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         MindNet Journal - Vol. 1, No. 16b * [Part 2 of 2 parts]
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         V E R I C O M M / MindNet         "Quid veritas est?"
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    Notes:

    The following is reproduced here with the express permission of
    the author.

    Permission is given to reproduce and redistribute, for
    non-commercial purposes only, provided this information and the
    copy remain intact and unedited.

    The views and opinions expressed below are not necessarily the
    views and opinions of VERICOMM, MindNet, or the editors unless
    otherwise noted.

    Editor: Mike Coyle

    Contributing Editors: Walter Bowart
                          Harlan Girard
                          Alex Constantine

    Assistant Editor: Rick Lawler

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    [Continued from part 1]

            The FMS Foundation is no less eccentric. Within two years
    of its founding, it was clear that the Foundation leadership was
    far from disinterested on the workings of childhood memory, and
    concealed a secret sexual and political agenda.
            FMSF founder Ralph Underwager, director of the Institute
    of Psychological Therapies in Minnesota, was forced to resign in
    1993. Underwager (a former Lutheran pastor) and his wife Hollida
    Wakefield publish a journal, Issues in Child Abuse Allegations,
    written by and for child abuse "skeptics." His departure from the
    False Memory Syndrome Foundation was hastened by a remark in an
    interview, appearing in an Amsterdam journal for pedophiles, that
    it was "God's Will" adults engage in sex with children. (His wife
    Hollida remained on the Foundation's board after he left.) As it
    happens, holy dispensation for pedophiles is the exact credo of
    the Children of God cult. It was fitting, then, when Underwager
    filed an affidavit on behalf of cult members tried in France in
    1992, insisting that the accused were positively "not guilty of
    abuse upon children." In the interview, he prevailed upon
    pedophiles everywhere to shed stigmatization as "wicked and
    reprehensible" users of children.
            In keeping with the Foundation's creative use of
    statistics, Dr. Underwager told a group of British reporters in
    1994 that "scientific evidence" proved 60% of all women molested
    as children believed the experience was "good for them."
            Dr. Underwager invariably sides with the defense. His
    grandiloquent orations have graced courtrooms around the world,
    often by satellite. Defense lawyers for Woody Allen turned to
    him, he boasts, when Mia Farrow accused her estranged husband of
    molesting their seven year-old daughter. Underwager is a virtual
    icon to the Irish Catholic lobby in Dublin, which raised its
    hoary hackles against a child abuse prevention program in the
    Irish Republic. He was, until his advocacy of pedophila tarnished
    an otherwise glittering reputation, widely quoted in the press,
    dismissing ritual child abuse as a hysterical aberration.
            He is the world's foremost authority on false memory, but
    in the courtroom he is repeatedly exposed as a charlatan. In
    1988, a trial court decision in New York State held that Dr.
    Underwager was "not qualified to render any opinion as to whether
    or not (the victim) was sexually molested." In 1990 his testimony
    on memory was ruled improper "in the absence of any evidence that
    the results of Underwager's work had been accepted in the
    scientific community." And In Minnesota a judge ruled that
    Underwager's theories on "learned memory" were the same as
    "having an expert tell the jury that (the victim) was not telling
    the truth."
            Peter and Pamela Freyd, executive directors of the
    Foundation, joined forces with Underwager in 1991, and their
    story is equally wretched. Jennifer Freyd, their daughter, a
    professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, openly
    leveled accusations of abuse against her parents at an August
    1993 mental health conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
            "My family of origin was troubled in many observable
    ways, " she said. "I refer to the things that were never
    'forgotten' and 'recovered,' but to things that we all knew
    about." She gave her father's alcoholism as an example. "During
    my childhood, my father sometimes discussed his own experiences
    of being sexually abused as an 11 year-old boy, and called
    himself a 'kept boy.'" Peter Freyd graduated to male prostitution
    as an adolescent.
            At the age of 13, Jennifer Freyd composed a poem about
    her father's nocturnal visits:

                                    I am caught in a web,
                                    A web of deep, deep terror.

    she wrote. The diaries of her youth chronicle the "reactions and
    feelings (guilt, shame and terror) of a troubled girl and young
    woman. My parents oscillated between denying these symptoms and
    feelings ... to using knowledge of these same symptoms and
    feelings to discredit me."
            "My father," she says, "told various people that I was
    brain damaged." The accusation was unlikely. At the time,
    Jennifer Freyd was a graduate student on a National Science
    Foundation fellowship. She has taught at Cornell and received
    numerous research awards. The "brain damage" apologia did not
    wash. Her mother suggested that Jennifer's memories were
    "confabulations," and faulted therapeutic intervention. Pamela
    Freyd turned to her own psychiatrist, Dr. Harold Lief, currently
    an advisory board member of the Foundation, to diagnose Jennifer.
            "He explained to me that he did not believe I was
    abused," Jennifer recalls. Dr. Lief's diagnosis was based on his
    belief that Peter Freyd's fantasies were strictly "homoerotic."
    Of course, his daughter furrows a brow at the assumption that
    homoerotic fantasies or a heterosexual marriage exclude the
    possibility of child molestation. Lief's skewed logic is a
    trademark of the Foundation.
            He is a close colleague of the CIA's Martin Orne. Dr.
    Lief, a former major in the Army medical corps, joined the
    University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1968, the peak of
    federally-funded behavioral modification experiments at
    Holmesburg Prison. Dr. Orne consulted with him on several studies
    in hypnotic programming. His academic writing reveals a peculiar
    range of professional interests, including "Orgasm in the
    Postoperative Transsexual" for Archives of Sexual Behavior, and
    an exploration of the possibility of life after death for a
    journal on mental diseases edited by Foundation fellow Paul
    McHugh. Lief is a director of the Center for Sexuality and
    Religion, past president of the Sex Information and Education
    Council.
            And an original board member of the False Memory Syndrome
    Foundation. Two others, Jon Baron from Penn U. and Ray Hyman (an
    executive editor of the aforementioned Skeptical Inquirer), a
    professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, resigned
    from the board after Jennifer Freyd went public with her account
    of childhood abuse, and the facetious attempts of her parents and
    their therapist to discredit her. They were replaced by David
    Dinges, co-director--with the ubiquitous Martin Orne--of the
    Unit for Experimental Psychiatry at the University of
    Pennsylvania.
            "At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered
    'false,'" Jennifer says, "and my alcoholic father's memory is
    considered rational and sane." She does not, after all, remember
    impossible  abuses: "I remember incest in my father's house....
    My first memories came when I was at home a few hours after my
    second session with my therapist, a licensed clinical
    psychologist working within an established group in a large and
    respected medical clinic.
            "During that second visit to my therapist's office, I
    expressed great anxiety about the upcoming holiday visit from my
    parents. My therapist  asked about half way into the session,
    whether I had ever been sexually abused. I was immediately thrown
    into a strange state. No one had ever asked me such a question. I
    responded, 'no, but...' I went home and within a few hours I was
    shaking uncontrollably, overwhelmed with intense and terrible
    flashbacks." Jennifer asks herself why her parents are believed.
    "In the end, is it precisely because I was abused that I am to be
    discredited despite my personal and professional success?"
            Pamela Freyd published an open letter defending her
    husband in Ralph Underwager's Issues in Child Abuse Accusations
    in 1991. It was reprinted in Confabulations, a book published a
    year later. Laced with lubricious sentiment, the book bemoans the
    "destruction of families" brought on by false child abuse
    accusations, and maligns "cult-like" support groups and
    feminists, or "lesbian cults." Executive director Freyd often
    refers to the feminist groups that have taken up the cause of
    child abuse survivors as "lesbians," after the bizarre Dr.
    Underwager, who claims, "these women may be jealous that males
    are able to love each other, be comrades, friends, be close,
    intimate."
            Pamela Freyd's account of the family history, Jennifer
    insists, is patently false. In an electronic message from her
    father, he openly acknowledged that in his version of the story
    "fictional elements were deliberately inserted."
            "'Fictional' is rather an astounding choice of words,"
    Jennifer observed at the Ann Arbor conference. The article
    written by her parents contends that Jennifer was denied tenure
    at another university due to a lack of published research. "In
    fact," Jennifer counters, "I moved to the University of Oregon in
    1987, just four years after receiving my Ph.D. to accept a
    tenured position as associate professor in the psychology
    department, one of the world's best psychology departments.... My
    mother sent the Jane Doe article to my colleagues during my
    promotion year--that is, the year my case for promotion to full
    professor was being considered. I was absolutely mortified to
    learn of this violation of my privacy and this violation of
    truth."
            Manipulative tactics are another Foundation imprimatur.
    Lana Alexander, editor of a newsletter for survivors of child
    sexual abuse, observes that "many people view the false memory
    syndrome theory as a calculated defense strategy developed by
    perpetrators and the lawyers and expert witnesses who defend
    them."
            A legitimizing barrage of stories in the press has shaped
    public opinion and warmed the clime for defense attorneys. The
    concept of false memory serves the same purpose as Holocaust
    denial. It shapes opinion. Unconscionable crimes are obstructed,
    the accused is endowed with the status of martyr, the victim
    reviled.
            The emphasis on image is obvious in "How Do We Know We
    are Not Representing Pedophiles," an article written for the
    February 29, 1992 FMS Foundation Newsletter by Pamela Freyd. In
    it, she derides the suggestion that many members of the group
    could be molesters because "we are a good-looking bunch of
    people, greying hair, well dressed, healthy, smiling; just about
    every person who has attended is someone you would surely find
    interesting and want to count as a friend."

    Friendly Fire

                            People forget things. Horrible things.
                    Here at the Foundation someone had a repressed
                    memory, or what would be called a false memory,
                    that she had been sexually abused.

                                           --Pamela Freyd
                                             FMS Foundation Founder

            The debate's bloodiest stage is the courtroom. The hired
    guns of Martin Orne's circle of psychiatrists are constantly
    called upon to blow smoke at the jury's gallery to conceal CIA
    mind control operations. This branch of the psychiatric community
    is steeped in the programming of serial killers, political
    assassins and experiments on involuntary subjects. Agency
    psychiatrists on the witness stand direct the press away from the
    CIA, and the prosecution to a predetermined end. Martin Orne's
    high-toned psychologizing in the Hillside Strangler case, for
    example, is a strategy adopted by the FMS foundation to stifle
    the cries of mind control survivors.
            Orne's influence contributed to the outcome of a
    high-profile abuse case, the $8 million lawsuit filed by Gary
    Ramona of Napa, California against child therapist Marche
    Isabella and psychiatrist Richard Rose. Ramona charged that his
    daughter Holly's therapists elicited from her flashbacks of
    sexual molestation that never occurred, decimating his marriage
    and career as a vice president at Robert Mondavi wineries. His
    wife and employer, note, immediately believed Holly's
    accusations. In May of 1994 Ramona received a $500,000 jury
    award. He hailed the decision as a "tremendous victory."
            Nevertheless, Holly Ramona still maintains that she was
    sexually abused by her father, though no criminal charges have
    been filed. Holly first confronted her father with the
    allegations on March 15, 1990, with her mother and Isabella
    present. She filed a civil action against him in Los Angeles
    County, but before it went to trial her father's suit got
    underway in Napa.
            The suit turned on the use of sodium amytal to resurrect
    buried memories. Holly Ramona exhibited telltale symptoms of
    abuse--fear of gynecological examinations, a phobia of pointy
    teeth, like her father's--and asked to be treated with sodium
    amytal. Dr. Rose wrote in his notes that under the influence of
    the drug, Holly "remembered specific details of sexual
    molestation." But Orne, who has pioneered in the use of sodium
    amytal in hypnosis research, cautioned in a court brief that the
    drug is "not useful in ascertaining 'truth.' The patient becomes
    receptive to suggestions due to the context and to the comments
    of the interviewers."
            Yet the jury foreman stated for the record that Isabella
    and Rose did not  implant false memories of abuse, as Holly's
    father had complained, but were negligent in reinforcing the
    memories as Holly described them under the influence of the
    barbiturate. The court considered it irrelevant whether Holly
    actually suffered abuse, narrowing the legal focus instead to the
    chemical evocation of Holly's recollections and her therapist's
    leading questions.
            Left hanging was the question of Ramona's guilt or
    innocence, not exactly an irrelevant issue. Orne offered no
    opinion. The "tremendous victory" in Napa, given these facts,
    begins to look like a manipulation of the court system,
    especially the use of "expert" testimony.
            The therapists did not, contrary to most press reports,
    bear the full brunt of blame. The jury found that Ramona himself
    bore 5% of the blame for what happened to him, Holly's therapists
    55%, and 45% was borne by the girl's mother and the Robert
    Mondavi winery.
            But the 55% solution is diluted by Holly's memories.
    Contrary to the impression left by the press, her past has not
    been explained away. "I wouldn't be here if there was a question
    in my mind," she testified in Napa.
            False memory had no clinical history or symptomology
    (repressed memory has both), but the concept had held up in
    court.
            All that remained was to provide a scientific
    explanation. The Foundation had spread the word that a "syndrome"
    was winding through society and "destroying families." But what
    is the origin of false (not inaccurate or clouded or fragmented)
    memories? What are the symptoms? It remained to supply a
    cognitive model for false memories of ritual molestation.
            One of the most prolific and quotable popularizers of
    false memory is Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and
    law at the University of Washington in Seattle, and an advisory
    board member of the Foundation. Her dual academic interests have
    fueled suspicions that the organization is more committed to
    defending perpetrators than ferreting out the facts. Loftus
    testified in over 150 criminal cases prior to joining the
    Foundation, always on behalf of defendants. In 1991 she published
    a professional autobiography, Witness for the Defense, a study of
    eight criminal trials in which she appeared as an expert witness.
    In her book, Loftus--billed as "the expert who puts memory on
    trial"--conceded that her critics deem her research "unproven in
    real-life situations," and her courtroom dissertations "premature
    and highly prejudicial."
            One book reviewer for the New York Times grumbled: "Her
    testimony would be less controversial if she could distinguish
    between the innocent and the guilty and reserve her help for the
    former."
            Elizabeth Loftus has two criteria for taking the stand.
    The first is when eyewitness identification is the sole or
    primary evidence against the defendant. Secondly, the accused
    must act innocent--she regrets testifying on behalf of Ted Bundy
    because the serial killer once smiled at the prosecutor, which
    she regards as an expression of guilt--and defense attorneys
    must believe it.
            Loftus stood at the Harvard Medical School podium in May,
    1994 to inform a conference on false memory of her research, "in
    which false memories about childhood events were created in 24
    men and women ages 18 to 63." Dr. Loftus reported that the
    parents of volunteers "cooperated to produce a list of events
    that had supposedly taken place in the volunteer's early life."
    Three of the events actually took place. But one, a shopping
    trip, never happened. Some of the volunteers had memories,
    implanted by suggestion, of wandering lost on the fictitious
    shopping expedition.
            Karen Olio, the author of scores of articles on sexual
    abuse, complains that Loftus's memory studies "examine only the
    possibility of implanting a single memory with which most people
    could easily identify (being lost in a mall, awakened by a noise
    in the night). The possibility of 'implanting' terrifying and
    shameful memories that differ markedly from an individual's
    experience, such as memories of childhood abuse in individuals
    who do not have a trauma history," remains to be proven."
            Psychiatrist John Briere of the University of Southern
    California has found that nearly two-thirds of all ritual abuse
    survivors report episodic or complete amnesia at some point after
    it occurred. The younger the child, the more violent the abuse,
    the more likely that memory lapses occurred. these findings have
    been duplicated at the University of California at San Francisco
    by psychiatrist Lenore Terr, who concluded that children
    subjected to repeated abuse were more likely to repress memories
    of it than victims of a single traumatic event.
            Clinical psychologist Catherine Gould has treated scores
    of ritually abused children at her office in Encino, California.
    At the September 1993 National Conference on Crimes Against
    Children in Washington, D.C., Gould objected that the studies of
    Elizabeth Loftus ignore past research on trauma and its influence
    on memory.
            "My concern about Elizabeth Loftus," Gould said, "is that
    she has stated in print, and correctly so, that her data tells us
    nothing about the nature of memory of traumatic events. And yet
    she has failed to protest the misapplication of her findings by
    groups who are involved in discrediting the accounts survivors
    are giving of their traumatic history. I believe that Dr. Loftus,
    like other psychologists, has an ethical responsibility to do
    everything possible to ensure that her research findings are
    interpreted and applied accurately, and are not manipulated to
    serve the political agenda of groups like the False Memory
    Syndrome Foundation. I question whether she has met this ethical
    responsibility."
            Some psychologists accuse Loftus of faking her research
    data.
            Her study did not live up to its promise. But now that
    she had "proven" that a false memory could be implanted, friends
    of the Foundation at the Harvard conference announced they'd
    identified the neurological and cognitive causes of disorder.
    Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychologist and conference organizer,
    claimed that the "confabulator" selects a fragment of a real
    memory, "but confuses its true context, and draws on other bits
    of experience to construct a story that makes sense of it." Dr.
    Morris Moscovitch, a neuro-psychologist at the University of
    Toronto, claimed that "brain damage" could also evoke false
    memories. He noted that mental patients with frontal lobe defects
    frequently confuse imaginary stories with actual memories.
            A superficially plausible revelation was provided by
    Cornell psychologist Stephen Ceci, who reported on five studies
    of 574 preschool children. After 10 weeks of repeated
    questioning, 58% of them concocted a false account for at least
    one fictitious event.
            But like the studies of Elizabeth Loftus, Ceci did not
    attempt to explain the supposed amnesiac effect of severe trauma
    on children and adults alike (veterans of WW II and Vietnam have
    been known to "forget" atrocities of war). Besides, the average
    preschooler is bound to invent at least one fantasy in 10 long
    weeks of repetitive questioning. Toddlers aren't known for their
    consummate adherence to objective reality. An invisible playmate
    and the Cat in the Hat are not "false memories."
            The research results presented at the Harvard conference
    were not exactly staggering. All that had been proven was that
    children forget, become confused and make things up.
            Seattle therapist James Cronin, one of the Foundation's
    harshest critics, believes that the false memory concept is
    promoted by "fact and artifice" to a public conditioned to the
    fragmentation of knowledge, intellectual charades, elitism and
    the sterile abstractions that often pass for university education
    and expertise. The so-called experts now jumping on the side of
    false memory and therapist 'bias' are opportunists."
            Yet the New York  Times hailed the Harvard conference as
    "epic." The conference had given a gracious "scientific nod to
    the frailty of memory." Victims of aggravated child abuse had
    nothing to celebrate, but the Times reporter was ecstatic. At
    long last, scientists everywhere had arrived at "a consensus on
    the mental mechanisms that can foster false memories." A
    consensus? Actually, the "consensus" of psychologists, at least
    the 88% mentioned earlier--only a vast majority--believe it to
    be a very real scourge.
            The Times story is typical of the scorn the press has
    shown ritual abuse victims and their therapists.
            Sixty Minutes, for example, publicly exonerated Kelly
    Michaels, a day-care worker in New Jersey, of charges that she
    sexually molested dozens of youngsters in 1984. Michaels was
    sentenced to 47 years in prison for sodomizing the children in
    her care with kitchen implements, among related charges. Her
    conviction was overturned in March 1993 when the state appeals
    court ruled that Michaels had not had a fair trial.
            But in its rush to present Michaels as a blushing
    innocent, the Sixty Minutes research department somehow
    overlooked a May 1991 New York Times story on the abuse trial,
    and the testimony of four Essex County corrections officers who
    witnessed Miss Michaels and her father kissing and "fondling" one
    another during jail visitations. Jerry Vitiello, a jailer, said
    that "he saw Ms. Michaels use his tongue when kissing his
    daughter, rub her buttocks and put his hand on her breasts."
    Similar incestuous liaisons were detailed in the courtroom by
    three women working in the jail. The bizarre sexual antics of
    Kelly Michaels--damningly chronicled in Nap Time  by Lisa
    Manshel in 1990--was nixed from the one-sided Sixty Minutes
    account, which made her out to be grist for the meat grinder of
    wrong-headed child abuse laws.

    The Forgettable "Remembering Satan"

            The False Memory Syndrome Foundation made its collective
    debut in "Remembering Satan," a two-part story by Lawrence Wright
    in the New Yorker for April and May 1993. The story (republished
    in 1994 in book form) concerns a ritual abuse trial in Olympia,
    Washington that culminated with a 20-year prison sentence for
    Thurston County Sheriff Paul Ingram, chairman of the local
    Republican Party. Ingram has since filed motions to withdraw his
    guilty plea, a move rejected by an appellate court in 1992. Also
    charged, but not convicted, were Jim Rabie, a lobbyist with the
    Washington State Law Enforcement Association and a former police
    detective assigned to child abuse cases, and Ray Risch, an
    employee of the State Patrol's body-and-fender shop. Wright's
    conclusion, however, is based on the opinions of False Memory
    Syndrome Foundation psychiatrists: that accusations made by
    Ingram's two daughters, and his own confession to police, were
    fantasies misinterpreted by Ingram himself and his daughters as
    actual memories.
            Wright fumigates any question of abuse with false memory
    theory. Among the authorities consulted by Wright was Foundation
    board member Paul McHugh, director of the department of
    psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins. Like
    Margaret Singer, he is a veteran of the Walter Reed Army
    Institute of Research (1961-64) and moves in political circles.
    For three years (1986-89), McHugh was chairman of the
    bio-psychology study section of the National Institutes of
    Health, and a former member of the Maryland Governor's Advisory
    Commission.
            McHugh is an unshakable skeptic of repressed memories. He
    told Wright that "most severe traumas are not blocked out by
    children but are remembered all too well." Most, in fact, are.
    But McHugh's own professional opinion leaves open the possibility
    that some severe traumas are repressed.
            He cites as an example the children of chowchilla,
    California, who were kidnapped in a school bus and buried alive.
    McHugh claims they remembered the horror "all too well." Not
    exactly. In fact, the FBI's subsequent use of investigative
    hypnosis was largely the result of the Chowchilla children's
    failure of memory. After their release, none of the children had
    a clear recollection of the kidnappers, could not identify them--
    and neither did the bus driver, Ed Ray, who managed to recite the
    license-plate number of the abductor's van under hypnosis.
            Wright's defense of Ingram turns on the opinion of
    Richard Ofshe, a Berkeley psychologist, reputed mind control
    expert and friend of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Ofshe
    has written, Wright explains, "extensively about how the
    thought-control techniques developed in Communist china, the
    Soviet Union and North Korea had come to be employed and refined
    by various religious cults in the United States." Pointing to
    mind control in Communist countries is a favorite tactic of the
    American mind control fraternity to divert attention from the
    highly sophisticated techniques employed in "Democratic"
    countries (often in the form of experimentation on unknowing
    subjects). This historical revision is a fine example of "mirror
    imaging," the CIA technique of vilifying others, and ignoring the
    Agency's own role in the formation and control of mind control
    cults. Ofshe has not been directly linked to the CIA, but his
    work parrots the writings of UCLA'S Louis Jolyon West and other
    psychiatrists with Agency credentials.
            Wright somehow failed to mention that Ofshe is sharply at
    odds with much of the American Psychological Association. He has
    filed a suit, with Margaret Singer, for $30 million against the
    APA for engaging in a "onspiracy"  to "destroy" their reputations
     and prevent them from testifying in the courtroom. Both Ms.
    Singer and Richard Ofshe derive a significant part of their
    income as consultants and expert witnesses on behalf of accused
    child abusers. Their complaint, filed under federal racketeering
    laws--tripling any financial damages--claims that members of
    the APA set out with "repeated lies" to "discredit them and
    impair their careers."
            The Association flatly denied the charges. Two courts
    quickly dismissed the case. The APA released a statement to the
    press stating that the organization had merely advised members
    against testifying in court on the subject of brainwashing with
    "persuasive coercion" (a concept, after all, pushed during the
    Korean war by the CIA to justify barbaric mind control
    experimentation on American citizens), and had in no way
    conspired to impair the careers of Ofshe, Singer or anyone else.
            Many in Ofshe's own profession believe him to be a
    world-class opportunist. He is a constant in newspaper interviews
    and on the talk show circuit, where he claims there is "no
    evidence" to support ritual abuse allegations. His categorical
    denial ignore's Ingram's own confession and a number of jury
    decisions across the country. And then there are, to cite one
    documented example of evidence from the glut that Ofshe ignores,
    the tunnels beneath the McMartin preschool, the most
    widely-publicized case. And a raid on the Children of God
    compound in Argentina in 1993 turned up videos of ritual abuse
    and child pornography. Evidence does exist--Ofshe simply refuses
    to acknowledge the fact. A cult specialist with Ofshe's
    credentials would surely explore the abundance of evidence if he
    was a legitimate psychologist. Instead, he chirps a categorical
    "no evidence," perfectly aware that most mental health
    professionals will see through him. A credulous public will not.
            On the December 3, 1993 Rolanda talk show, a woman was
    interviewed who'd had flashback memories of abuse before
    consulting with a therapist. Dr. Ofshe appeared on the program,
    his silver beard groomed, looking every inch the authority.
    Rolanda asked Ofshe if "a terrible childhood memory, as bad as
    child abuse, (can) actually be repressed."
            "There is absolutely no reason to think that that is
    true," Ofshe told her. "And it's not just what I say--this is
    the sum and substance of everything science knows about how
    memory works." This, of course, is a transparent lie. Ofshe
    dismissed repressed memories of abuse as the reigning
    "psychological quackery of the 20th century."
            Dr. Daniel Lutzker, a psychologist at the Milton Erickson
    Institute, was sitting in the audience--turning crimson with
    rage at Ofshe's misrepresentations of the psychology of trauma.
    He stood up and argued that sex abuse can indeed begat buried
    recollections. "Repressed memories," Lutzker countered, "are not
    only important, they are the cornerstone of most psychotherapies.
    the fact is that the more awful the experience, the more likely
    it is to be repressed!"
            Ofshe responded that there was "no evidence" so support
    such "nonsense."
            Grimacing with disbelief, Lutzker said that Ofshe
    wouldn't make such outrageous comments if he bothered to pick up
    "any basic textbook on psychotherapy."
            "Your making it up!" Ofshe spat. Lutzker stared at him in
    disbelief.
            But the crowning contradiction to Ofshe's "expert"
    opinions appeared in a September 1994 L.A. Weekly article on
    alien abductions (another phenomenon said by the Foundation to
    breed "false memories").
            "There are a lot of not particularly well-certified
    people out there," Dr. Ofshe told Gardetta, "using very powerful
    techniques on people. Visualizing this kind of stuff under
    hypnosis--abduction, Satan cults, sexual abuse--is the closest
    thing that anyone can experience short of the experience itself.
    That's why it's so traumatic to the individuals undergoing
    hypno-therapy, and why the hypno-therapist today can be seen as a
    new form of sexual predator."
            But one morning, shortly thereafter, Gardetta awoke to
    find a triangular rash on the palm of his left hand.
            "It didn't surprise me," Gardetta wrote. "Things around
    the house--which sits on a hilltop in a semi-rural area--had
    been getting weird. A jet-wash noise buzzed some afternoons
    around the house, its origin impossible to discern. Lights were
    turning themselves on, and the alarm system's motion sensor was
    tripping itself every morning between 5 and 6. One early evening,
    small footsteps crossed the roof. I ran outside to find the
    electrical wires leading to a nearby telephone pole swaying in
    the windless dusk."
            The mysterious federal mind control fraternity had struck
    again, leaving behind more memories to be denounced by the
    "skeptics" of the FMS Foundation--the CIA's answer to the Flat
    Earth Society.

    [END]
    ----------------------------------------------------------------
    VERICOMM BBS filename: [mn116.zip] = [mn116.txt]
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