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"Based on the undisputed facts of this case, plaintiff has not made and cannot make a showing that Lisa McPherson was unlawfully restrained "against her will' by the defendants." "In fact, all of the evidence indicates the opposite. Lisa McPherson refused psychiatric observation or admission at the hospital; she expressly stated her desire to receive the religious care and assistance from her fellow congregants that she and they wanted her to have."[

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After the review Wood changed the cause of death from "undetermined" to an "accident". Wood traced McPherson's pulmonary embolism to her psychosis and a minor auto accident as major factors. [1] This garnered controversy as described in Assistant State Attorney Douglas Crow's memo in which he recommends dropping the criminal case.[35]

They and the plaintiffs stated,

“ Even after changing her opinion, Dr. Wood states she is ambivalent as to whether Lisa's death is medical neglect or homicide. (Appendix "2", p35 of June 1,2000 sworn interview to the state attorney)."[36][37] ”

and that Woods

“ initially changed [the death certificate] to read the death was an "accident" not caused by dehydration, Crow said. She then reconsidered, he said, deciding to re-insert dehydration as a cause of death and list the death as a homicide. The next morning, she changed her mind once again and finalized the changes

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In 1995, CAN, Rick Ross and two others were found guilty of conspiracy to violate the civil right to freedom of religion of Jason Scott, then a member of the Life Tabernacle Church. Ross was ordered to pay more than $3 million in damages; CAN was ordered to pay in excess of $1 million[20][21]. Ross had been involved in hundreds of interventions with members of various religious groups over a 15-year period. Scott was allegedly kidnapped, and was forcibly confined for five days. The large damage award, plus a large number of additional civil tort cases brought against CAN by the Church of Scientology, drove the "old CAN" into bankruptcy in 1996[15], and its assets, including records, names and phone numbers, ended up in the hands of Scientologists.[22][21][23][20]

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Introduction

As a lobbying firm concerned with the preservation and expansion of democracy both at home and abroad, we are writing to draw your attention to the activities of the [original] Cult Awareness Network (CAN).[1]

The Cult Awareness Network describes itself as a “national non-profit organization founded to educate the public about the harmful effects of mind control as used by destructive cults.” In fact, as the following evidence documents, CAN has played a major role in propagating an atmosphere of intolerance and violence against new, smaller, non-mainstream religions (as well as psychological movements and political groups); moreover, it has functioned as an indirect referral agency, facilitating “concerned” families getting in touch with individuals who can be hired to use coercion (including forcible abductions) to remove individuals from groups of which CAN disapproves.

The influence of the Cult Awareness Network was made clear by the role it played in influencing media coverage of the siege and subsequent massacre of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas earlier this year, and the role CAN-associated “deprogrammers” played as advisors to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the FBI during the siege.

“DEPROGRAMMERS”

CAN, originally called the Citizens Freedom Foundation (CFF), was founded in 1974 by Ted Patrick, who, according to Gerald Arenberg, writing in The Chief of Police magazine, already had a “career of kidnapping young adults from young and little understood churches in exchange for handsome fees from distraught or over bearing parents” (Arenberg, 1993).

Information from a number of sources indicates that over the past 19 years, persons within the CAN network have been involved in thousands of abductions or other coercive actions, which the perpetrators euphemistically call “deprogrammings.” “Deprogrammers” charge between $5,000 and $20,000 for a kidnapping. The payment is usually made in cash, so there will be no record of the transaction (Blocksom, 1992, p. 2).

According to the organization’s own figures, reported at its national conference in Los Angeles last year, CAN-connected “deprogrammers” were involved in more than 1,800 “deprogrammings” in 1992 alone (Robertson, 1993, p.3).

On the record, CAN condemns forcible kidnappings and maintains that it receives no financial benefits from referring families to kidnappers. However, John Myles Sweeney, Jr., a former national director of CAN’s predecessor, the Citizens Freedom Foundation, in a declaration dated March 17, 1992 charged:

Because of the large amount of money they make due to referrals received from CFF members, deprogrammers usually kick back money to the CFF member who gave the referral...The kickbacks would either be in cash or would be hidden in the form of a tax-deductible “donation” to the CFF (Sweeney, 992, p.1).

Former “deprogrammer” Johnathon Lee Nordquist has charged that in the mid-eighties CAN, through Mary Krone, then CAN’s director of information and referrals, paid for the living expenses of Nordquist and his partner: “All that I had to do...was make infrequent speeches at Cult Awareness Network affiliate meetings and receive phone calls from people who wanted to hear negative propaganda about the Hare Krishna religion” (Nordquist, 1991, p. 24).

In addition, expense reports seized by the FBI and entered as evidence in a court case reveal that at least one “deprogrammer,” convicted kidnapper Galen Kelly, was paid a regular retainer of $1,500 a week in 1992 by the Cult Awareness Network (U.S. vs. Smith, Kelly, Point and Moore, 1992).

CAN operates its indirect referral system in a manner intended to avoid incurring criminal or civil liability from the activities of the “deprogrammers” in its network. Mark Blocksom, who worked as a “deprogrammer” from 1979 to 1989, reports:

The standard method by which I received referrals for involuntary deprogrammings was via phone calls to the “good old boy” network (CFF, and later, CAN members or affiliates), who would then refer the caller to a non-CFF/non-CAN person (usually a family member of a prior successful case), who would then call me and arrange the deprogramming. This “cut out” system was created to insulate CFF/CAN from legal liabilities (Blocksom, 1992, pp. 1-2).

Blocksom also reports that he often consulted with CAN officials (including the current director, Cynthia Kisser) in the course of “deprogrammings” for the purpose of “obtaining additional assistance, or with obtaining written materials about a particular group” (Blocksom, 1992, p. 4). Former CFF director Sweeney warns: “CAN still attempts to convince the public that it is not now, nor has it ever been, connected with deprogrammers. This is an absolute lie and should never be accepted as true” (Sweeney, 1992, p. 3).

A special report in The Chief of Police, the official publication of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, notes that “During the 1970s and `80s, mercenary deprogrammers like Patrick kidnapped hundreds of adults from a wide spectrum of organizations including Catholic, Episcopal, Evangelical Christian, Mormon, Amish, political and even karate classes. While the deprogrammers celebrated their growing profits, for the victims, it was a story of terror.” (Arenberg, 1993, p. 60)

The terror includes not only the abduction itself, for the “deprogramming” is not complete (and the victims are not released) until she or he agrees to leave their religion or political organization. According to former “deprogrammer” Mark Blocksom: “Some deprogrammers used techniques of sleep and food deprivation, humiliation, ridicule, deprivation of privacy, and in some cases, physical abuse and restraint to accomplish their goal of altering a person’s religious views” (Blocksom, 1992, p. 2).

A number of former “deprogrammers” and CAN officials have reported, in sworn affidavits, that some of the CAN-affiliated “deprogrammers” have had sex with individuals they held captive (Nordquist, 1991, p. 63; Sweeney, 1992, p. 2). Dr. Lowell Strieker, the former executive director of the Freedom Counseling Center in Burlingame, California, reports that “deprogrammer” Cliff Daniels ...” said that he used the `sex thing’ as a testing board to see whether the girl was completely out of the cult. If she consented, then he knew that she was completely out. If she did not consent, then he knew that he had more work to do.” (Strieker, 1992, p. 3)

What is remarkable, given the large number of abductions that allegedly have been carried out by CAN-associated “deprogrammers,” is how few prosecutions—and even fewer convictions—have resulted from their activities. This virtual immunity from legal liability has resulted in a high level of arrogance among “deprogrammers.” U.S. Attorney Lawrence Leiser, who successfully prosecuted Galen Kelly, told the Times Herald Record in Middletown, New York: “Mr. Kelly thinks he has the right to go out, because someone pays him, and kidnap someone. That’s incredible, and he’d been doing it for 10 or 15 years. He admitted on the stand that he has abducted 30 to 40 people” (Hall, 1993).

This ability to get away with breaking the law has to do with the success CAN has had in demonizing non-mainstream religions and political organizations, as well as the policy employed by “deprogrammers” of involving family members in the kidnapping process, which tends to inhibit the victim’s willingness to press charges. As former “deprogrammer” Blocksom says:

I have been arrested at least five times for kidnapping-related charges. I have never even gone to trial in even one of these cases, due largely to the fact that it was my policy to get the family directly involved in the actual kidnapping. This would make it much harder for the target to want to pursue criminal prosecution, since it would mean they would also have to prosecute a family member (Blocksom, 1992, p. 3).

Despite these precautions, the last year has seen a few cracks in the wall of virtual immunity which has surrounded CAN-associated “deprogrammers.”

On May 27, 1993 Galen Kelly—chief of security at the CAN convention in November 1990—was convicted for kidnapping a Washington, D.C. woman in May 1992 (he is still awaiting sentencing). Another well known “deprogrammer,” Randall Burkey, was convicted on similar charges in Madison, Wisconsin earlier this year. Other CAN-connected “deprogrammers” who have recently faced criminal charges are Joseph Szimhart and Mary Alice Chrnalogar who were charged with kid napping a 39-year-old mother of four in Boise, Idaho (Robertson, 1993, p. 3), while Rick Ross, who acted as an advisor to ATF in Waco and has boasted of more that 200 “deprogrammings,” was arrested at the end of June on charges of kidnapping and illegal imprisonment of a Kirkland, Washington teenager in 1991 (Holt, 1993).

PSYCHOLOGISTS AND PSYCHIATRISTS

A handful of psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists, some of whom serve on CAN’s board of advisors, provide pseudo-scientific cover for these activities. They give talks at CAN events, write articles, mostly in their own publication, Cultic Studies Journal, and provide quotes to the media when a “cult expert” is needed. Many of these individuals also earn money testifying as “expert witnesses” in kidnapping cases, litigation in which disaffected ex-members are suing their former group or group leaders, and conservatorship cases in which parents are seeking legal and financial control of grown children who have joined so-called “cults.”

Among these individuals, the two most high-profile are psychiatrist Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA’s School of Medicine, and Margaret Singer, a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Berkeley, California and a former adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley.

West currently serves on the advisory board of CAN and a similar group called the American Family Foundation. He has been a keynote speaker at CAN conferences for more that 15 years. In a 1983 speech to a CFF convention, West called for the development of a “medical model” for the elimination of what he considered “fake” religions:

A good approach if you were interested in curing a cancer is to find a chemical that kills the malignant cells and spares those that are healthy. What would be the effect of a device or technique which, when applied by society to any organization calling itself religious, would have no untoward effect upon bona fide religions, but would be deadly to the fakes? ... Malignant cells or fake religions wouldn’t survive it. Healthy cells or bona fide religions and altruistic organizations would not be harmed (West, 1983).

While West today purports to be repulsed by the “mind control” and “brainwashing” supposedly practiced by some of the new religions (“cults”), in the 1950s and ‘60s he was involved, through the CIA-funded Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, in experiments employing LSD as a means of mind control. During these experiments the CIA used ethnic and racial minorities as human guinea pigs. At the Lexington, Kentucky federal prison, for example, African Americans were singled out and used as test subjects for various mind control experiments (Citizens Commission on Human Rights, 1985).

Questioned about his relationship with CIA “mind control” expert Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, in 1977 West told the New York Times: “As far as the Geschickter Fund was concerned, what Dr. Gottlieb told me was that he was an employee of the CIA and that they had an interest in this problem [the area of LSD research], which I could see they did and possibly should have at that time” (Horrock, 1977).

After the riots in Watts in 1965, West, then head of Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI) at UCLA, was an outspoken proponent of the view that violence was tied to genetic factors, and that those most prone to violence were young Black urban males. West and his associates at NPI recommended that some violent offenders could be treated by psychosurgery and chemical castration through the use of cyproterone acetate (West, 1972).

West’s advocacy of chemical castration—this time on prisoners and “appropriate non-institutionalized clinical subjects” (Restak, 1975)—surfaced again when he proposed the establishment of a Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence; based on the premise that violence is caused primarily by genetic or chemical factors, the Center would conduct various chemical and biosurgical experiments. In many respects the Center prefigured the Youth Violence Initiative recently proposed by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Nearly all of the studies West had in mind for the Center involved women, minority groups—of the two high schools he proposed for violence studies, one was in a Black community and one in a Chicano area (West, 1972)—prisoners or others who couldn’t defend themselves, such as autistic children and the mentally retarded. Examples of the treatments proposed by West at this time included psychosurgery, “curing” hyperactive children with unproven drugs, and implanting electronic monitoring or homing devices into the brain (California State Senate Health and Welfare Committee Transcript, 1973). Funding for the Center was opposed in a series of protests in California in 1974; they succeeded not only in stopping the Center, but in getting federal and state funds for the NPI reduced. In 1989 West resigned as director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute after the LA Weekly published an exposé of financial wrongdoings in relation to research grants he and his staff had obtained from t he National Institute of Mental Health (Shae, 1988).

The principal psychologist identified with CAN is Margaret Singer. Unlike West, who is a fixture of the academic psychology establishment, Singer has never held a full-time, tenure-track position; in the words of her attorney Michael Flomenhaft, she “derives a substantial portion of her income from consultancies and work as an expert witness based on specialized knowledge in the area of social influence” (Singer vs. APA, 1992).

Singer is suing the American Psychological Association for $125 million, claiming that the Association’s refusal to endorse her views on so-called mind-control and “brainwashing” have caused “injury to her business and professional reputation” and caused her “mental anguish and distress” (Singer vs. APA, 1992).

The Singer suit (which she filed with Berkeley sociologist Richard Ofshe in August 1992) is instructive both in revealing where CAN-associated psychologists and psychiatrists stand in relation to the psychological mainstream, and in clarifying how sharply psychological professionals differ over concepts such as “cults,” “brainwashing” and “coercive persuasion,” which CAN uses to rationalize its activities.

Singer’s suit was filed under provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). In it she contends that the APA and several of its leaders and members have engaged in a “pattern of racketeering activity” designed to ruin her career as an “expert witness.” The only concrete evidence offered to prove the alleged harm to her career is a ruling by a judge disqualifying Singer as an expert witness in a case in which an ex-adherent of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness was suing the organization for “false imprisonment” despite the plaintiff’s admission that she was never physically restrained, confined or threatened by the Society for Krishna Consciousness and despite further admission on the stand that she adopted Krishna Consciousness following a genuine religious conversion.

In disqualifying Singer, who was called in to testify that the plaintiff had been a victim of “brain washing,” Judge Jensen explained:

Although the record before the Court is replete with declarations, affidavits and letters from reputable psychologists and sociologists who concur with the thought reform theories pro pounded by Dr. Singer and Dr. Ofshe, the government has submitted an equal number of declarations, affidavits and letters from reputable psychologists and sociologists who disagree with their theories ... A more significant barometer of prevailing views within the scientific community is provided by professional organizations such as the American Psychological Association (“APA”) and the American Sociological Association (“ASA”). The evidence before the Court, which is detailed below, shows that neither the APA nor the ASA has endorsed the views of Dr. Singer and Dr. Ofshe on thought reform ... At best, the evidence establishes that psychiatrists, psychologists and sociologists disagree as to whether or not there is agreement regarding the Singer-Ofshe thesis. The Court therefore excludes defendants’ proffered testimony (U.S. vs. Fishman, 1989).

While Singer’s testimony had been accepted at numerous trials before and since, the Jensen ruling has been used as a precedent in subsequent cases in which Singer and other CAN allies were called in as expert witnesses.

The dispute between Singer and the APA leadership goes back at least seven years. In 1986, at Singer’s initiative, the APA’s Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology (BSERP) set up a Task Force on Deceptive and Indirect Methods of Persuasion and Control which was headed up by Singer. The 69-page report produced by the Task Force openly attempted to make CAN’s definitions of “cults,” “brainwashing,” etc. official APA usage. The APA’s rejection of the report, dated May 11, 1987, read in part:

BSERP ... is unable to accept the report of the Task Force. In general, the report lacks the scientific rigor and evenhanded critical approach necessary for APA imprimatur. The report was carefully reviewed by two external experts and two members of the Board. They independently agreed on the significant deficiencies in the report ... The Board cautions the Task Force members against using their past appointment to imply BSERP or APA support or approval of the positions advocated in the report. BSERP requests that Task force members not distribute or publicize the report without indicating that the report was unacceptable to the Board. Finally, after much consideration, BSERP does not believe that we have sufficient information available to guide us in taking a position on this issue (BSERP, 1987).

At dispute in the Task Force report—and within the psychological community before and since—are the underlying concepts justifying CAN’s activities. The term “brainwashing,” for example, was coined by Edward Hunter, a CIA propagandist who worked under cover as a journalist (Marks, 1991). In the early fifties Hunter used the term to explain communist influence over American POWs in Korea and western civilian prisoners in communist China (Hunter, 1953). Hunter defines the result of “brainwashing” as changing “a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet—a human robot” (Hunter, 1956, p. 309).

Robert Lifton, in the Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961), one of the pioneering scholarly works in the field, writes: Behind this web of semantic (and more than semantic) confusion lies an image of “brainwashing” as an all-powerful, irresistible, unfathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind. It is of course none of these things and this loose usage makes the word a rallying point for fear, resentment, urges towards submission, justification for failure, irresponsible accusation, and for a wide gamut of emotional extremism. One may justly conclude that the term has a far from precise meaning and a questionable usefulness (Lifton, 1961, p. 4).

Singer maintains that the theory of “brainwashing” upon which her “expert witness” career depends is based on studies conducted on repatriated prisoners after the Korean War, as well as the Russian purge trials of the 1930s and the “revolutionary universities” of the People’s Republic of China.

However, examination of the facts by mainstream scholars contradict her arguments. A total of 7,190 American servicemen were captured during the Korean War. Of that number only 21 declined to return to the United States. Of those who returned only 14 were ever court-martialed on the grounds of “going over” to the enemy and only 11 convictions were obtained. Thus Singer’s contention that communist “brainwashing” succeeded on a large scale just doesn’t hold up (Secretary of Defense’s Advisory Committee on Prisoners of War, 1955, pp.78-81).

Furthermore, of the POWs who did make pro-communist statements during the war, most had not changed their ideological framework, i.e., “converted” to communism at all; they were speaking in the shadow of incarceration and physical maltreatment, rather than as the result of any sort of exotic psychotechnology. Thus Lunde and Wilson conclude in Brainwashing as a Defense to Criminal Liability: Patty Hearst Revisited:

[T]he much-ballyhooed Communist program of `brainwashing’ was really more an intensive indoctrination program in combination with very heavy-handed techniques of undermining the social structure of the prisoner group, thereby eliciting collaboration that in most cases was not based on ideological change of any sort (Lunde and Wilson, 1977, p. 348).

Finally, the handful of Americans who actually did go over to the communist side during the Korean War have been shown to have already been predisposed to communist politics when they were drafted (Schein, 1961, pp. 104-110; Lifton, 1961, pp. 117-132, 207-222).

Unlike Singer and other CAN “expert witnesses,” the overwhelming majority of scholars have rejected the attempt to extend the experiences of Korean POWs to the practices of new religious movements. (“absurd to compare this [recruiting practice of new religions] to the fear of death in prisoners held by the Chinese and North Koreans” (James, 1986, pp.241, 254); the comparison “cannot be taken seriously” (Barker, 1984, p. 134); the “model of the Chinese prisoner of war camp ... is highly deficient since members of the religious movements are not abducted or physically detained” (Saliba, 1987); a “far-fetched comparison” (Anthony and Robbins, 1990, pp. 263).)

Although the term “brainwashing” has never been accepted within the scientific community, it has become commonplace in the media and is the basis of a number of other concepts of significance to CAN. For example, the term “deprogramming” clearly implies that human minds can be “programmed” like computers (or robots) in the first place an assumption questioned in much research (James, 1986; Saliba, 1987; Anthony and Robbins, 1990; Reich, 1976).

Moreover, the very existence of “cults” defined (vaguely) by Singer and other CAN supporters as groups which organize through “deception” and which practice “brainwashing” and “mind control” on their members, is disputed by the majority of scholars, many of whom point out that the “coercive processes” that Singer and others attribute to “cult” organizations could be applied equally to college fraternities, Catholic orders, self-help organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous, the armed services, psychoanalytic training institutions, mental hospitals and conventional childrearing practices (Lifton, 1961, pp. 141, 435-436, 451; Schein, 1961, pp. 202, 260-261, 270-276, 281-283).

What Singer’s arguments come down to is that the only conceivable way that a sane person might choose to believe in or adhere to religious and/or political views outside the perimeters of the mainstream is if they are “deceived.” And from this it follows that deceived or “brainwashed” people are incapable of making sane, responsible judgments and should therefore have their civil and Constitutional rights revoked.

But “deception” is a hopelessly subjective term. Perception and deception are two sides of the same coin. As Judge T.S. Ellis III declared on December 31, 1992 in regard to an unsuccessful kidnapping prosecution brought against CAN-associated “deprogrammer” Galen Kelly: “One man’s cult is another man’s community, however wacky you or I may think that is” (U.S. vs. Smith, Kelly, Point and Moore, 1992). Who among us in a democratic society would dare to impose his or her perception as the only true one?

THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS

The threat to religious freedom inherent in the pseudo-scientific theories and language of West, Singer and other CAN-associated psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists is evident. That they have been used to rationalize criminal activity is equally evident. As early as 1974 the National Council of Churches warned of CFF’s danger to religious liberty:

[R]eligious liberty is one of the most precious rights of humankind, which is grossly violated by forcible abduction and protracted efforts to change a person’s religious commitments by duress. Kidnapping for ransom is a heinous crime indeed, but kidnapping to compel religious deconversion is equally criminal (Arenberg, 1993, p. 60).

And if the dangerous implications of applying CAN’s credo to the political arena were not already obvious, CAN’s executive director, Cynthia Kisser, made them explicit in an article entitled “Nation needs to address cults’ ever-present evils,” written originally for the Los Angeles Daily News and reprinted in a number of papers around the country during the Waco siege. In it Kisser warned: “Cults also hurt society when their members undermine the democratic process by voting in solid blocks [sic] or by providing free volunteer labor to campaigns in return for favors from candidates” (Kisser,1993). To most people this would serve as a model description of healthy participation by an interest group or party in a representative democracy. But apparently to CAN only groups of which it approves should be allowed to vote in “blocks” and volunteer for political campaigns. When groups CAN doesn’t like (“cults”) participate in electoral politics, it “undermines the democratic process.”

Frighteningly, the FBI appears to share this way of thinking. In 1988 and again in 1991 the Bureau launched investigations of the New Alliance Party (NAP), a left-wing electoral party, rationalizing this harassment by labeling NAP a “political/cult organization” (New Alliance Party vs. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1993).

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In religion and sociology, a cult is a term designating a cohesive group of people (generally, but not exclusively a relatively small and recently founded religious movement[1]) devoted to beliefs or practices that the surrounding culture or society considers to be outside the mainstream. Its status may come about either due to its novel belief system, its idiosyncratic practices, its perceived harmful effects on members, or because its perceived opposition to the interests of the mainstream culture

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1 : formal religious veneration : WORSHIP
2 : a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also : its body of adherents
3 : a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also : its body of adherents
4 : a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator <health cults>
5 a : great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (as a film or book); especially : such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad b : the object of such devotion c : a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion

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