law violations in order to "free"
prisoners. (cited as citation 92 in the book, buy it now)
Constructed some thirty feet underground in total isolation from the
outside world, painted entirely white to induce sensory deprivation, with naked
flourescent lights burning 24 hours per day and featuring rules severely
restricting diet, correspondence, reading material, and visits, the HSU was
deliberately designed to psychologically debilitate those imprisoned
there. This was coupled to a program of
intentional degradation in which the incarcerated women were strip searched,
often by male guards, and observed by male guards while showering and using the
toilets. Perhaps worst of all, the
Bureau of Prisons (BoP) refused to set any formal criteria by which the women might
work their way back out of the HSU once they were confined there. The objective was to invoke in them a sense
of being totally at the mercy of and dependent upon their keepers. (cited as
citation 93 in the book) In the polite
language of the John Howard Association:
Through a year or more of sensory and psychological deprivation,
prisoners are stripped of their individual identities in order that compliant
behavior patterns can be implanted, a process of mortification and
depersonalization.
The techniques involved have been described by Amnesty International in
the accompanying chart (not added into this message, buy or borrow the
book). As early as 1962, Dr. Edgar
Schein described the methodology at issue rather more straightforwardly in an
address to all federal maximum security prison wardens in Washington, D.C.:
In order to produce marked changes in behavior, it is necessary to
weaken, undermine, or remove supports for old attitudes. I would like you to think of brainwashing
not in terms of... ethics and morals, but in terms of the deliberate changing
of human behavior by a group of men who have relatively complete control over
the environment in which the captives live...[These changes can be induced by]
isolation, sensory deprivation, segregation
of leaders, spying, tricking men into signing written statements which are then
shown to others, placing individuals whose will power has been severely
weakened into a living situation with others more advanced in thought reform,
character invalidation, humiliations,sleeplessness, rewarding subservience, and
fear. (citation 95)
Dr. Richard Korn, in a 1987 report on Lexington commissioned by the
ACLU, framed the matter even more clearly.
In Korn's estimation, the purpose of an HSU-framed the matter even more
clearly. In Korn's estimation, the
purpose of an HSU-style facility is to:
...reduce prisoners to a state of submission essential for their
ideological conversion. That failing,
the next objective is to reduce them to a state of
psychological incompetenece sufficient to neutralize them as efficient,
self-directing antagonists. That
failing, the only alternative is to destroy them, preferably by making them
desperate enough to destroy themselves." (Churchill, pp. 321-322)
Now that we should all be in agreement that the government is actively
using brainwashing techniques on the most vulnerable in our society, those
adults imprisoned (many falsely) and those children in private prisons as paid
for by our tax dollars as well as parent's pocketbooks and insurance companies,
we should all be in agreement that this is the most important issue needing
solving in our society today. The
intentional stripping away of someone's identity is the most grievous and
egregious act and, at least in my opinion, is worse than death. This is
happening in prisons nationwide and will continue to happen as prisons are
privatized and this method is adopted and advanced. This is happening in "private boarding schools"
claiming to "help troubled teens" and instead are, in fact,
brainwashing (or attempting to brainwash) teens who have done nothing but
question authority in an attempt to establish independent identity, something
that is normal when reaching adolescence and that is a healthy part of maturity,
growth, and evolution.
Please do not just block
this information out of denial and fear.
If you believe in your right to be who you are, then you must defend it
now. As you know, the online petition
that was gaining a nice bit of public attention was hacked and destroyed. Survivors are often too afraid of being put
back into the "care" of these psychotic brainwashing fools who don't
consider ethics or morals in their world that often we don't speak out, the
fear being too great. It is up to all
of us to put aside our fears and demand justice and our constitutional and
human rights. As the saying goes,
"use it or lose it." Use your
voices, use your time and the freedoms you do have or lose all of them. That is the choice we are faced with here,
and it is a choice you need to seriously consider when deciding where your
volunteer energy, extra time, or passions are spent. I'm ready and set, when you join in, we can all go!
I look forward to hearing from you.
Please think of ways to get this resolved within the system if
possible. Do we need to have a million
teen march on the capitol? Do we need
to lobby government officials? Can we
trust them since they aren't protecting us now? Should we start with local levies or state propositions/initiatives
demanding third-party human rights regulators (even through Amnesty or the
ACLU) chosen or approved by the public, with no financial or social investments
in the private corporation/prison/school that they are
investigating/regulating, regulate all prisons, psychiatric facilities,
rehabilitative programs, behavior modification programs, and private schools
(for children under 18) to insure that federal and international human rights
laws are being completely obeyed?
The problem right now is that activism is scattered
and that human rights violations or abuses in the prison system are seen as
individual cases and not systemic ills.
They are systemic ills. In order
to cure them, we need to fix the system.
In order to fix a problem, you must find out the cause or the root and
root it out. I believe the grave abuses
of stripping human beings of their identities and instilling new personalities
that are easy to control is the underlying desire of the corrupt leaders of our
society in both government and corporate circles. I believe we must vote out those we know to be corrupt and must
diligently fight for our rights by all means necessary. It is my greatest hope that we can do this
through legal channels and that is where I place my energies. You and I have the power to change
this. We can do it if we work together
and hold on tenaciously to our goals.
Again, I look forward to hearing from you.
Peace,
HEAL Coordinator (and PCS Survivor)