US Electromagnetic Weapons and Human Rights 1/6

A Study of the History of US Intelligence Community Human Rights Violations and Continuing Research in Electromagnetic Weapons

Research Statement

This research explores the current capabilities of the US military to use electromagnetic (EMF) devices to harass, intimidate, and kill individuals and the continuing possibilities of violations of human rights by the testing and deployment of these weapons. To establish historical precedent in the US for such acts, we document long-term human rights and freedom of thought violations by US military/intelligence organizations. Additionally, we explore contemporary evidence of on-going government research in EMF weapons technologies and examine the potentialities of continuing human rights abuses.

In the 1950s and 60s the CIA began work to find means for influencing human cognition, emotion and behavior. Through the use of the psychological understanding of the human being as a social animal and the ability to manipulate a subject’s environment through isolation, drugs and hypnosis, US funded scientists have long searched for better means of controlling human behavior.  This research has included the use of wireless directed electromagnetic energy under the heading of “Information Warfare” and “Non-Lethal Weapons.”

New technological capabilities have been developed in black budget projects¹ over the last few decades— including the ability to influence human emotion, disrupt thought, and present excruciating pain through the manipulation of magnetic fields. The US military and intelligence agencies have at their disposal frightful new weapons, weapons that have likely already been covertly used and/or tested on humans, both here and abroad, and which could be directed against the public in the event of mass protests or civil disturbance.

1 Black budgets are government-funded projects that are classified/secret to Congress and the American people. For an in-depth analysis on the topic, see Weiner, Tim, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget, Warner: 1990.

Human Rights belong to people collectively. To believe in rights for some and not others is a denial of the humanness of people worldwide. Yet, denial is exactly what Congress and George W. Bush did with the signing of the Military Commission Act of 2006. The new official US policy is that torture and suspension of due process are acceptable for anyone the president deems to be a terrorist or supporter. This act is the overt denial of the inalienable rights of human beings propagated in our Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. More so, US actions declared to the world that the US suspends human rights for those it believes are evil.

The precious words,

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” did not declare that only some men (and women) possess unalienable rights.

Our independence was founded on the understanding that all men and women are recognized by this nation as having innate rights derived by their humanity.

Likewise, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, created by the United Nations in 1948, signed and ratified by the US Congress, specifies in its preamble that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been a guide for international law for most of six decades, and as such binds the United States to its general principles. Article 10 states that “everyone is entitled to full equality, to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him,” and Article 5 specifically prohibits torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Both of these basic human rights have been superceded by the passage the of Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Additionally, the Universal Declaration of Human rights declares that everyone has the right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression and opinion. This means that humans have the inalienable right to be able to freely think their own thoughts and discover their own truths. This paper addresses this most fundamental human right and explores the pending threats to individual freedom of thought posed by new EMF weapons technologies.

Freedom of thought or cognitive liberty is the natural human right of each person to be secure in their ability to perceive the world to the best of their ability. To have true cognitive liberty in a world as complex as ours would mean that first we must have access to truthful and unbiased information about the actions of others and the general state of the world. The Center for Cognitive Liberties defines this as “the right of each individual to think independently and autonomously, to use the full spectrum of his or her mind, and to engage in multiple modes of thought.” ² Without accurate representations we cannot make independently informed choices. It is imperative that the human body and mind be considered sacrosanct. To invade a person’s body without their consent is an egregious human rights crime.

The circumstance may soon arrive in which anti-war or human rights protesters suddenly feel a burning sensation akin to touching a hot skillet over their entire body. Simultaneously they may hear terrifying nauseating screaming, which while not produced externally, fills their brains with overwhelming disruption. Not only are both phenomena currently possible, but designs for more powerful EMF technologies receive continuous funding from the US Government.

We are in a time of extremism, permanent war, and the unilateral manifestation of ethnocentrism and power by a cabal of people in the US government. These power elites have been in operation for decades and are set on nothing less than the total US military domination of the world. They defy the foundational values of the American people to achieve their ends. This is not a new phenomenon.

The repression of human rights has been present within the US Government throughout our history. ³ A long thread of sociological research documents the existence of a dominant ruling class in the US that sets policy and determines national political priorities.

2 See the Center for Cognitive Liberty at http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/ 
3 For a full discussion on the Global Dominance Group currently operating in the US see: http://www.projectcensored.org/downloads/Global_Dominance_Group.pdf 

The American ruling class is complex and inter-competitive, maintaining itself through interacting families of high social standing with similar life styles, corporate affiliations, and memberships in elite social clubs and private schools.⁴

This American ruling class is self-perpetuating, ⁵ maintaining its influence through policy-making institutions such as the National Manufacturing Association, National Chamber of Commerce, Business Council, Business Roundtable, Conference Board, American Enterprise Institute, Council on Foreign Relations and other business-centered policy groups.⁶ C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 book The Power Elite, documents how World War II solidified a trinity of power in the US, comprised of corporate, military and government elites in a centralized power structure motivated by class interests and working in unison through “higher circles” of contact and agreement. Mills described how the power elite were those “who decide whatever is decided” of major consequence.⁷

4 G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006 [5th ed.] and Peter Phillips, A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, 1994, (http://library.sonoma.edu/regional/faculty/phillips/bohemianindex.html)

5 Early studies by Charles Beard in the Economic Interpretations of the Constitution of the United States (1929), established that economic elites formulated the US Constitution to serve their own special interests. Henry Klien (1933) in his book Dynastic America claimed that wealth in America has power never before known in the world and was centered in the top 2% of the population owning some 60% of the country. Ferdinard Lundberg (1937) wrote American’s Sixty Families documenting inter-marring self-perpetuating families where wealth is the “indispensable handmaiden of government. C.Wright Mills determined in 1945 (American Business Elites, Journal of Economic History, Dec. 1945) that nine out of ten business elites from1750 to 1879 came from well to do families.

6 See R. Brady, Business as a System of Power, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943) and Val Burris, Elite Policy Planning Networks in the United State, American Sociological Association paper 1991.

7 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956)

With the advent of the military-industrial complex after World War II, President Eisenhower observed that an internal military industrial power faction was consolidating their long-term plans for the domination of America and, eventually, the world. Eisenhower was in no position to fight these men, and history records his feelings on the subject with the text of his short farewell address:

“….But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. Of these, I mention two only…

…This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.” ⁸

We now understand that Eisenhower was referring to the conjunction of redirected tax monies to research secret new technology aimed at nothing less than increasing the controlling power of the military industrial elite to a global scale.

One particular faction of ambitious men, the former cold warriors and emerging neo-conservatives, were close followers of philosopher Leo Strauss. This elite group included not just generals and industrialists but philosophers, scientists, academics, and politicians have now become the most powerful public-private war organization ever known.

Strauss espoused an elitist philosophy that fawned over the characteristics of those who inherited wealth and lived lives of leisure to pursue whatever their interests may be. His ideas have been transformed into a cogent ideology in which the media, religion, and government are used to subdue the masses while the real “nobles” follow their own will without regard to the laws designed to control lesser men. Strauss was likewise fond of secrecy, as a necessity for control, because if the lesser men found out what was being done to them they would no doubt be upset.

“The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many.” In On Tyranny, Strauss refers to this natural right as the “tyrannical teaching” of his beloved ancients.⁹
Leo Strauss, Albert Wohlstetter, and others at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought receive wide credit for promoting the neo-conservative agenda through their students, Paul Wolfowitz, Allan Bloom, and Bloom’s student Richard Perle.

Canadian cultural review magazine Adbusters, defines neo-conservatism as,

“The belief that Democracy, however flawed, was best defended by an ignorant public pumped on nationalism and religion. Only a militantly nationalist state could deter human aggression …such nationalism requires an external threat and if one cannot be found it must be manufactured.”¹⁰

8 Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p. 1035- 1040
9 Leo Strauss, “On Tyranny,” Edited by Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, University Of Chicago Press, 2000.
10 Guy Caron, “Anatomy of a Neo-Conservative White House,” Canadian Dimension, May 1, 2005.

The neo-conservative philosophy emerged as a reaction to the 1960s era of social revolutions. Numerous officials and associates in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidencies were strongly influenced by the neo-conservative philosophy including: John Ashcroft, Charles Fairbanks, Richard Cheney, Kenneth Adelman, Elliot Abrams, William Kristol and Douglas Feith.¹¹

Within the Ford administration there was a split between Cold War traditionalists seeking to minimize confrontations through diplomacy and detente and neo-conservatives advocating stronger confrontations with the Soviet’s “Evil Empire.” The latter group became more entrenched when George H.W. Bush became CIA Director. Bush allowed the formation of “Team B” headed by Richard Pipes along with Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Paul Nitze and others, who formed the second Committee on the Present Danger to raise awareness of the Soviet threat and the continuing need for a strong aggressive defense policy. Their efforts led to strong anti-Soviet positioning during the Reagan administration. ¹²

The Committees on the Present Danger (CPD) extend from the 1950s Russian threat to the present.

The current CPD proudly boasts on their website;

“In times of great challenge to the security of the United States, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents have traditionally joined to make an assertive defense of American interests.

Twice before in American history, The Committee on the Present Danger has risen to this challenge. It emerged in 1950 as a bipartisan education and advocacy organization dedicated to building a national consensus for a strong defense against Soviet expansionism. In 1976, the Committee on the Present Danger reemerged, with leadership from the labor movement, bipartisan representatives of the foreign policy community and academia, all of whom were concerned about strategic drift in US security policy. With victory in the Cold War, the mission of the Committee on the Present Danger was considered complete and consequently was deactivated.

Today, the current CPD promotes radical Islamists as the primary threat to the American people and millions of others who prize liberty. They claim that the threat is global. They also claim that they operate from cells in a number of countries. Rogue regimes seek power by making common cause with terrorist groups. The prospect that this deadly collusion may include weapons of mass murder was the justification for the invasion of Iraq.”¹³

11 Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet, “The Strategist and the Philosopher: Leo Strauss and Albert Wlhlestetter,” Le Monde, April 16, 2003, English translation: Counterpunch 6/2/03.
12 Anne Hessing Cahn, Team B; The Trillion-dollar Experiment, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 1993, Volume 49, No. 03
13 The Committee on the Present Danger mission statement can be accessed at http://www.fightingterror.org/whoweare/index.cfm 

Journalist John Pilger recalls his interview with neo-conservative Richard Perle during the Reagan administration:

“I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about ‘total war,’ I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America’s ‘war on terror’, “No stages, This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”¹⁴

There is ample evidence available to show that some individuals within government and industry have little problem with violating the public trust and using their positions to kill, maim, torture and destroy. It is of the utmost importance to our traditional American values of human rights and cognitive liberty that we recognize this threat from within. We must move to identify those who show these proclivities and ensure that their activities have adequate oversight.

Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment involving obedience to authority proved that individuals are fairly easily cowed into submitting to anyone who has a claim of authority, and that on average 61 percent of people will administer pain to another person if instructed to do so.¹⁵ Both test groups in these experiments rationalized their behavior by appealing to “the greater good.” Because it was for the “advancement of science” they were able to be convinced they should ignore personal judgment and obey the instructions given to them by the experimenters.¹⁶

Martin Orne, who was one of those paid by the CIA to conduct experiments on obedience, showed in 1962 that people would go to tremendous lengths to please a person in authority. Orne conducted research that involved presenting subjects with a stack of 2,000 pages of random numbers and instructing them to add each two adjacent numbers until he returned. Over 90 percent of the test subjects continued in this meaningless task for up to five hours.¹⁷

Today the combination of political climate and technological capability presents a condition in which widespread manipulation of, not only the flow of information through the media, but also the manipulation of the emotional states and cognitive ability in large populations could be achieved. If policy elites are unaccountable to the public for their actions, and the public has been emotionally manipulated to support them, we can assume that they will certainly abuse their positions in the pursuit of their agendas.

14 John Pilger, “The World Will Know The Truth,” New Statesman (London) (December 16 2002).
15 Stanley Milgram “Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View”, New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
16 “Obedience as a determinant of behavior is of particular relevance to our time,” Behavioral Study of Obedience, Stanley Milgram, Yale University, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 67, No. 4, p. 371
17 See Martin Orne-Orne, Martin T., “On The Social Psychology of the Psychological Experiment: With Particular Reference to Demand Characteristics and Their Implications,”Am. Psychol. 17 (1962): 776-783, Orne, M.T. The potential uses of hypnosis in interrogation. In A.D. Biderman (Ed.), The Manipulation of Human Behavior (pp. 169215). New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1961

Previous human rights and cognitive liberty violations are evidenced in CIA and FBI records pertaining to the infamous MK-ULTRA project and the grim record of harassment and subversion uncovered in the COINTELPRO program in force through the 1950s and into the 1970s. We also examined some of the cases of illegal experimentation on the public dating back to the 1930s. We consider, in depth, the forms of electromagnetic weapons entering the battlefield today that trace their origins back through the secret projects of the Defense Department in the 1950s and 1960s.

Psychological Warfare, Information War, and mind control may seem to be exotic topics, but the impact of these technologies and techniques is profound. Our minds are being impacted through a longstanding series of programs aimed at manipulating public opinion through intelligence agencies, think tanks, corporate media and a host of non-governmental organizations designed to engender fear, division and uncertainty in the public.¹⁸

Media manipulation involving the artificial framing of our collective reality is often a hit or miss proposition, but psychological operations have been carried out in the past, and are being carried out even today, through the practices of “Information Warfare,” directed at enemies abroad and at the American people.¹⁹

According to Mary C. FitzGerald of the Hudson Institute, New-concept weapons, such as laser, electromagnetic, plasma, climatic, genetic and biotechnological are the central principle driving the modernization of national defense. The potential for these weapons to be used for both good and bad deserves a great deal of attention, but there is little to be found in the media or discussed by our administration.²⁰

The US is a system of many institutions including those whose sole function is to provide government oversight. When problems arise that threaten the stability of the country or the safety of the people, the US government is designed to have checks and balances that allow the people to challenge misconduct either directly or through congressional representatives. Increasingly, oversight is disintegrating. According to a 2006 report in the Boston Globe, the intelligence committee does not read most intelligence reports in their entirety.²¹

The media is complicit in omitting information necessary to make democratic decisions.²² A global dominance agenda includes penetration into the boardrooms of the corporate media in the US. A research team at Sonoma State University recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US.

18 For an analysis on the interlocking of the corporate media, think tanks and government organizations, see Peter Phillips, Bridget Thornton and Lew Brown “ The Global Dominance Group and the US Corporate Media” in Censored 2007, Seven Stories Press.

19 See: Snow, Nancy, Information War American Propaganda, Free Speech, and Opinion Control Since 9/11, 2004 Seven Stories Press and Chomsky, Noam Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, 2002 Seven Stories Press
20 In researching this article, there are no instances of remarks by senior White House, Pentagon, or Congressional officials that specifically address the human effects of non-lethal EMF weapons. A search in Lexis Nexis from 20012006 returned no results in American mainstream media.
21 Classified Intelligence Bills Often Are Unread: Secret Process Can Discourage House Debate, Susan Milligan, Boston Globe August 6, 2006.
22 The Global Dominance Group and the US Corporate media, by Peter Phillips, Bridget Thornton and Lew Brown, published in Censored 2007, Seven Stories Press, 2006, Chapter 10,

The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. Four of the top 10 media corporations in the US have DOD contractors on their boards of directors including:

·        William Kennard: New York Times, Carlyle Group

·        Douglas Warner III, GE (NBC), Bechtel

·        John Bryson: Disney (ABC), Boeing

·        Alwyn Lewis: Disney (ABC), Halliburton

·        Douglas McCorkindale: Gannett, Lockheed-Martin

Given an interlocked media network, big media in the US effectively represent corporate America’s interests. The media elite, a key component of policy elites in the US, are the watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, the controllers of news and information content, and the decision makers regarding media resources.

It is not suggested that everyone in the government believes in global domination, nor that it is the intent of every government official to ‘cover up’ misconduct.²³ Scientists involved in potentially harmful technology are not ‘mad scientists.’ In fact, there are many reports in the public sphere addressing government and military misconduct that are put forth by people within these very institutions. The problem is when the government threatens whistleblowers, intimidates officials with job loss, infiltrates activist organizations, and increases surveillance²⁴.

23 Remarks on Classification, The Hon. Lee Hamilton, Information Security Oversight Office, October 18, 2005. “At a time when the US intelligence community is under intense scrutiny in the aftermath of 9/11 and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we only increase public skepticism about our government by denying the public information.”
24 See: Valerie Plame, the Richard Leiby, Spy Who Got Shoved Out Into the Cold, Washington Post, October 29, 2005; Page C01; Amended 2006 surveillance bill by Bush; The FBI and the Engineering of Consent, Noam Chomsky, From Public Eye Magazine, Volume One, Number Two; and Demian Bulwa, Oakland: Police spies chosen to lead war protest, San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, July 28, 2006. - Source: Peter Phillips, Lew Brown and Bridget Thornton, December 2006, Sonoma State University, Project Censored, Media Freedom Foundation, ProjectCensored Website, (READ MORE) #US Electromagnetic Weapons and Human Rights, #electromagneticweapons, #HumanRights, #OSEH, #MindControl, #DEW