Innocent People Went To Prison

Why did disinfo writers such as Andy Stephenson and Jeff Wells work so hard to bring right woos left disinfo into left leaning blogs? That's what I've been trying to figure out. Maybe the answer is as mundane as they were cuckoo bananas. Though I don't think so. Nonetheless, the bottom line is they did bring convolution into the left-o-sphere.

In this blog entry, I will go after others who played pivotal roles in messing with people's pysches concerning the satanic panic, and how with the McMartin Preschool scandal, their actions led to innocent folks going to prison. Then I will delve into the convolution spread by Dr. Corydon Hammond. But first I'd like to share yet another example of Jeff Wells supporting right woos left memes. I have discovered his supporting of Alex Jones. Since we know Jeff can be tied into the Michael Rivero network through Tinoire of Progressive Independent, and since we know that Rivero is part and parcel of Jones' tinfoil, this is further proof of the high probability that Wells has been much more than merely a misguided fool.

Here is a July, 2005 Democratic Underground thread.

The author copied and pasted a Guardian article but used Alex Jones' domain for the primary link. One of the methods by which disinfo has tried to pass off crap websites such as Jones', Michael Rivero's, and Jeff Rense's as credible has been through spreading the idea that such places are information clearinghouses, that they primarily link to respected publications such as The Guardian. However, look at how Prison Planet changed the title of the article to fit their global conspiracy schtick.

Here's The Guardian article. The actual title was, "UK-based dissident denies link to website that carried al-Qaida claim." Prison Planet changed it to, " Website that carried al-Qaida claim has connections to Bush family." It doesn't get much more in your face insidious than that.

Now while it is clear as day that Jeff Wells is a worthless right woos left disinfo writer, back in the day people like himself, Andy Stephenson, and even (ahem) Wayne Madsen were getting attention at left leaning websites such as Democratic Underground. A bunch of posters showed up on the DU thread to appropriately call out the original poster for attempting to spread Alex Jones' disinfo. Later on, Jeff Wells as Minstrel Boy showed up to evoke authority. In the process, he ultimately showed that he is a supporter of Alex Jones.

beam me up scottie: I have a problem with conspiracy nuts. Websites like your Prison Planet are teeming with tinfoil termites. Are you trying to tell me you didn't know that?


Minstrel Boy: I have a problem with argument by ridicule. There are a lot of preening, ignorant bullshitters with little grasp of the evidence and no understanding of the criminalization of the state, who contentedly squeeze greasy farts in the faces of researchers and activists who know what time it is.


beam me up scottie: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! The only defense of the tinfoil soldier: When all else fails, accuse the skeptics of conspiracy or unawareness of reality. Is that the best you can do?

Jeff Wells was eventually banned from Democratic Underground for voting yes in a racist poll. There are a million and one examples of how Jeff Wells and others are insidious right woos left internet frauds. The question becomes, why keep hammering at a nail which is already fully into the wood? Here's one more example, then I'm moving on. Jeff Wells and Andy Stephenson were close to a freeper infiltrator troll named Seventhson. After Seventhson trolled the DU board after John Kerry's 2004 "loss" to GW, he found refuge at Wells' Rigorous Intuition. Jeff bought that chump's story that his DU account had been hacked into. Andy did too.

I sincerely don't see how Jeff Wells could be characterised as a grifter. I don't see how too many would be making donations to him. Someone would have to be quite the chump to buy into his supporting of various hoaxes such as the Franklin Case and satanic ritual pedophile rings run by the US military and influential politicians. My conclusion is that he is probably making a salary from some other organisation. He doesn't appear to have the greatest writing skills. It's not that he has ever done much more than spread various lies as truths. I believe that whomever Gunderson and Aquino were paid by to spread the satanic panic hoax are the same source of revenue for Jeff Wells. I admit this can't be proven. But that's my conclusion. That's my honest opinion. I believe that the organisation is based in Texas and also employs people such as Alex Jones and Michael Rivero.

Unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be any way to prove someone is doing more than grifting. Hal Turner has been proven to be an FBI informant with shades of cointelpro. We could use more proof like that. Maybe it will eventually arrive.

As for the satanic panic that swept the US in the 1980s and found its eventual way into parts of Europe, I am not arguing that all the creeps involved in being catalysts for innocent folks going to prison were on disinfo payrolls. Some people are just incredibly stupid. Some prosecutors got swept up in believing this was the politically right thing to do for themselves. Certain psychiatrists built up a cottage industry in spreading satanic ritual abuse propaganda. A bunch of them were eventually brought to court for malpractice. The original accuser in the McMartin scandal, Judy Johnson, was batsh*t insane. There are real people who are neither grifters nor disinfo punks who actually buy into outrageous conspiracy theories.


I would now like to segue into looking at a few of the villians involved in spreading the satanic panic. While I sense that Gunderson and Aquino were probably a two man operation most responsible for starting the thing, none of it would have taken off, imho, if not for self-serving useful idiots who gave such obvious bullcrap some credibility. To repeat, innocent people went to prison. That is beyond wrong. The people responsible for that deserve to forever wear badges of dishonour. I will now do my best to further expose some of them.



The Satanic Panic and the Creeps who Facilitated Innocent People Going to Prison


Kee MacFarlane

MacFarlane was the "social worker" who used anatomically correct dolls to pressure young children into aiding the McMartin witch hunt. From the link above, one can see exactly why she should be considered one of the prime villians of what is considered the case which set off the satanic panic of the 80s and 90s. They can see that all MacFarlane had for an education was a bachelor's degree in fine arts and a master's degree in social work. Nothing in psychiatry. No real expertise in law enforcement, i.e. for having the training to conduct a legitimate investigation. One may wonder how she was ever given the job description of being a child abuse expert.

(excerpts)
Cross-examination by Dean Gits:

"When [name of girl] says she doesn't remember any [naked games] you said, 'I know 'em all because other kids told me.' Do you think that puts pressure on Melinda to remember games that she might otherwise not remember?"

"Yes."

"Do you think that having naked dolls with anatomical parts tends to suggest to the child naked games, naked people?"

"No, I don't believe that.".

"You made the statement, 'Every kid from the preschool came in and told me.' Do you think that statement puts pressure on a child?"

"No."

"You said, 'That's why we wanted to use puppets. We wanted them to get real brave because more than sixty kids have come in and told yucky secrets, and every day more kids come in and tell us what went on down there.' Do you think that statement might put undue pressure on [name of girl] to comply with what other kids said?"

"That statement was true.".

"'And 'we found out all the scary stuff was just a trick to scare the kids to make the kids think that somebody would hurt their moms and dads or hurt them.' 'We found out':' Doesn't that tell the child that you know that something happened?"

"Yes."

"In this interview, you are the source of contagion, right?"

"Objection. "

"Sustained. "

" 'All the kids' mommies and dads now know what happened at the school, all the touching, all those sneaky little games.' Do you think by using that statement, and authority figures as sources of knowledge is putting pressure on her?"

"I'm telling her all the parents came to see me and now it's okay."....


Cross-examination by Daniel Davis:

"You indicated you had training from the FBI."

"No, I was the trainer."

"And who trained you before you trained the FBI?"

"I attended numerous workshops."

"Did you ever sit down with police officers and did they tell you what law enforcement needs to do in interviewing a child who may have been molested?"

"Yes...."

"Do you think that by disrobing a doll and exposing a child to what appears to be an erect penis, that that's suggesting things to the child?"

"Well, we worked very hard on the dolls to have them not appear to be an erect, stimulated penis. In fact we tied them down. If you're asking about whether it can ever affect a child, it's one the research of the last five years has been investigating and . . . there's absolutely no evidence in the research that they do that. . . providing incorrect or false information just because they've got these dolls...."
...

I'm certainly not going to copy and paste everything, as it's easy enough for interested folks to check into these things themselves. I guess the only reason bloggers copy and paste what they do, is because one can sense there will be many who are generally lazy and won't check into these things. Hence, some of us feel the need to do others' homework.



Dr. Astrid Heger: Another Villian



An excerpt from The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial: A Commentary by Doug Linder (2003):

The prosecution produced several parent witnesses to lay a foundation for the accounts of their children that would follow. Typically, a parent would testify that prior to the infamous letter of Chief Kuhlmeyer announcing that Ray Buckey was suspected of child abuse, he or she had no reason to suspect that his or her child had been molested. After taking the children to CII and talking with Kee MacFarlane, however, the parents became convinced that their children had been sexually abused. Parents suggested that bladder infections, nightmares, anatomically correct artwork, or masturbation were confirming evidence of abuse. A couple of parents theorized that the massive abuse might have occurred during naptime, when parents were prohibited from picking up their children.

The prosecution's child witnesses, ranging in age from eight to fifteen, repeated many of their stories from the preliminary hearing. Jurors heard of the Naked Movie Star Game, Ray Buckey scaring the children into silence by executing a cat with a knife, and numerous graphic accounts of sexual abuse by both Ray and Peggy Buckey. The defense countered with evidence of contradictions between trial testimony and testimony at the preliminary hearing, videotaped interviews in which the children denied that they were molested, and CII interviews revealing MacFarlane coaching children and rewarding "right" answers.

The defense tried to produce a child witness of its own, the young boy who started the whole investigation rolling: the son of Judy Johnson. With Judy Johnson now deceased, the boy's father flatly told reporters that his son would testify "over my dead body." Judge Pounders agreed with Johnson that trial testimony might prove too stressful for his son and declared the boy legally unavailable as a witness.

Perhaps the key witness in the trial was CII therapist Kee MacFarlane. In her five weeks on the stand, MacFarlane fought to defend her controversial interview techniques that included naked puppets, anatomically correct dolls, and telling children what other children had previously reported about sexual abuse at the McMartin School. Before MacFarlane finished her lengthy testimony, even Judge Pounders was expressing concern about her techniques. Outside of the presence of the jury, Pounders declared, "In my view, her credibility is becoming more of an issue as she testifies here."

Defense expert Dr. Michael Maloney, professor of psychiatry at USC, further discredited MacFarlane's interview techniques. Maloney criticized the technique as presenting children with a "script" that discouraged "spontaneous information" and instead encouraged the children to supply expected answers to "please mother and father" and prove themselves "good detectives."

Another distinct weakness in the prosecution's case was the lack of medical evidence of sexual abuse. Although Dr. Astrid Heger testified that she found numerous scars "consistent with rape," the defense's medical expert, Dr. David Paul, said that his review of the medical evidence turned up virtually no evidence of molestation. In the case of nine of the eleven alleged victims, Paul found the body parts to be "perfectly normal."

Dr. Astrid Heger is blogging for The Huffington Post.



Maybe she can blog on her participation in the McMartin witch hunt! Or maybe she can blog on how she has been sued in the past for her so-called expert testimony in a similar case.

CARNEY SUES COURT-TRIAL WITNESSES 2 HOSPITALS, STAFFERS NAMED.

Byline: Karen Maeshiro Staff Writer

PALMDALE - Acquitted of child molestation Child molestation charges last fall, former Palmdale councilman and sheriff's Sgt. Kevin Carney is suing a physician and a nurse practitioner who testified against him in his trial.

The nurse practitioner had examined Carney's principal accuser, a 15 year-old girl for whom he said he acted as a surrogate father, and the doctor, a child-abuse expert, who reviewed the videotape and photographs of the exam.

"You can't go into court and lie. There's no immunity for that," said Milton Grimes, the attorney who defended Carney in the criminal trial.

Carney was sued by the girl last October. In a counterclaim filed in March as a part of that lawsuit, Carney asked for unspecified damages from Marcia Wehr, a nurse practitioner who works at High Desert Hospital, Dr. Astrid Heger and Antelope Valley Hospital.

Moving on from McMartin

There's this nutjob out of Utah named Corydon Hammond. He used to be the leading academic promoting the idea that MK Ultra and satanic ritual abuse was the real deal. Because of people like him, it has been easier for disinfo writers like Jeff Wells to emerge.



Dr. D. Corydon Hammond


One can read here how Jeff Wells found Hammond's disinfo rubbish quite fascinating.

And we can follow Dr Greene right down the rabbit hole with the lecture "Hypnosis in Multiple Personality Disorder: Ritual Abuse" by Dr D Corydon Hammond, President of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, delivered at the Fourth Annual Eastern Regional Conference on Abuse and Multiple Personality in 1992. It's come to be known as the "Greenbaum Speech". The Psychiatric Institute of Washington, sponsor of the event, still makes available tapes and transcripts of the other sessions. Not of this one:

Hmmm. I wonder why. Not!

Folks can search engine a bit and find copy and pastes of the transcript of the "Greebaum Speech." Here's one example and some excerpts.

So I have gone from someone kind of neutral and not knowing what to think about it all to someone who clearly believes ritual abuse is real and that the people who say it isn't are either naive like people who didn't want to believe the Holocaust or -- they're dirty. [Applause]...

Here's where it appears to have come from. At the end of World War II, before it even ended, Allen Dulles and people from our Intelligence Community were already in Switzerland making contact to get out Nazi scientists. As World War II ends, they not only get out rocket scientists, but they also get out some Nazi doctors who have been doing mind-control research in the camps.

They brought them to the United States. Along with them was a young boy, a teenager, who had been raised in a Hasidic Jewish tradition and a background of Cabalistic mysticism that probably appealed to people in the Cult because at least by the turn of the century Aleister Crowley had been introducing Cabalism into Satanic stuff, if not earlier. I suspect it may have formed some bond between them. But he saved his skin by collaborating and being an assistant to them in the death-camp experiments. They brought him with them. They started doing mind-control research for Military Intelligence in military hospitals in the United States. The people that came, the Nazi doctors, were Satanists. Subsequently, the boy changed his name, Americanized it some, obtained an M.D. degree, became a physician and continued this work that appears to be at the center of Cult Programming today. His name is known to patients throughout the country. [Pause] What they basically do is they will get a child and they will start this, in basic forms, it appears, by about two and a half after the child's already been made dissociative....

In a patient at this point in time about eight years old who has gone through a great deal early programming took place on a military installation. That's not uncommon. I've treated and been involved with cases who are part of this original mind-control project as well as having their programming on military reservations in many cases. We find a lot of connections with the CIA....

The way you create Manchurian Candidates is you divide the mind. It's part of what the Intelligence Community wanted to look at. If you're going to get an assassin, you're going to get somebody to go do something, you divide the mind....

Hmmm. So Hammond said the chief Satanic doctor was Jewish. How convenient for the right woos left conspiracy theorists.

Here's more from Richard Bartholomew on Corydon Hammond and his run for the hills, it's the Jews with their satanic, mind control nonsense.

...Meanwhile, D. Corydon Hammond, another “authority” manages to flirt with Jewish conspiracy theory when he argues that abuse victims who had repressed memories of trauma

will be slaves to a worldwide intergenerational cult that is organized into “Illuminatic councils.” The cult, said Hammond, is headed by a shadowy “Dr. Greenbaum,” a Hasidic Jewish collaborator with the Nazis who once assisted in death camp experiments and later used the CIA to further his nefarious ends.

Quoting Hammond directly:

My best guess is that they want an army of Manchurian Candidates, tens of thousands of mental robots who will do prostitution, do child pornography, smuggle drugs, engage in international arms smuggling, do snuff films, …and eventually the megalomaniacs at the top believe they’ll create a Satanic order that will rule the world.

Both Hammond and Scheflin contributed to a work titled Memory, Trauma Treatment, and the Law. It won an award from the American Psychiatric Association in 1999. McNally gives some reasons for why the ideas managed to gain currency, concerning the legacy of Freud and past failures by therapists to spot real (and remembered!) sexual abuse. However, the continued credibility given to these claims by therapists and the media suggest that there may be future tragedies inspired by self-serving panic-mongers....

It should come as no surprise that Hammond has been one of many psychiatrists accused of abusing patients.

Psychiatric patient tells of ordeal in treatment
Chicago Tribune/February 13, 2004
By Hal Dardick

(excerpts)

When Elizabeth Gale sought psychiatric treatment in 1986, she suffered from depression, the most common of psychiatric illnesses.

But Dr. Bennett Braun and his colleagues convinced her that her family indoctrinated her as a child so she would make babies for sacrifice in a satanic cult, Gale charged in a malpractice suit she settled Wednesday for $7.5 million.

The therapists, she alleged, told her she needed their help to recover memories hidden beneath layers of rare multiple personalities that she had developed as a psychic guard against her childhood trauma.

Braun's attorney Martin Kanofsky said his client denies the allegations and declined to comment further....

Gale's attorney Todd Smith said that under the settlement, entered Wednesday in Cook County Circuit Court, Rush North Shore Medical Center, where Braun was director of the dissociative disorders program, will pay $3.6 million. Psychologist Roberta Sachs will pay $3.1 million, and a corporation affiliated with Braun will pay $500,000. Dr. Corydon Hammond will pay $175,000, and Rush University Medical Center must pay $150,000. No wrongdoing was admitted by the hospitals, the doctors or the psychologist.

Hammond's attorney Scott Thomas declined comment.

Related readings:
Renee Fredrickson Settles for $175,000

Google Books- Victims of memory: sex abuse accusations and shattered lives By Mark Pendergrast (excerpt)






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