A Review of Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense By Jonathan D. Moreno

Dana Press (The Dana Foundation: New York and Washington DC) 2006

Richard Thieme

"What we don't know is so much bigger than we are."

A Haitian Proverb

 

Oh, how I wish that reviewing a book like this were simple and straightforward! That

would mean we live in a world of transparency, government accountability to

citizens, easy access to sources, primary sources willing to go on the record, and

data trails that lead readers to those same sources so everyone can see for

themselves.

 

But alas, we do not live in such a world.

"Mind Wars" is a broad but necessarily incomplete overview of neuroscience,

nanotechnology and related areas applied to the arts of war, with an examination of

ethical issues raised by this work, all considered in a historical context by a

scholar who has researched the field.

 

The key to decoding the book, however, is on page 4 of the introduction.

"I am no loose cannon," writes Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph. D., the Emilie Davie and

Joseph S. Kornfeld Professor and Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the

University of Virginia. "I am deeply entrenched in the non-threatening, even boring,

academic establishment. I've taught at major research universities, hold an endowed

chair at an institution not known as a hotbed of radicalism ." and on the disclaimer

goes, a plea to the reader to recognize that the author is no kook, no "conspiracy

theorist," but a respectable, conventional man.

 

Moreno sounds those notes again, on p. 107, for example, when he states that he has

considerable "experience with government-on the staffs of presidential advisory

committees, in [giving] congressional testimony, and so forth."

 

Those qualifications define the subtext of this work and in many ways the subtext is

the primary content. They also suggest one reason why the exploration of the

frontiers of military research and development and the penetration of the

military-industrial-academic-scientific-media complex is so difficult these days.

Insiders know but can't tell; outsiders can tell, but don't often know, and when

they do know, ridicule and other forms of disinformation can make what they know

seem like fanciful speculation. So they err on the side of extreme caution.

 

Jonathan Moreno is qualified, without a doubt, to survey what is in the public

domain about neuro-weapons and diverse applications of numerous branches of research

that blur the distinctions between government, military, and medical, technological

and scientific research, and he is also qualified to discuss the ethical

implications of this research. So why does he need to insist that he is qualified?

Because black budget (clandestinely funded) science and technology is so large a

percentage of all scientific R&D and so hidden from public view that even to

approach the subject is to enter a force field of distortion and paranoia. One might

as well explore UFOs or time travel-domains of actual research, in fact, but which

must be discussed with a wink or, as Moreno's disclaimers indicate, the trumpeting

of one's credentials, above all credentials of character-respectability and

conventionality-so that one is not marginalized by the mere fact that one has chosen

to explore the domain.

 

Inevitably, researchers of exotic technologies experience a condition called

"strangeness," a kind of cognitive dissonance, and have to push against it to

reestablish clear boundaries.

 

Why has this come about?

Because a national security state has evolved since World War 2 and is now the water

in which we all swim. Moreno describes the history of that evolution and shows that

a great deal of research, including research in the behavioral sciences, has been

determined by a perception of military necessity. Access to the research is

determined by the "need to know" and most readers of this book are "outsiders."

Moreno himself is an insider of sorts, having served as an expert for numerous

government venues, but his credibility depends on continued access and access

depends on behaving rightly. Saying the right things in the right way defines

correct behavior; hence disclaimers that distance him from fringe thinkers without

institutional support or structural authority, like this reviewer.

 

Steven H. Miles, M.D., the author of "Oath Betrayed/Torture, Medical Complicity, and

the War on Terror," states that he is often asked if he fears for his life because

he discussed public documents, thirty five thousand pages of them, which reveal that

medical complicity. That he is even asked such a question, Miles says, "is an

epiphenomenon of being a torturing society. A torturing society is a society that is

abraded by the process of dehumanization. In that process, we essentially create our

own mirrored netherworlds."

 

A mirrored netherworld is exactly what is signified by Moreno's repeated insistence

on credentials that ought to be obvious. His netherworld is a force field of

distortion that attends any venture through the looking-glass of security clearances

to explore areas that are exotic, dangerous, and mostly secret. That force field is

an epiphenomenon of the national security state.

 

Moreno's history of post-WW2 research begins with identifying the transformation of

America into a "garrison state," a nation that views the world as a dangerous place

that requires the United States to project power everywhere in and increasingly out

of the world to be secure. National Security Council document NSC-68, published in

1950, defined this strategy which is still pursued today. "It is mandatory that in

building up our strength, we enlarge upon our technical superiority by an

accelerated exploitation of the scientific potential of the United States and our

allies," the document states. Currently, academic research receives several billion

dollars a year, with MIT receiving half a billion, the largest single share. Much of

the research is dual use, with commercial as well as military applications, but

would not have been funded were it not for the latter.

 

"Mind Wars" surveys current research that has come to light. I was not surprised by

any of the details of this book, although someone with less of a fetish for the

subject might well be.

 

Moreno asks what novel ethical questions are raised by the emergence of new

applications for war which will alter human identity by modifying memory, cognition,

and core physical, emotional and spiritual capabilities. The enhancement of

cognitive processes such as memory, for example, raises questions about why we

evolved as we have. We forget things for good reasons-it is not helpful to be

tormented, and our brains would be overwhelmed if we remembered everything,

including masses of irrelevant data. Near-total recall would pose new problems as

would enhancement of affective processes related to religious experience-e.g., how

many mystics do we need? Evolution of the species suggests that a few mystics per

thousand are plenty. But if genetic, chemical, and technological enhancements can

trigger mystical experiences, might too many people bliss out in ecstatic

contemplation of the One? Would too many of us become mice pressing buttons

connected to pleasure centers and die happily rather than eat? Would enhancements of

memory and cognition give an unfair advantage to the children of the rich much as

steroids give big-headed baseball players the ability to hit the long ball?

 

Moreno was hampered in his research because many scientists "clammed up" when asked

about their work which means that we can only speculate about many of the projects.

Their silence means that while we know we don't know, we don't know what we don't

know. Hence, cognitive dissonance.

 

That dissonance never left as I read this book. It's what happens when I read the

fiction of Philip K. Dick. Dick no longer reads like speculative science fiction

smacking of paranoia because the landscape he describes is the world we now inhabit,

a moebius-strip world in which distortions feed back into the perception of everyday

life. The world we encounter in "Mind Wars" is like the world in Dick's "A Scanner

Darkly," in which a policeman discovers that the subject he pursues is himself. In

"Mind Wars," Moreno is a participant in the world he describes as well as an

objective observer; the edge of the glass curves and returns a distorted image.

 

His own emotions, for example, when he communicates the shock of certain

discoveries, transform his feelings into subject matter the reader must consider. He

communicates his surprise when he learned that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber,

participated in "a Harvard study aimed at psychic deconstruction by humiliating

undergraduates and thereby causing them to experience severe stress." (p. 69) Moreno

does not simplistically attribute all of Kaczynski's behaviors to this event, but he

does speculate on the impact of "a psychological experiment that . involved

psychological torment and humiliation that could have left deep scars" over a period

of three years.

 

I had a similar reaction when I learned of a formative episode in the life of Donald

Defreeze, a.k.a. Cinque, leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. DeFreeze and

other members of the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst and subjected her to brainwashing

using classical mind control techniques. It is seldom asked how DeFreeze learned to

brainwash so effectively. Colin A. Ross, M.D. in "Bluebird," a study of the

deliberate creation of multiple personalities, notes that DeFreeze, while an inmate

at Vacaville State Prison, was "a subject in an experimental behavior modification

program run by Colston Westbrook, a CIA psychological warfare expert and advisor to

the Korean CIA." (Bluebird, p.212). Westbrook returned to the United States from

working undercover in Viet Nam and "entered Vacaville State Prison under cover of

the Black Cultural Association and there designed the seven-headed cobra logo of the

SLA and gave DeFreeze his African name, Cinque." (Bluebird, p. 212)

 

The accounts of both Kaczinski and DeFreeze suggest that their crimes might have

been "blowback," unintended consequences of covert intelligence operations that

rebound on perpetrators.If those accounts were not public, however, and we

speculated in that vein about DeFreeze and Kaczinski, it would be easy to dismiss

our speculation as "conspiracy theories" or sloppy thinking. We know those two

accounts are not the only experiments that might have backfired, but prudence

suggests we not extrapolate from the known data, lest we be ridiculed. That's what

respectability in a world of strangeness requires. But in light of those accounts,

it is not unreasonable to ask, what other rough beasts have slouched out of covert

research to be born?

 

So there is often a disconnect between the history that we know and discussions of

current research sanitized by willful innocence. This is crazy-making. I understand

why Moreno does not want to be found on the wrong side of the looking glass. Yet

Moreno wrote an excellent history of how "informed consent" evolved from the horrors

of our own history. There is a parallax view of the stick of history which enters

the water but seems to be discontinuous rather than a straight line. The distance of

a historical account disinfects the moral dimension of events; we may be shocked

when we read of the torturous experiments of Ewen Cameron and Sidney Gottleib, for

example, doctors who participated in MKULTRA, a series of CIA experiments with

hallucinogenic drugs, electric shock, and sensory deprivation, but because those

experiments ended in the seventies, they read like scripts for a horror movie

instead of a daily newspaper.

 

Moreno's discussion of ethical issues is similarly sanitized and sane, appropriate

to the seminar room on a college campus, with its warmth, light, and comfortable

chairs, but far from the trenches in which experiments takes place. His calls for

accountability sound eminently reasonable but are theoretical and abstract because

the details we need in order to explore ethical implications in a real historical

context, one with flesh-and-blood men and women feeling real emotions, are hidden in

darkness.

 

As a result, readers remain outsiders because we do not "need to know." We learn

afterward some of what has taken place, when details filter into the light of

ordinary day, but the ethical imperatives of a quickened public conscience can not

be applied retroactively. The secret deeds are already done.

 

The technology of hypersonic sound (HSS) illustrates how the worlds of scientific

researchers and outsiders bifurcate, creating an epistemological divide when we

outsiders try to understand what is happening on a basic level.Hypersonic sound is

"a column of sound that does not spread out like conventional sound but stays locked

like a sonic laser." (p. 147). If you enter the column, you hear it, but outside it,

you do not. HSS can be used to target individuals while ensuring that those around

them hear nothing.

 

It does not take a devious mind to imagine a variety of uses for hypersonic sound,

nor to imagine its misuse, even as a trivial amusement. Some accounts of HSS

describe pedestrians on sunny days walking into a column of sound in which they hear

a waterfall. Seconds later, the sound is gone. The demonstrator laughed, watching

the non-consenting public try to puzzle out experiences for which they had no prior

frame. More pernicious uses of the technology suggest themselves. At the siege of

Waco, David Koresh of the Branch Davidians reported hearing voices in his head. He

was crazy, we are told. But without the key pieces to the puzzle . how do we

know?Moreno states that he has spoken for years with people who claim to have been

targeted by this or similar technologies which put voices into their heads or use

them unknowingly to test beam, particle and electromagnetic weapons. I have spoken

to such people, too. Yes, hearing voices that are not there is a symptom of illness.

But hearing a voice that no one else hears does not mean, now that we know about

HSS, that the voices do not exist.

 

Enter strangeness once again. Moreno concludes that the claims of these people are

not credible. But Moreno had already reviewed by that point in the discussion the

abuse of medical and psychological testing by intelligence professionals in the

past. We know about those earlier experiments only because CIA Director Richard

Helm's order in 1973 to destroy all documents related to MKULTRA were carried

out-except for financial documents stored in obscure places. Had they known those

boxes existed, they too would have been destroyed, but because they were overlooked,

researchers could connect some dots, at least, and describe a maze of funding

sources, dummy companies fronting for intelligence agencies, and significant numbers

of respectable medical establishments funded in whole or in part by the CIA.

 

The parallax view.So here's the dilemma: Secret experiments were carried out by

well-intentioned patriots working under the cover of security who tortured

non-consenting adults, then covered up the events. There was no transparency or

outside accountability for what they did. The same kinds of people today authorize

experiments and weapons testing, and in the absence of accountability, they too

report only to themselves. The light from inside bends back at the surface and we

see only a black hole.

 

Had Moreno spoken to victims of MKULTRA and related projects in the fifties or

sixties, before those documents were discovered, had he heard people subjected to

electroshock therapy or drugs or isolation who told him in horrendous detail what

had been done to them, don't you think he would have made the same statement? That

the sane conventional respectable response by a man of the establishment would be

that they were deluded?

 

So why are such claims today unworthy of investigation?

Because to conduct such investigations in the absence of transparency,

accountability, and meaningful legislative oversight is to subject oneself to

ridicule and career suicide.

 

An aside about hypersonic sound . John Alexander, the author of "Future War," told

me that a major motivation for developing hypersonic sound was to communicate with

covert agents in dangerous places. Someone about to be taken down can not answer a

cell phone call but can attend to a voice in the head that tells them to "get out

now."

 

Moreno doesn't mention that application-not a serious flaw, but an indicator that

one depends on one's sources for this sort of research and many of Moreno's sources

are unnamed. Moreno has confidence in them, as I often do in mine, but without an

objective way to evaluate what they say . How do we know?

 

That question is left on the table when we finish this book. "Mind Wars" surveys

much of what has become public about military applications of brain and mind science

and reviews the historical context. Ethical issues are articulated at length. But in

the end, what we don't know is still much larger than what we do know.

 

The national security state, with millions of classified documents and billions of

dollars in black research, freezes the average citizen out of the loop. Like

enemies, real and imagined, we do not "need to know." Classification, of course,

covers mistakes and malfeasance and protects political bases in addition to ensuring

security. So we ought to feel uneasy when we finish this book. "Mind Wars" is not an

antidote to "strangeness." We can't blame Dr. Moreno, who wants doors to continue to

open, calls to be returned. But our dissonance persists. We don't know what we don't

know, only that those who do know ask us to trust.

 

Trust, yes, but verify, as the old Cold Warrior said. If it was good enough for him,

it ought to be good enough for us.

 

Works cited:

 

Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense

by Jonathan D. Moreno

Dana Press (The Dana Foundation: New York and Washington DC) 2006

 

Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror

by Steven H. Miles, M. D.

Random House: New York. 2006.

 

Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists

by Colin A. Ross, M.D.

Manitou Communications: Richardson Texas. 2000

 

.Future War: Non-Lethal Weapons in Twenty-First-Century Warfare

by John B. Alexander

St. Martin's Griffin: 2000.

 

This review (edited) was published on June 22, 2007 by the National Catholic

Reporter (http://www.natcath.com/). Copyright 2007 The National Catholic Reporter

Publishing Comapny.