Germany’s Shelter for Victims of Ritual Abuse

Germany’s Shelter for Victims of Ritual Abuse
By Antonia Oettingen

Gaby Breitenbach has seen and heard some awful things. The German psychotherapist is telling me about how sometimes, from a very young age, women are systematically tortured by people seeking to split their minds into multiple identities. The desire is to control the victims, of course, but also to leave them with an identity that seems perfectly normal to strangers. While the victim’s everyday identity will have no “memory” of the trauma they’ve experienced, Breitenbach says the abusers are able to “summon” the other identities with various triggers. This can be something as simple as a ringtone, for example.

This method of mind control is known as “ritual abuse.” Most of the time the abuse is sexual in nature. Sometimes the abusers crave power; sometimes they’re just being cruel. Sometimes they’re pseudo-religious nutjobs, sometimes they’re fascists, and oftentimes they are organized crime networks. Sometimes the abusers use their victims to gain membership to a secret society; sometimes they flick a switch in their minds to make them commit suicide. The world can be an incredibly shitty place.

Last month, Breitenbach opened a safehouse to treat victims of ritual abuse in Germany. Vielseits, which translates to versatility, is the first of its kind in Europe and offers trauma therapy to anyone who walks through its doors….

Can you tell me about the kind of women who seek help at Vielseits?

All the women who end up with us are victims of organized, sadistic, and sexual violence, who have been subjected to mind control. There are also organizations practicing ritual abuse with a kind of spiritual superstructure where certain ideologies come into play, such as neo-fascist mindsets or different pseudo-religious groups, like Scientology or satanic cults.

From an outsider’s perspective, these are women who appear to have led seemingly normal lives—their everyday persona wouldn’t have been aware of the abuse they were subjected to at night, weekends, or on school holidays. These traumatic experiences are contained in different parts of the identity, so they’re kept away from the conscious, and the person has no knowledge of the trauma they’ve experienced.

How are these personas created?

The victims are subjected to near-death situations—with the help of electric shocks, waterboarding, or other forms of torture—from an early age, and then they’re “rescued” by their tormentors. At some point the victim’s psyche will develop an automated response—it will split, in a bid to survive. As a consequence of the systematic torture, the victims can develop a range of different identities throughout their lifetimes. Offenders perpetrating the abuse hold the key to this system of split identities and have the power to evoke a specific set of behaviors using triggers—which can be hand signs or certain smells or sounds, like a ringtone….
http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/ritual-abuse-sanctuary-vielseits

Massive online pedophile ring busted by cops, The Zombie Ward – women were put to sleep for months in an NHS hospital room, Exposing national and international child exploitation and trafficking networks

– Massive online pedophile ring busted by cops
Five Americans among 184 people arrested; 230 abused children taken to safety
– The Zombie Ward: The chilling story of how ‘depressed’ women were put to sleep for months in an NHS hospital room – leaving mental scars that remain 40 years on
– Exposing national and international child exploitation and trafficking networks

Massive online pedophile ring busted by cops
Five Americans among 184 people arrested; 230 abused children taken to safety

msnbc.com staff and news service reports

An Internet pedophile ring with up to 70,000 members — thought to be the world’s largest —has been uncovered by police, a security official said Wednesday.

The European police agency Europol said in a statement that “Operation Rescue” had identified 670 suspects and that 230 abused children in 30 countries had been taken to safety. More children are expected to be found, Europol said.

It said that so far 184 people had been arrested and investigations in some countries were continuing. Most of those detained are suspected of direct involvement in sexually abusing children.

They include teachers, police officers and scout leaders, AP reported. One Spaniard who worked at summer youth camps is suspected of abusing some 100 children over five years.

Europol director Rob Wainwright said Wednesday the ring, which communicated using an Internet forum, was “probably the largest online pedophile network in the world.”

Cori Bassett, a public affairs officer for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an email that there had been five arrests and four convictions in connection with Operation Rescue in the U.S….

“The website operated from a server based in the Netherlands and, at its height, boasted up to 70,000 members worldwide,” it added….
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/42108748/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/massive-online-pedophile-ring-busted-cops/

The Zombie Ward: The chilling story of how ‘depressed’ women were put to sleep for months in an NHS hospital room – leaving mental scars that remain 40 years on
Women with postnatal depression and anorexia passed through Royal Waterloo’s infamous Ward 5
They were drugged and subjected to horrendous levels of ECT
Unluckiest were taken to the ‘Narcosis Room’ and put to sleep for weeks
By Barbara Davies   8 August 2013

There are many horrors that Elizabeth Reed recalls from her time at London’s Royal Waterloo Hospital, but one in particular lingers in her mind. She describes a small, windowless room at the top of the red-brick Edwardian building, just lit by a night lamp on a nurse’s desk.

Six beds are jammed together. The deep breathing of women in a drug-induced sleep. The fetid stench of unwashed bodies.

‘It was like being buried alive,’ she says. ‘I was lying there in the dark, hour after hour, and couldn’t move. I wasn’t aware of my body,  just my head in this darkness. You could hear people moving around and other people breathing and moaning.’

While Elizabeth is one of only a handful of women prepared to speak out, her story is not unique. Up to 500 women, suffering from conditions such as postnatal depression and anorexia, passed through the Royal Waterloo’s infamous Ward 5 before it shut 40 years ago.

Heavily drugged and subjected to horrendous levels of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) and even lobotomies, the unluckiest were taken to the ‘Narcosis Room’, where they were put to sleep for weeks at a time.

Almost all teenage girls and women in their early 20s, they were treated as little more than guinea pigs by controversial psychiatrist William Sargant as he conducted a bizarre experiment to ‘repattern’ their brains and cure them of depression.

….questions remain about why the women of Ward 5 were subjected to such cruelty at an NHS hospital. Two of them, now in their 60s, spoke about their experiences to Femail this week….

Officially, the Department of Health says it no longer has records of Sargant’s work at the Royal Waterloo, affiliated to London’s St Thomas’s Hospital. However, Elizabeth has a copy of her referral letter from January 1973, stamped with the ominous words: ‘Admit to Ward 5.’ Notes reveal she was given a ‘course of narcosis’….

She was admitted to the Royal Waterloo in spring 1973 when she was 22 and engaged to be married. After arriving on the 22-bed Ward 5, she was sedated and underwent ECT — sometimes every other day.

‘I can remember the sound of the ECT machine being wheeled down the corridor and it being switched on and off in other rooms,’ she says.

‘It was so frightening. First of all, they injected you and you had an awful feeling of falling backwards into yourself. After ECT, you didn’t know who you were.’….

Eventually, Elizabeth was moved into the Narcosis Room beside Ward 5 and put into a drug-induced sleep.

‘I was awake, but couldn’t move or speak. It was torture, lying there for hours in the darkness’

Women there were occasionally woken to be taken to the toilet or to be fed. ‘We were like zombies,’ says Elizabeth. ‘I couldn’t walk. I had to be lifted. Afterwards, they put you back to sleep again.

Sargant, a founding member of St Thomas’s department of psychological medicine, who advocated the use of drugs to treat mental illness, operated his ‘sleep room’ for ten years until 1973. Four patients are known to have died there and yet no one stepped in to stop him….

At the heart of his treatment was his belief that the brain could be ‘repatterned’ to erase bad memories.

His fame – due to TV and radio interviews and best-selling books – ensured a steady stream of patients….

The secrecy surrounding Dr Sargant’s work has even led to claims he was being bankrolled by British intelligence and the CIA. He certainly had links to the military in World War II, working at Porton Down, the Ministry of Defence biological and chemical weapons research base.

But long before he died in 1988, Sargant destroyed all his records, which might have shed light on his sinister treatments….

A leading psychiatric expert, Professor Malcolm Lader of King’s College, London, recalls how, as a junior doctor, Sargant showed him his sleep room several times in 1966….

‘The women were really cramped together. It was dark. It was like twilight. There was a terrible smell of unwashed bodies.

‘It was a fraught procedure to be sedated for that amount of time. Most importantly, there was no evidence that narcosis had any effect.

‘He was doling out drugs in large doses that were way above the recommended maximum dose. I resolved never to send anyone there.’….

There were also rumours, says Professor Lader, that Sargant was untouchable because he was supported by British intelligence or the CIA. He was a frequent traveller to the U.S. and wrote in his autobiography of being entertained at the White House during one of his trips.

‘He was interested in brainwashing and so was the CIA. He may have been protected by his contacts.’

Perhaps it is no coincidence that Ward 5 and Sargant’s sleep room closed when he retired in 1973 — the same year the CIA officially ended its top-secret mind-control experiments, codenamed Project MKUltra….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2386477/NHS-Zombie-Ward-How-depressed-women-sleep-months-Londons-Royal-Waterloo-Hospital.html

Are US and Canadian Officials Torturing Children?
Judy Byington

August 13, 2013

Exposing national and international child exploitation and trafficking networks by uniting child abuse survivors is the goal of an early September New York Press Conference with Kevin Annett, International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State ( ITCCS http://www.itccs.org ); Neil Brick, Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse Today (SMART http://ritualabuse.us ) and Judy Byington of Child Abuse Recovery (CAR http://www.ChildAbuseRecovery.com ).
….The coalition expects to bring together thousands of child sex abuse, ritualized abuse, Satanic Ritual Abuse and mind-control survivors, victims and therapists. Annett recently joined Catholic Priest Abuse survivors from 21 nations to hold their first convention in Italy on September 20.

….Considering present testimonies of severe abuse survivors, it is believed that government-funded mind-control experimentation continues. The history dates to the CIA’s 1950s Project Bluebird, Artichoke, MK-Ultra and MK-Delta brainwashing programs. After World War II the CIA exported experts on human experimentation in Nazi concentration camps into the US via Project Paperclip.

Of the 987 ritual abuse, mind control and other extreme abuse survivors who responded to the 2007 Extreme Abuse Surveys, 234 stated that as children they remember being used in US government-sponsored mind-control experiments, while 83 said they were used in Canadian government-sponsored tests.  http://extreme-abuse-survey.net/  ….

The 16th Annual SMART Child Abuse and Ritual Abuse Conference went ahead as scheduled…. Neil Brick held the conference for US, Canadian and worldwide ritual abuse and mind control survivors, their helpers and therapists August 9-11 in Connecticut.

Among the SMART Conference speakers was CAR’s Judy Byington, author of “Twenty-Two Faces” the biography of mind-control victim Jenny Hill. Http://www.22faces.com . Hill was diagnosed with 22 multiple personalities that resulted from childhood trauma. The 2007 Extreme Abuse Surveys document 502 survivors like her who were forced by their perpetrators to participate in murder. She explained one experience in a YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/wat?v=F626Lsrdwg4  ….

http://www.examiner.com/article/are-us-and-canadian-officials-torturing-children

Against Their Will The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America

Against Their Will   The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America
Allen M. Hornblum, Judith L. Newman, and Gregory J. Dober

Palgrave Macmillan, June 2013
ISBN: 978-0-230-34171-5, ISBN10: 0-230-34171-3,

During the Cold War, an alliance between American scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and the US military pushed the medical establishment into ethically fraught territory. Doctors and scientists at prestigious institutions were pressured to produce medical advances to compete with the perceived threats coming from the Soviet Union.

In Against Their Will, authors Allen Hornblum, Judith Newman, and Gregory Dober reveal the little-known history of unethical and dangerous medical experimentation on children in the United States.  Through rare interviews and the personal correspondence of renowned medical investigators, they document how children—both normal and those termed “feebleminded”—from infants to teenagers, became human research subjects in terrifying experiments. They were drafted as “volunteers” to test vaccines, doused with ringworm, subjected to electric shock, and given lobotomies. They were also fed radioactive isotopes and exposed to chemical warfare agents.

This groundbreaking book shows how institutional superintendents influenced by eugenics often turned these children over to scientific researchers without a second thought. Based on years of archival work and numerous interviews with both scientific researchers and former test subjects, this is a fascinating and disturbing look at the dark underbelly of American medical history.
http://us.macmillan.com/againsttheirwill/AllenHornblum

MK-ULTRA Violence Or, how McGill pioneered psychological torture

MK-ULTRA Violence Or, how McGill pioneered psychological torture

Features | September 6th, 2012  Written by Juan Camilo Velasquez

Today, many journalists, doctors, and the general public see the Allan Memorial Institute in Royal Victoria Hospital as the cradle of modern torture, a cradle built and rocked by Scottish-born Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. To the patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron, our university was the site of months of seemingly unending torture disguised as medical experimentation –– an experimentation that destroyed their lives and changed the course of psychological torture forever.

Cameron’s experiments, known as MK-ULTRA subproject 68, were partially funded by the CIA and the Canadian government, and are widely known for their use of LSD, barbiturates, and amphetamines on patients. In the media, they were known as the “mind control” studies done at McGill and were reported as a brainwashing conspiracy from the CIA and the Canadian government….

This story begins on June 1, 1951 at a secret meeting in the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Sherbrooke. The purpose of the meeting was to launch a joint American-British-Canadian effort led by the CIA to fund studies on sensory deprivation. In attendance was Dr. Donald Hebb, then director of psychology at McGill University, who received a grant of $10,000 to study sensory deprivation. It would be fifteen years after this meeting at the Ritz that Cameron would disastrously pick up where Hebb left off.

Dr. Hebb paid a group of his own psychology students to remain isolated in a room, deprived of all senses, for an entire day. In an attempt to determine a link between sensory deprivation and the vulnerability of cognitive ability, Hebb also played recordings of voices expressing creationist or generally anti-scientific sentiments – clearly, ideas psychology students would oppose. However, the prolonged period of sensory deprivation made the students overly susceptible to sensory stimulation. Students suddenly became very tolerant of the ideas that they had readily dismissed before. As a history professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Alfred McCoy described in his book, A Question of Torture, that during Hebb’s own experiments “the subject’s very identity had begun to disintegrate.” One can only fathom the cognitive effects of Hebb’s work….

MK-ULTRA Subproject 68

Cameron’s research was based on the ideas of “re-patterning” and “re-mothering” the human mind. He believed that mental illness was a consequence of an individual having learned “incorrect” ways of responding to the world. These “learned responses” created “brain pathways” that led to repetitive abnormal behaviour.

Dr. Cameron wanted to de-pattern patients’ minds with the application of highly disruptive electroshock twice a day, as opposed to the norm of three times a week. According to him, this would break all incorrect brain pathways, thus de-patterning the mind. Some call it brainwashing; Cameron called it re-patterning….

Step 1: To prepare them for the de-patterning treatment, patients would be put into a state of prolonged sleep for about ten days using various drugs, after which they experienced an invasive electroshock therapy that lasted for about 15 days. But patients were not always prepared for re-patterning and sometimes Cameron used extreme forms of sensory deprivation as well….

Step 2: Following the preparation period and the de-patterning came the process of “psychic driving” or re-patterning, in which Cameron would play messages on tape recorders to his patients. He alternated negative messages about the patients’ lives and personalities with positive ones; these messages could be repeated up to half a million times….

The experiments done at McGill were part of the larger MK-ULTRA project led by Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA. In 1963, the year in which MK-ULTRA ended, the CIA compiled all the research into a torture manual called the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook. Yes, a “torture manual” that would eventually define the agency’s interrogation methods and training programs throughout the developing world….

Following 9/11, the war on terror and the generalized fearmongering that ensued, the Bush administration changed the rules of the game out of concern for homeland security. Then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved special practices that included the “use of isolation facility for up to thirty days.” All of a sudden, the U.S. allowed the use of torture methods developed just up University….

Only decades later, in the 1980s, did past victims speak about their experiences, and by the nineties, the lawsuits began to pile up. In response, the Canadian government launched “The Allan Memorial Institute Depatterned Persons Assistance Plan,” which provided $100,000 to each of the former patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron. The compensation came from a recommendation by lawyer George Cooper, in which he clarified that the Canadian government did not have a legal responsibility for what happened, but a moral responsibility.
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2012/09/mk-ultraviolence/

Brain – Psychopaths, C.I.A. Data Show 14-Year Project On Controlling Behavior

Y! Big Story: What the brain tells us By Vera H-C Chan 4/28/12

….Finding how to stop extreme behavior. Thanks to crime literature and serial killer movies, Americans are aware of many different “-paths”: sociopath, psychopath, and antisocial personality disorder. What has been a raging debate is if one is doomed to that diagnosis and basically lifetime incarceration, or if there’s a window of intervention. One researcher went on a roadtrip into the heart of darkness: Using a mobile MRI unit, a University of New Mexico associate professor of psychology took a snapshot of 2,000 inmate volunteers.

He found that compared to the average offender, 60 percent of psychopaths re-offend within the next 200 days. Maximum-security juveniles showed a similar pattern: 68 percent of individuals who were at high risk for psychopathy re-offended.

Using images of the brain, [Kent] Kiehl said he could predict psychopathy as well as one can with clinical error. (April 23, Duke (University) Research Blog)

Among preliminary findings, Kiehl zeroed in on the interaction with a gene (MAOA) and a “stressful” upbringing and that treatment like group therapy actually ends in “violent failure” among adults. For juveniles, intervention’s a different story and can show a 50% reduction in violent recidivism.

“We have a problem in the United States: We incarcerate a lot of people,” he said. “We incarcerate more per capita than any other country. It’s expensive—it costs $2.34 trillion per year, which is about the same as the annual estimate for all health care [in the country].” (April 23, Duke (University) Research Blog)

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/trending-now/y-big-story-brain-tells-us-000534638.html

C.I.A. Data Show 14-Year Project On Controlling Human Behavior; Data From C.I.A. Show Project on Human Behavior

By NICHOLAS M. HORROCK Special to The New York Times July 21, 1977
WASHINGTON, July 20 The Central Intelligence Agency conducted a 14-year program to find ways to “control human behavior” through the use of chemical, biological and radiological material, according to agency documents made public today by John Marks, a freelance journalist….

Marks: “To be sure, drugs were a part of it, ” he said, ” but so were such other techniques as electric shock, radiation, ultrasonics, psychosurgery, psychology and incapacitating agents, all of which were referred to in documents I have received.”….

According to Mr. Marks’s documents and an earlier Senate investigation, the C.I.A. conducted secret medical experiments from 1949 through 1963 under the code names Bluebird, Artichoke, MK Ultra and MK Delta. The C.I.A. inspector general’s report in 1963 described the program as the “research and development of chemical, biological and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior.”
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60A1FFC3E59157493C3AB178CD85F438785F9