### McMartin Preschool Revisited

#### by Alex Constantine

#### Part III

The Wall

One much maligned school of psychology argues that a preschool operated by a mind control cult specializes in dissociative conditioning, a regimen of physical and psychological beatings that give birth to a cluster of alter personalities. The first stage of conditioning, they maintain, insults the child's most primitive reflexes, a repetition of tortures that overloads the child's neurological complex and forces the adoption of protective alters. Most very young children rapidly learn to dissociate, a learned reflex that the group exploits as the child grows - often into adulthood - by accessing the alters. They can be called up at any time and used in criminal enterprises. Dissociative programming is sort of a psychological hard drive: it occurs when the victim is very young and is the bed of future programming.1

But the study of dissociative conditioning in traumatized preschool children did not reach these conclusions until c1990 (with the work of Dr. Steven Ray, Frank Putnam, Catherine Gould and others) nearly a decade after the first charges of abuse at McMartin were filed. There was narry a hint at the time that the intelligence cults were plying a system for creating multiple personalities and programmed alters. Well before techniques for multiplicity programming were at all known outside the mind control fraternity, a lively debate of cerebral, smartly-groomed psychologists was kindled by the McMartin trial.

An early champion for the defense was the late Dr. Nahman H. Greenberg, a prominent psychiatric consultant on child abuse and neglect. With a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in 1971, Dr. Greenwood once designed a psychological profile to identify the personality characteristics of abused children. For 20 years, while still an associate professor at the University of Illinois's psychiatry department, he was director of child development in the clinical and research unit. In 1975 he founded CAUSES (Child Abuse Unit for Studies, Education and Services) at Illinois Masonic Hospital. His office glittered with numerous honors from federal and state government agencies.2

Dr. Greenberg was brought in to make sense of the McMartin children's allegations. He studied the questioning techniques of Kee MacFarlane and generally behaved as though he agreed with her findings. But in public pronouncements Greenberg later stated that MacFarlene coerced accusations of abuse from the children, goaded them into making slanderous allegations. The argument, endlessly repeated, has since cast a pall on McFarlane's credibility.3

His subsequent career is revealing. Dr. Greenberg's next ritual abuse case came shortly after his consultation on McMartin.

Beth Vargo joined Believe the Children shortly after witnessing it. In April 1984, Vargo suspected that her four-year-old daughter had been sexually abused at the Jewish Community Center (JCC) preschool in Chicago. Several other children told of molestations. They described "strangers" engaging in sexual escapades at JCC and elsewhere. Staff members of the center even stepped forward to supplement the allegations with their own testimony.

Vargo was referred to Dr. Greenberg by the local Department of Child and Family Services.4 The name rang a bell - Vargo had been warned by the family doctor to steer clear of him, she recalls. Dr. Greenberg did not believe in 'involving' the "police or prosecutors in child abuse cases, but preferred to work with the child victims and adult perpetrators to repair relationships damaged by sexual abuse" she says. "Since our case involved extrafamilial abuse, not incest, my husband and I made other therapy arrangements for our daughter." At a meeting called by JCC to address parents' concerns about the investigation, Vargo says, he recommended that the parents and teachers attend a retreat to "share their feelings." Dr. Greenberg sympathized with the teachers' "stress," and engaged in heated arguments with the therapists treating the children. He refused to believe the JCC's own staff that children had been abused at the preschool, and stood fast in his refusal to cooperate with police.5

The case was a repetition of McMartin. During questioning, two mothers reported that their daughters said their alleged abusers had threatened to kill their families if they talked. The children deposed that they'd been beaten, stuck with needles and screwdrivers. In fact, parents reported unexplained scratches and bruises. The preschoolers also said that teachers at the center organized "naked games." "This will be with us forever," one mother lamented. "It will never be wiped away."6

In 1987, Dr. Greenberg's consultation in another aborted child abuse investigation - into the child pornography operation run by the Finders cult - exposed his unshakable bias in favor of ritual abuse perpetrators, and his role in a CIA cover-up. The Finders, as most cult observers are aware, was a CIA-anchored clutch of ritual abusers engaged in operant mind control conditioning, child pornography and kidnapping. At first, Langley officials acknowledged to custom agents in Tallahassee, Florida that they "owned the Finders."7 Marion David Pettie, who retired from the Air Force in 1956 and defined himself as a "political powerhouse," was the guiding light of the cult. He denied any connection to Langley - yet his late wife was a CIA employee and his son a veteran of Air America, the opiate courier. Confidential sources told police the Finders conducted "brainwashing" sessions and "explored satanism."8 Police in Tallahassee were called off the case after Dr. Greenberg examined the children and found "no evidence of recent physical harm." Nonetheless, two Florida policemen stood by their statement that they'd found visible evidence of sexual abuse. The original arrest file, as one investigating Treasury agent complained in an internal report, was "classified secret and not available for review." Customs service agents in Washington discovered on the group's premises directions for kidnapping children and photographing naked toddlers. Yet the case was quickly guttered, largely due to Dr. Greenberg's militant denials that children had been used by an occult group with an active interest in mind control programming.

Another "expert," a universally-quoted debunker of ritual abuse, hails from the FBI. Agent Ken Lanning of Quantico has provided RA debunkers, namely pedophiles, propagandists and mind control operatives in academia and the press, with an illusory pillar of debate. Fatal flaws in Lanning's "research report," a denial that the cult abuse of children exists, were exposed as a hoax by a law enforcement insider:

I have spoken to Ken Lanning, I know others who have spoken to him and we all take issue with Ken's *opinion* and how this report is being used. It should also be stated that I work within the System in some capacity and have some experience in investigations. I've also been involved on the metaphysical path for a long time. I'm not too excited about "witch hunts" because I'd be the first one put on the stake by a "hysterical," know-nothing public. But neither am I too pleased by what I have been learning about the atrocities that are occurring, the reasons for it, and the artful skewing of perceptions.... Ken Lanning is an armchair analyst and he has *not* personally investigated many cases of RA. Law enforcement and others sometimes *consult* with him about cases and how to proceed. He is not aware of all RA cases. The FBI, Childrens Services, and law enforcement do not keep statistics on ritual crime. No one is keeping track, therefore no one can say with authority how prevalent RA is. The DAs are not bringing evidence of RA into cases unless they really have to because of Freedom of Religion issues and reports like Lanning's.

He has a confusing, difficult time defining RA. He has told others that he prefers to catergorize RA under Sex Rings or Gang Violence. Someone like him cannot deal with or understand metaphysical intent. Few people can. Nor can he officially acknowledge RA because of various Governmental entities which have been implicated. The FBI and has been implicated in at least *botching* some RA case investigations and in some instances *covering up* the evidence. The CIA has been implicated in far worse fashion.... There are many cases of ritual murder and brainwashing. Lanning professes not to know of any.

There is more to this issue than is apparent on the surface. I have understood some of what is going on due to my personal contact with victims, my personal experience with how cover-ups occur, and the sheer time I have put in investigating this phenomenon.

There are mechanisms being put in place to make the RA claims "incredible." Of course, not everything anyone says is true, but there are too many people around the world who are victims of this horror and if there are any responsible people here, it would behoove you to pay attention.9 That's all for now,
Curio II

The science of mind control experimentation in the U.S. has benefited enormously from experiments on young children. The horror stories told by toddlers at McMartin did not arise in a historical vacuum. Comparable outrages, foreshadowing McMartin, filled Lynne Moss-Sharman's childhood as an unconsenting guinea-pig.

I am a survivor of military torture and experimentation as a young child in the 1950's. It is very difficult to 'write' about my experiences because of the military's use of electricity and binding on my right hand to make sure I could or would not communicate through printing, writing or drawing for decades. One of the sessions involved huge amounts of electricity being applied to my right hand; then it was tied to my back, and I was made to walk around on my knees, using my left hand for support, "like a dog." Their other torture techniques and devices took care of the possibility of talking.10

She was "tied, strapped, belted down so I couldn't writhe. That would have been too kind and might have dislodged some of the headgear/electrodes, etc." The military experiments, she recalls, left her "spasmodic" The preschoolers in Manhattan Beach provoked scorn and giggles when they claimed they'd been whisked off to military bases. But numerous examples from classified federal files could confirm that children have been tortured in biomedical and behavior control research since the prime of D. Ewon Cameron. Military bases are a common theme.

One mother of children attending McMartin alleged that employees of TRW, a local defense contractor based in Southern California, paid regular afternoon visits to the preschool.11

And the stake-out? In 1989, nearly a year before the verdict of the second trial was delivered, a McMartin mother took note of a van parked in front of her home. Two strangers sat inside the van. A few hours later, they were still there. When a couple of the mother's husky male friends arrived, she complained. They walked out to the van, peeked inside. The walls of the vehicle were lined with advanced electronic surveillance equipment. The stake-out team was dragged out of the van and questioned - but not by police. More than one child in the household had attended McMartin. A superficial justice system and a hostile media had forced the families to find answers anywhere they could. And these spies with their advanced surveillance gear would do fine.

But they refused to answer questions. One of the interrogators hit on an idea frowned upon by most law enforcement authorities - sodium amytal. The amytal was administered. When the grievous tones and insults faded, the pair gazed up blankly and began to answer questions. Who were they? They were members of a religious cult. Where did they call home? San Diego. Who else was belonged to it? They named several prominent officials in the defense establishment - including the chairman of TRW and executives of other ranking corporations in Orange County and the South Bay with close CIA connections.12 The pair were let go after questioning.

Of course, none of this reached the jury. Lee Coleman, a California psychologist who gave the keynote address at the Second National Conference of VOCAL (Victims of Child Abuse Laws) - an organization notorious for recurring scandals among its ranks involving pedophilia - testified that the children had not been abused by teachers at the preschool, but by "officials" (not therapists) who'd "brainwashed" the children into believing they'd been abused.13 Coleman's theory has evolved into a combative branch of psychology based on "false memory" theory. The school describes a "syndrome" and lends its name to an organization led by veterans of the mind control fraternity, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

The "syndrome" is accepted as fact by the public at large. But at Carleton University, a group of graduate researchers recently concluded a study of the so-called "false memory syndrome," an explanation for recovered memories of child abuse promoted by a "foundation" of psychologists who appear frequently on talk shows to denounce therapists for filling the heads of children with recollections of horrific crimes. One of the most prominent psychologists on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was Dr. Ralph Underwager, the clinical psychologist who once said it was "God's will" adults have sex with children, and suggested to a group of British reporters in 1994 that most women who are raped "enjoy the experience."

Equally peculiar is the FMSF advisory board, a clutch of psychologists from leading universities, many with backgrounds in CIA mind control experimentation. The researchers at Carleton concluded they could find no proof that an insidious pathology, the "confabulation" of memories, exists, a charge the FMSF has been making about ritual abuse for years - possibly, some informed onlookers insist, to conceal the participation of CIA psychologists in the torture of young children, a regimen of trauma used to condition the minds of young initiates.

The Ottawa Survivors' Study searched for evidence of the false memory syndrome in 113 adult women who, as children, reported they'd been sexually molested. Four sets of questions concerning symptoms of false memory were drawn up. The women were asked about the type of therapy they received, problems with personal relationships and patterns of stress. A detailed analysis of their responses also sought the presence of pseudomemories, the core of false memory theory.

The study was headed by Connie Kristiansen, a professor of psychology at Carleton who proposed that the university evaluate the statistical claims of the Foundation, which have been widely repeated in the press. The FMSF insists that 25 percent to all recovered memories of child abuse are completely false, in contrast to the results of the Ottawa study.

About half of the subjects remembered abuse. The other half had remembered buried memories of abuse as adults. The responses of the two groups were analyzed, and only two of the 51 women with recovered memories had symptoms that met the false memory criteria, leading the researchers to conclude that the syndrome does not exist as defined by the Foundation, and may not exist at all. They advised that false memory syndrome should not be used in the courtroom to discredit recovered memories of abuse until the validity of false memory theory can be demonstrated.

So it certainly had not been demonstrated at the time Drs. Nahberg and Coleman took the stand to testify on behalf of the defendants in the McMartin case.

NOTES

1 David Neswald & Catherine Gould, "Basic Treatment and Program Neutralization Strategies for Adult MPD Survivors of Satanic Ritual Abuse," Treating Abuse Today, vol. 2, no. 3, p. 5.

2 Obituary, Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1991. 3 Correspondence, Beth Vargo, executive director of Believe the Children, Gary, Illinois, to John Boyd, Ph.D., August 28, 1995.

4 Vargo.

5 Ibid

6 Carolyn Lenz, "Parents: Abusive Teachers Still at JCC," Rogers Park Edgewater News, May 23, 1984, p. A-1.

7 U.S. Custom and Treasury Department documents. 8 Witkin, Cary and Martinez, "Through a Glass, Very Darkly," U.S. News & World Report, January 3, 1994, p. 30. Also, Saperstein and Churchville, "Officials Describe 'Cult Rituals' in Child Abuse Case," Washington Post, February 7, 1987.

9 Anonymous, "Re: FBI/Ritual Abuse," alt.pagan WWW newsgroup, March 7, 1996.

10 Lynne Moss-Sharman, "Nancy Drew Meets the Exorcist," MindNet (electronic journal), January 20, 1996.

11 Interviewed August 22, 1988.

12 Interviews with participants.

13 David Hechler, The Battle and the Backlash: The Child Sexual Abuse War, (1988: Lexington, Kentucky), Lexington Books, p. 255.

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