P(D)enny La(i)ne wrote:
If you've never read it, I highly recommend Programmed to Kill."68 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Is There a Political Angle to Serial Killers?, March 22, 2006
By Donald Hunt
This review is from: Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder (Paperback)
Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder, by David McGowan
(New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2004) is not just another sensationalized
book about serial killers. McGowan, author of Derailing Democracy:
The America the Media Don't Want You to See, and Understanding
the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion,
ties serial murders, programmed assassins, satanic cults and child pornography
and prostitution to a fascist political and military conspiracy of frightening scope.
I normally hate reading about this type of material. Too sickening.
But McGowan, unlike most authors who treat this stuff, is not interested in
sensationalized accounts that appeal to dark prurient interests.
Rather, he wants to sound the alarm about the real methods used in
fascist takeovers of societies.
McGowan begins by reviewing the evidence for government sponsored mind
control experiments dating back to the Nazis and the OSS (forerunner of the CIA).
According to McGowan, these shadowy intelligence agencies, along with
the military intelligence units, founded, encouraged, and covered up for Satanic cults,
whose systematic abuse of children from very young ages provided a
contnuing supply of potential mind-controlled programmed assassins.
They supplied not only assassins but also child prostitutes, pornography
subects and even sacrificial victims. The more susceptible to dissociated states,
the easier to program. Mind control in this context refers to "the process of
first enhancing an unwitting subject's natural ability to dissociate
(creating, in essence, the condition of Multiple Personality Disorder),
and then controlling that subject's dissociative states (by creating one
or more alter personalities that are effectively under the control of others,
and that are unknown to the `core' personality)." (p. xv)
Part I of the book is titled "The Pedophocracy."
Here McGowan takes the reader on a tour of child sex, child porn and child murder
rings around the world whose members include many high-ranking political
figures. One of the things that tie all these scandals together is the cover-up
of participants, destruction of evidence, and lenient sentences to those who
have to take the fall by authorities around the world.
From the Marc Dutroux scandal in Belgium, to one in Latvia involving the
Prime Minister and Justice Minister, to another in Portugal, to the scandal in
the United Kingdom that reportedly reached into Tony Blair's cabinet,
to those of Larry King, Michael Aquino and Craig Spence in the United States
with many circumstantial connections to high-ranking political and media figures,
McGowan shows how the damage control operations, including numerous
"suicides" by potential witnesses, work.
McGowan then details the CIA connections of some of the Satanic groups that
have been linked to ritual abuse and killing of children, in particular
the Finders, described in an article in the Washington Post from 1987 as
"a 1960's style commune ... described in a court document as a `cult' that
allegedly conducted `brainwashing' and used children in `rituals (p. 59).
After some members of the group were arrested for possible kidnapping
when found in the possession of several children who they were keeping in a
van and who showed signs of neglect, abuse and sexual abuse, homes and
warehouses belonging to group members were searched. U.S. Customs
found "photos showing children involved in bloodletting ceremonies of
animals and one photograph of a child in chains" (pp. 59-60).
While memos written by one of the U.S. Customs investigators detailed evidence
of much worse actions, nothing was written in the press about the matter until
seven years later when the US News and World Report attempted to
put it to rest by downplaying the accusations as "rumors" even though
they were in the possession of the memos.
McGowan goes on to note that "the firm that supplied training to CIA officers
didn't just employ several members of the Finders, but appears to have in fact
been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Finders organization. It should also
be noted that the CIA does not, as a general rule-of-thumb, assign the
training of its officers to outside contractors, unless, that is, the `private' firm
utilized in such a capacity is a CIA front." (p. 61) The leader of the Finders group,
Marion Pettie, in a 1998 interview explained that "Going back to World War II,
I kept open house mainly to intelligence people in Washington. OSS people
passing through, things like that." (p. 65) Regarding evidence found regarding
international trafficking of children, the US Custom Service investigator in
his memo stated that he was advised by a member of the Washington D.C.
police that "the investigation into the activity of the Finders had become a CIA
internal matter. The MPD [D.C. police] report has been classified SECRET and
was not available for review." (p. 66). No one was indicted.
McGowan concludes Part I by suggesting that "it is certainly in the realm of
possibility that the high profile child pornography raids in recent years, which
invariably result in relatively few arrests and even fewer prosecutions
and convictions, are not intended to punish the victimizers, but to identify and
compromise them. And it is not inconceivable that the databases being compiled
will be utilized as something of a recruitment list to identify those persons who
have been `preconditioned,' so to speak, for future mind control operations." (p. 68)
McGowan begins Part II with the story of Henry Lee Lucas, a serial killer
who confessed to nearly 600 murders, committed "rape, torture, mutilation,
dismemberment, necrophilia, cannibalism and pedophilia" (p. 71) and who,
oddly enough,
was the only death-row inmate in the State of Texas
spared death by Governor George Bush.
McGowan suggests the reason for this and other odd leniencies enjoyed by
Lucas lies in the possibility that he was an MK-Ultra programmed assassin.
By perpetuating the myth of the lone serial killer, authorities can deflect attention
away from organized groups, cults or intelligence services. McGowan shows
that in nearly all cases, the serial killers most likely had accomplices.
The close ties of serial killers, child pimps and pornographers to people in position
of authority in politics and law enforcement has also been covered up.
Lucas himself is quoted as saying: "No one wants to believe the cult story.
The TV people cut it out. The writers don't write about it." (p. 88)
Part III looks at some recent scandals as well as historical precedents
from the past. Along the way we get a lucid exposition of why the parents of
Jon-Benet Ramsey probably killed her and why Charles Lindbergh probably
killed his "kidnapped" son.
McGowan concludes that the wave of sensationalized serial killings beginning
around 1966 were a domestication of Operation Phoenix, the U.S. program
of mass political assassination in Vietnam. The goal was to shock and frighten
the public into acceptance of police state measures in the United States and
to create a climate of right-wing reaction.
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