Manchurian Candidate -- Mind Control

[Boomer Chick]

This could be posted in the government AND the outer limits forums, but it's a movie, so I placed it here!

The article is four pages long so I linked it for you! Often, because a movie is interpreted as JUST a movie, therefore fiction, the implications of the truth behind it aren't viewed as a threat from the PTB. In this case the writers can go hog wild and really get into the subject although compared to many our readings, this only skims the surface of the black ops in this area of mind control experimenting.


a.abcnews.com/media/SciTech/images/ho_man_candidate_040727_nh.jpg[/img]

In Your Head
Manchurian Candidate Taps Emerging Science to Depict Mind Control

By Amanda Onion


July 29, 2004 — Resistance is futile — or so Hollywood might have you believe about the burgeoning world of neuroscience.



In an updated version of the 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate, evil-doers alter the memories of American veterans of the first Gulf War and then program them to kill on command years later.

For the original film, starring Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury, the programmed victims were Korean War veterans, and hypnosis and brainwashing were the main tools of corruption. In the remake, starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, rogue scientists tap emerging brain science that has been tested or at least considered in recent years.

So how real is the possibility of mind control? It depends on how you define it, but scientists say current research comes close.

While a chip implant to change a person's memory hasn't surfaced, scientists have begun influencing memory using pharmaceuticals. And technology that has been tried extensively on animals can trigger the subjects to follow commands with the flick of a switch.

"These kind of innovations all have this feeling of being exciting, but also creepy," said Richard Glen Boire, founder of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, a nonprofit awareness group in Davis, Calif.

Enhancing and Repressing Memory

One study, for example, found nine healthy middle-aged pilots who took the Alzheimer's drug Aricept remembered flight-simulator lessons much better than nine others who took a placebo. Aricept has unwanted side effects, but researchers are working on other drugs that have been shown to promote long-term memory in animals.

Certain drugs known as beta blockers, meanwhile, have been shown to suppress emotional memory. Some feel this holds promise for people with post traumatic stress disorder who have trouble leaving behind wrenching events of their past.

READ THE REST:
abcnews.go.com/sections/SciTech/Living/mind_control_040729-1.html

[Boomer Chick]

Halliburton: Designer of the real Manchurian candidate?

www.progresoweekly.com/friendly.php?pdr=Aug1925_04&progreso=Landau

By Saul Landau

Those who command the empire don’t possess great clarity or intellect. Rather, they tend to not ask themselves or anyone else about right or wrong, attributes of sensitive, self-critical people. The Washington imperialists do great harm as naturally and routinely as most people breathe or sleep. Power, getting it and exercising it, sustains them. It is their drug, nay their oxygen. They will say and do almost anything to keep it.

So, if “Fahrenheit 9/11” didn’t convince you to vote against the power-crazed gang of George W. Bush, see “The Manchurian Candidate,” a remake of the 1962 film. The screening of this frightening, fictional Hollywood attack on the influence of a Halliburton-like entity coincides with a shareholder class-action lawsuit charging this mega oil and war-related conglomerate’s chief executives with intentionally engaging in “serial accounting fraud” from 1998 to 2001. Vice President Dick Cheney headed the company from 1995-2000.

Just as Republicans tried to stop the exhibition of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit,” so too did right wing elements back in 1962 try to stop the original “Manchurian Candidate” from hitting the big screen. Thanks to President Kennedy’s friendship with Frank Sinatra, the lead in the original film, and his appreciation of novelist Richard Condon, who wrote the novel in 1959, the film slipped through the mostly locked gates of Hollywood’s political censors. I doubt that the Bushies would give even a one thumb up to a film in which the villain, Manchurian Global, resembles a Halliburton/Bechtel/Enron/Carlyle Group collage of corrupt corporate executives manipulating U.S. policy. “The Manchurian Candidate’s” combined proximity to the November election and to recent legal actions against Halliburton makes for a clear political message – for those who will listen.

In early August, Houston-based Halliburton resolved a civil lawsuit by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by agreeing to pay $7.5 million to settle charges that it misled investors by not disclosing an accounting change that boosted corporate profits in 1998 and 1999.

Yet another suit, according to Reuters (August 6), alleges that Halliburton executives committed “systematic accounting misdeeds far more wide-ranging than those charged in” the SEC action. The company, according to the plaintiffs, inflated results, failed to disclose a big asbestos verdict in a timely manner, and did not “account for $3.1 billion of profit and cash.” Neither suit named Cheney as a defendant. He has not commented on the actions of his former close associates: David Lesar, former chief operating officer and now CEO; Douglas Foshee, former chief financial officer and now CEO of El Paso Corp.; Gary Morris, another former CFO; and Robert Muchmore, former controller.

A New York Times story reports four former finance and accounting executives claimed that “Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), Halliburton's engineering and construction unit, inflated its financial results by overbilling for services, overstating its accounts receivable due from customers and understating accounts payable owed to vendors.” The Times quoted one former accounting department worker’s claim that her bosses ordered her to do “whatever it took” to create the façade of profitability so as to meet Wall Street expectations for Halliburton earnings. Much of the gauging was at the taxpayers’ expense.

The Center for Public Integrity claimed that this Enron-like giant, using KBR, made $11,475,541,371 in Iraq as of July 2004. The KBR unit has billed the Pentagon $1.8 billion to feed and house troops in the region, some of whom protect Iraq’s oil industry.

Halliburton also profits from repairing Iraq’s oil infrastructure. “Pentagon auditors have concluded that Halliburton Co. failed to adequately account for more than $1.8 billion of work in Iraq and Kuwait,” reported The Wall Street Journal (August 11).

U.S. companies cashed in by “servicing” during the 1991 Gulf War, from which emerges the new “Manchurian” release, directed by Jonathan Demme. The film travels into dark but, given the Halliburton suits, plausible alleys of contemporary corporate conspiracy. CEO greed substitutes for the original film’s plot, in which the Commy conspiracy subtly creates McCarthyism to subvert the U.S. system and attain maximum power. Condon published his Swiftian tale, in which the red conspirators plan to assassinate the president and replace him with their brainwashed agent, at a time when notions of Red Chinese and Soviet perfidy had no limits.

Condon’s novel, written before the Sino-Soviet split, features an ambushed U.S. patrol in Korea that gets drugged and taken to Manchuria where Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey, now Liev Schreiber) undergoes brainwashing and becomes a “sleeper” agent.

Having programmed him to obey certain word commands, his Machiavellian mother (Angela Lansbury, Meryl Streep in the new version) plans to take power. Major Bennett Marco (once Frank Sinatra, now Denzel Washington), who commanded the captured platoon that the Reds (now corporate programmers) subjected to their mind altering scheme, begins slowly to realize the treachery. Hallucinatory terror, ominous and suspenseful, mixes with bizarre humor. In one episode of the original, the Commy manipulators make the soldiers think that members of a middle class garden club, with flowered hats and mannerisms to match, have become interrogators. Condon portrays brainwashing as comedy of the absurd, akin to presenting McCarthyism as a tool of the red perpetrators.

But in Demme’s version, the Red enemy has given way to terrorists. So, during the 1991 Gulf War, unknown assailants ambush Marco’s platoon. Like the original, platoon members describe the bravery of the unfriendly and disliked Sergeant Shaw, who then wins the Congressional Medal of Honor for single-handedly leading his platoon to safety.

Now a congressman with anxiety seeping from the pores of his mouth barely covered with a smile, Shaw finds himself manipulated into the political spotlight by his overbearing mother, who maneuvers to place him in the White House.

Major Marco, who suffers from a recurrent nightmare about that war incident, meets another member of his unit who has experienced similar nightly terrors. Marco realizes that the escape story, including Shaw’s highly-touted heroism, has been fabricated when he finds an implant embedded in his skin. But why? Does Marco suffer from a pernicious type of Gulf War Syndrome and thus constitute a danger to national security?

Shaw appears as the epitome of the solid citizen and dutiful son whose obedience to authority makes him Mommy’s ideal candidate. She, as a key Senator, plots with the CEOs of Manchurian Global for endless power and wealth. Schreiber portrays a man who has been conditioned by his mother to obey even when his strongest instincts dictate the opposite. For example, he loved the daughter of another Senator, but his mother maneuvered to end the affair. Shaw resents but accepts his inability to confront his mother’s power. Indeed, he is powerless to stop himself from obeying once he hears the secret words that trigger the brainwashing.

Streep plays Shaw’s mother as a combination of Hillary Clinton at her pregnant dogiest and Lady Macbeth without bloodstain worries. She smiles demurely, while controlling each interface. Have we met her? Or is it only in the movies? Are the Halliburton, Enron, Carlyle Group and Bechtel CEOs the driving force for war as their source of never ending profits?

In the movies bad guys generally show themselves; great actresses like Streep conceal the venom of power that inspires her actions until it reveals itself. Sex and power merge when she kisses her son before he undertakes his assassination mission.

The Halliburtons and Enrons don’t create such qualities in people, but they certainly channel them. “The Manchurian Candidate” speaks directly to an issue much larger than that of the Bush Administration’s dubious dealings with war profiteers. It goes to the heart of U.S. imperial power as Condon has done in a series of his novels (The Prizzis, Three Days of the Condor and December Kills).

U.S. empire and criminality go hand in hand. The imperial chiefs deny all imperial intent while ringing the world with bases and routinely bombing and invading weak nations and then imposing the U.S. economic model on them.

After witnessing the hanky panky of the 2000 elections and the direct propinquity of former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney to both power and war, “The Manchurian Candidate” acquires a level of credibility that most sci fi films cannot achieve. Just as the military takes normal people and converts them into professional killers, the political system takes ambitious individuals and changes them into international criminals. Before George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, came Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Daddy Bush. They too overthrew governments, bombed and assassinated and grew wealthy in the process. Such people accumulate wealth, but not wisdom or clarity. To appreciate the Bush world perspective, refer to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld at an April 3, 2003 Pentagon press briefing: “I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past – I think the past was not predictable when it started.”

You get it?

Saul Landau’s new book is THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA: HOW CONSUMERS HAVE REPLACED CITIZENS AND HOW WE CAN REVERSE THE TREND. He teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University and is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.