L. Ron Hubbard

The following is an article published by Casey Research, LLC in an electronic newsletter called, "What We Now Know ."  It was forwarded to me by a colleague and I put it here for you to read.

State-Sponsored Child Abuse

Of course you have heard of the Nazi Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele, who became infamous for conducting grueling medical experiments on concentration camp inmates during WWII. Some of his victims were children. He tested unsafe drugs on them, injected them with lethal germs, removed their organs and limbs and performed sex change operations on them. His primary interest were identical twins.

Thank goodness something like that could never happen here. Or could it?

While the U.S. mainstream media eagerly report on every new case of child molestation, abuse, kidnapping, or murder, they're strangely silent about the many historical and not-so-historical cases of child abuse for scientific purposes, condoned and/or sponsored by modern, "civilized" governments.

Take the Canadian "Duplessis Orphans," for starters. In the 1940s and '50s, between 1,500 and 20,000 (some say up to 50,000) children living in Catholic orphanages in Quebec were subject to severe abuse. Practically overnight and without good reason, perfectly healthy children were declared mentally ill or retarded and entire orphanages were converted into psychiatric wards.

The reason, as reported in the Gazette in 2002: "Between 1945 and 1960, the federal government paid out 70 cents a day per orphan to orphanages. Psychiatric hospitals received a subsidy of $2.25 per day, per patient."

Hervé Bertrand, one of the victims, remembers how a doctor visited his third-grade class and asked him what the word "compare" meant. "I didn't know," remembers Bertrand. "We hadn't studied it yet. That's how it was decided that I was retarded." A lifelong sentence for most of the kids involved.

Surviving victims allege that some of the children underwent painful experiments, electroshock treatments, even lobotomies. Most were pulled from their schools and forced into farm labor or hospital maintenance and brutally beaten for non-compliance. Many were physically and sexually abused by the Catholic priests, nuns and administrators. Some died of their injuries. (According to unconfirmed news, a mass grave with the bones of hundreds of children was recently discovered just outside of Montreal.)

The Duplessis scandal was revealed when a 1961 commission on Quebec's psychiatric hospitals found that more than 30% of the 22,000 patients didn't belong there, most of the falsely diagnosed being illegitimate children. (Not all of the children were actual orphans; many were born out of wedlock.) The survivors named themselves Duplessis Orphans after the iron-fisted Quebec Premier under whose reign their plight occurred. [For detailed CBC footage on the topic, click here.]

Around the same time, something happened in the Middle East that the Israel Insider magazine calls "the ugliest secret of Israel's Labor Party founders." Others call it the "Sephardi Holocaust."

In 1951, allegedly with the assistance of the U.S. Army, about 100,000 Sephardi children--Sephardim are Jewish-Arab immigrants--were used as guinea pigs in a mass radiation experiment. To avoid suspicion by the parents, the mostly Moroccan children were taken on "school trips" where they received a radiation treatment, purportedly for ringworm infection.

"Every Sephardi child was to be given 35,000 times the maximum dose of x-rays through his head," states the Israel Insider. "For doing so, the American government paid the Israeli government 300 million Israeli liras a year. . . equivalent to billions of dollars today."

Could it all have been a misunderstanding? Could it be that the "medical establishment thought ringworm was a grave danger to public health," as the review of the award-winning movie "Ringworm Children" suggests? We doubt it. In the 1950s in Israel, the permitted maximum x-ray dose was 0.5 rad. The Sephardi children received 350 rad, directly to their heads. No lead aprons were given to them. And eyewitnesses suspiciously noted that in preparation for the so-called "school trips," all the Ashkenazi (Jews of European descent) were sorted out while "the dark children were put on the bus."

The Ringworm experiment left its marks on the victims. Approximately 6,000 children died soon after treatment; the rest developed severe conditions such as various cancers, epilepsy, psychosis, etc. Today the survivors are broken people, and many of their children and grandchildren are stricken with genetic diseases and malignant tumors.

"The Ringworm Children" won a prize for Best Documentary at the 2005 Haifa International Film Festival. To buy a copy of the movie on DVD, click here.

Well, maybe the Israelis are capable of something like that, but our own government? Impossible.

But is it really? In fact, a host of questionable experiments have taken place in the United States... and probably still do.

In 1946 and '47, eighteen terminally ill patients--one of them a four-year-old boy--were injected with plutonium to see how the radioactive material would spread through the body. In some cases, the chemical was injected into the limbs, which were then amputated post mortem. The experiments were conducted by the University of California at San Francisco, the University of Rochester, the University of Chicago and Oak Ridge Laboratory.

In a long-term experiment by the University of Cincinnati that was finally stopped in 1971, "88 poor, uneducated and mostly African-American patients with incurable cancers were exposed to heavy doses of full-body irradiation--a procedure that was largely abandoned as therapy by the 1960s," states an article from a March 1996 issue of Research/Penn State magazine. Some of the subjects died only hours after treatment.

Then there's the testing in the '40s and '50s at the Fernald School in Waltham, MA. Sponsored by MIT and Quaker Oats, mentally retarded students were told that they were now "members of a science club" and fed cereal that contained radioactive calcium and iron. The goal was to trace mineral absorption from cereal in the body. The results were supposed to be used in an advertising campaign, giving Quaker Oats an edge over their competitor Cream of Wheat. Neither the students nor the parents knew about the radioactive content; parents were only told that the boys would receive a diet high in nutrients.

In the '50s and '60s, a team of researchers mentally retarded 3- to 11-year-olds were purposely infected with hepatitis. "The early test subjects were fed extracts of the feces of an infected patient," states constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead in a 2005 article on his website www.rutherford.org, while "later subjects were injected with the virus."

The head of the team, Dr. Saul Krugman, later became the chairman of pediatrics at New York University and won the Lasker Prize (the American equivalent of the Nobel Prize).

Also in the 1960s, the D.C. Children's Center in Laurel, MD, administered the diet pill NeoBazine, "which contains thyroxin, a drug that causes tremors, nervousness, insomnia, and tachycardia" to mentally handicapped children. "The FDA later found that this drug was not safe for use."

From 1989 to 1991, Kaiser Permanente of Southern CA in conjunction with the CDC treated poor black and Latino children in Los Angeles with experimental measles vaccines. "The same vaccination was given to infants in Mexico, Haiti and Africa by the World Health Organization," says Whitehead. "It was discontinued after a large number of those tested died."

And those are "just" the incidents involving children, and those during or after WWII. We didn't even get to the horrifying experiments performed on adults, like the testicular transplant trials performed on prisoners at St. Quentin's from 1919-22, in which scientists inserted the testicles of executed inmates and goats into the abdomens and scrotums of living prisoners.

Aside from mentally retarded children, prisoners have always been a preferred type of guinea pig for American medical researchers. In 1966, Professor Emeritus of Dermatology Albert Kligman, who applied highly toxic dioxin directly to the skin of U.S. prisoners, said to a reporter: "All I saw before me were acres of skin... It was an anthropoid colony... which wasn't going anywhere... I was like a farmer seeing fertile field for the first time."

Or, to speak with another American scientist, quoted by the British Medical Journal: "Criminals in our penitentiaries are fine experimental material--and much cheaper than chimpanzees."

We also didn't have room to talk about the thousands of U.S. soldiers that were unknowingly subjected to experiments with mustard gas and other chemical agents--by the very government they served. Not to mention the about 240 experiments between 1944 and 1961 in which, according to a 1993 Guardian article, "radiation was deliberately released into the atmosphere . . . in New Mexico, Utah, Washington state, and perhaps elsewhere."

Those are another story for another day.

We would like to hear your comments, however. Write to us at feedback@caseyresearch.com.

In response to the recent hype about Tom Cruise for the last few months, Jim Meskimen wrote the following article, which I've copied in full. 

ON TOM AND THE MEDIA
by Jim Meskimen

Okay, if you are like me, you have watched with a bit of stunned horror as the media has had a field day with Tom Cruise.

Apparently, being famous, successful, opinionated and in love is just too much for some critics to stomach.  (I left out rich.  And handsome.  That probably doesn't sweeten the deal any.)

Some writers have even gone so far as to infer that Mr. Cruise's off screen behavior has somehow changed him from being a good actor to a bad actor.  They suggest this without any irony, as if condemning an artist completely because of his personal beliefs is justified and acceptable.

(This happens to great artists all the time, and perhaps to all great men.  Even great historical figures like Washington, have been discarded by critics, because at one time in history they were guilty of doing something that later became unpopular.  Nothing new here.)

Is Tom Cruise a great artist?  Is he a great man?  Not easy questions to answer, especially with passions running hot.   Maybe these are questions better decided in the future, when perspective and time are in greater supply. 

Perhaps an easier question for ordinary people to answer is, "would you like to enjoy the success Tom Cruise has had?"  Most would answer in the affirmative.

Are some people jealous of his success and his impact on the world?  Believe it.  Can jealousy twist one's view of others and make their most admirable characteristics abhorrent?  You know it can. 

A friend told me recently that we americans like to build up our heroes and then tear them down.  I disagree.  I think americans are disappointed with failures of their heroes, legitimate ones, but always willing to forgive.  I think they love their heroes for besting some foe, be it the second hand, the distance between Earth and the moon, the opposing football team or the domestic box-office.  I think we really love it when they pull off a comeback, when they come from behind and score with mere seconds on the board.

But there are a few who seem to relish tearing down able people, and pointing out their losses with glee.  And when no losses exist, pretend their existence and crow about the invented failures.

As another friend of mine recently pointed out, it takes no special skill to point out someone's flaws: we are human beings; imperfection is part of the recipe.  The real work comes in appreciating others and finding something to admire.  In Tom Cruise's case, that isn't the kind of work you break a sweat over; there is plenty to admire.

What I find unpalatable in the extreme is taking what is decent and human and exceptional in an individual and holding it up to ridicule.  Sure, we've all erred and done that to others in our weaker moments, but when men and women in the media do it, it becomes a vast new level of unfairness that nobody should ever have to experience.

Thankfully, I have never myself had to endure personal attacks of any magnitude.  Probably you haven't either.  Maybe like me, you find it hard to imagine having the opinions of uninformed strangers criticizing your personal behavior plastered all over the TV news, the magazines in the grocery store, on cable and the Internet, all over the planet, 24 hours a day.  I think that might possibly make one blanch a little. 

Okay, sure- that is the Price of Fame.   I understand that.  But should we celebrate our ability to criticize and publicly attack figures who by their achievements have distinguished themselves?  Is this one of our most laudable skills?  I don't think so.  I think it should be one of those things we should be quite a bit embarrassed by, and should be high on our list of what we need to improve about ourselves, instead of revel in and congratulate each other about.

It is always too easy to speak ill of another, and especially so when they are living a life we can only dream of. 

Although he made it look easy, Tom Cruise made his money the hard way; he worked hard to entertain people the world over.  If he hadn't done it successfully time and time again, he would be on that show, "The Surreal Life", not in the number one spot at the box-office... again.  He hasn't, like some politician, manipulated economics to force people to buy tickets, he just makes sure he is doing a great job in "A" projects that will thrill and entertain people, so that they will choose his films, knowing they are going to have a great time.  That means people in Seoul, in Perth, in Budapest... and the people in Burbank.

Now, that said, I went to see Mission: Impossible III not expecting very much.  I'm not nuts about the recent action movies I've seen, a lot of them are nothing but eye candy and insultingly stupid stories.  Well, I was very pleasantly surprised.  MI 3 is a terrific movie, by far the best of the series, and actually one of the best action films I've seen ever.  It is gripping, funny, brilliantly directed, very good at creating tension and excitement, and artful.  The performances are all very well done, and the special effects are remarkable.  I'm utterly satisfied by what I saw, and I wouid see it again gladly.  I was sore that I wasn't in it!

I know from my own experiences in films that there are a million points during the lengthy process for a movie to go off the rails and flop.  It can be 98% there and that final 2% can just turn it into a stinker.  When a film manages to succeed on most levels, deliver what it promises and provide an enjoyable escape from reality, it needs to be noted and applauded.  This is such a film.  I didn't find a single thing about it that didn't work, that didn't contribute to the success of the whole.  I laughed and I was very exhilarated by it, and I recommend it to you highly.

You might be thinking, "Well, what else is Meskimen going to say, he's a Scientologist- of course he is going to love Tom Cruise and anything he does".  (Were you thinking that?)

It's true, I am a Scientologist, and I have been for over half my life.  But if anything, my religion has taught me to think for myself.  When good people of whatever faith, are sacrificed on the altar of "public opinion" when their only crime is thinking for and expressing themselves, I notice it, and I speak up.

Artists, actors, musicians, writers... these people make our weary lives fun and interesting.  They aren't bullies that we should automatically shout down and ridicule.  Let's save that treatment for the criminals and madmen that truly deserve it.

Thanks for reading this.

Jim Meskimen

The following article has an interesting take on the subject of medicine.  It's called Pretend medicine: Let's Play Doctor! and is based on the premise that all of modern medicine is a hoax.  The author has a point with many of the is examples, like Psychiatry, but the main difficultly is that the article provides no solutions. 

Yes, chemotherapy is vile and toxic drug for a healthy human being, but unfortunately, it does have a high percentage of success for specific types of cancer.  If you know you've got a disease which, if left unchecked, will kill you undoubtedly, and you have a chance of 80% success with chemo and 10% chance with an alternative, which are you going to take?  As with any medical evaluation, be sure to get second and third opinions and when you do, get from that doctor, medical clinic or hospital, that institutions statistics.  Get the percentages of success and failure rates.  Then find out how many people were admitted for (blank).  What treatments did they get?  Of the numbers that got (blank) treatment, how many survived, how many didn't?  Work out your own percentages if you feel necessary, but do find out the patient pool.  If only 1 person was admitted for (blank) and he survived, that's a 100% success and is misleading. 

So, be your own judge, evaluate each situation as it is at that moment, not what someone else thinks it is and if you still feel you can't make an evaluation, gather more data until you feel you understand it enough to make a decision and make it.  Medicine is not a perfect field, there is MUCH room for improvement, be we do have to make do with what we have.

The Hollywood Reporter has an article about a movie called United 93.  It is based on the premise that on Sept 11, four planes where hijacked.  The three we know about and this movie tells the story of the fourth that didn't make it's target, and so we follow the lives of the 40 passengers that survive and live in a post 9/11 world.  It is expected to be release on April 28.

Many of the unsung heros at the site of the World Trade Centers on 9/11 are the Scientology Volunteer Ministers who tirelessly worked with rescue workers and victims to bring relief.  You can read about the Scientology Volunteer Ministers' effors in the links below:

http://www.scientology.org/message/Scientology-volunteer-ministers.htm
http://www.volunteerministers.org/eng/nydc/scientology-disaster-relief.htm

Hey folks. 

My Church has a new website.  It's so awesome.  Many of my friends are also on the front page as featured artists.

The Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre International is a special class of Church of Scientology that was formed to inspire a new civilization by catering to those individuals who dream and strive to creating a new and better world through social outreach, betterment and educational programs.

This building located in the heart of Hollywood, is absolutely gorgeous with a 4-star restaurant on site.  It was where I got married and is a wonderful place to spend an afternoon, dinner, have Sunday brunch before Sunday Service, and just plain experience Spiritual enlightenment.

I found my cellphone.  It was at the Church, safely put away, waiting for my return.  As a Scientologist for more than 10 years, I have found not safer, more trustworthy place than the Church of Scientology.  Wallets, purses, cellphones, keys, they're always safe, particularly for the absentminded.  But that doesn't mean, one should just leave his/her belongings all over the place.  It just means, you can trust a place like the Church of Scientology.

Here are some websites to find out more about Scientology.

Scientology Effective Solutions

Center for Studies on New Religions: Documents and Updates on the Church of Scientology

Scientology Volunteer Ministers

One of the worst things to happen is to have an aborted upgrade.  Last weekend the upgrade had to be aborted because of system performance issues, which turned out to be network related.  While, technically, it's not our fault, it still is our software being removed and so myself and many of our staff spent all of Saturday and Saturday night and most of Sunday trying to salvage the project.  Unfortunately, given the timeframe, it was unsalvagable.

It was pretty disheartening to hear the no-go decision.  And so, we will have to spend the next few days, today being day 3, scrambling to get the system implementedthrough, well, hell and high water.

This is pretty early for a Saturday morning, but I have a client conversion this weekend and I'm on all the check point calls starting from 7am.  It's actually not too bad.  I got up early, made a gourmet breaskfast and while I wait for my turn to do my part, I get to make scones and all sorts of fun foods.