-Caveat Lector- 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). Founded in 1979 and based primarily in communities of color in our country's inner cities, over the last 14 years NAP has run candidates for local, state and federal office in every state and received millions of votes. In 1988 NAP's presidential candidate, Dr. Lenora Fulani, became the first woman and the first African American presidential candidate in U.S. history to be on the ballot in 40 states. In both campaigns Fulani qualified for and received federal primary matching funds. The 1988 investigation , sparked by a Phoenix, Arizona "informant of unknown reliability," included at least 24 field offices and the national headquarters, all of which devoted federal resources to compiling dossiers on NAP. The investigation generated numerous communications from the FBI to law enforcement officials around the country warning them, without cause, that NAP members--who at the time were actively campaigning in the 1988 presidential campaign-- should be considered "armed and dangerous" (New Alliance Party vs. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1993). The 1991 investigation was launched solely on the basis of protected First Amendment activities and despite the fact that the FBI itself had concluded that NAP had broken no laws. As with the earlier investigation, it was buttressed with propaganda from a private organization with its own political agenda, in this case the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith. The 1991 FBI files on NAP contain an ADL "report" attacking NAP and labeling the independent party "part Marxist sect, part therapy cult" (FBI Airtel, July 24, 1991). In addition, since the distribution of PRA's cult-baiting pamphlet in 1987, publications hostile to NAP's politics-- including the Village Voice, the Boston Phoenix, the New York Post, and various publications of the Communist Party of the United States--have published articles which explicitly or implicitly apply the "cult" label to NAP. In turn, some of these articles, or references to them, have been incorporated into the FBI files (FBI Airtel, May 1, 1988). On June 24, 1993 Representative Don Edwards (D-CA), chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Judiciary Committee set a letter to William Sessions protesting the FBI investigations of NAP: I am writing about the FBI's interest in the New Alliance Party (NAP). This is the second time that the FBI's handling of a NAP matter has raised questions about the focus and management your terrorist program. The FBI's treatment of NAP in recent years evidences a lack of perspective on world and national events and a continuing focus on First Amendment activities instead of criminal conduct...The NAP documents raise something more troubling [than wasteful carelessness] and that is that the FBI continues to treat ideology as an indicator of a predisposition to crime...I must request that the Bureau cease basing investigative action on this type of predicate (Edwards, 1993). Responding to an investigation of the ADL by the San Francisco district attorney--which indicates that the ADL's "fact-finding" division was part of an information-trading operation which included local police departments, the FBI and foreign governments (most notably, the apartheid regime in South Africa)--Edwards told the San Francisco Examiner that he planned to investigate "whether the FBI was using private surrogates to collect the information it cannot collect directly" (Opatrny and Winokur, 1993). Within a month of the Waco massacre, NAP, Fulani and two members of the NAP National Committee (Dr. Fred Newman and Dr. Rafael Mendez) filed suit in federal court against the FBI, then-FBI director William Sessions, James Fox, the acting director of the Bureau's New York Division, and Attorney General Janet Reno. The lawsuit charges that the FBI's description of a political organization as a "cult"-- or the use of such a description to justify investigative activities, the use of force, criminal prosecution or governmental regulation--violates the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which respectively guarantee the right to freedom of speech and association, freedom of assembly and due process (New Alliance Party vs. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1993). Pointing out that the term "cult" does "not appear in any federal statute or regulation, or in the Federal Rules of Evidence, as a predicate for declaring a person legally incompetent, depriving a person of parental rights, or subjecting a person to psychological warfare and the use of deadly force by federal law enforcement authorities," the suit challenges the appropriateness of the FBI's use of the label as a rational for investigation (New Alliance Party vs. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1993, p. 12). Furthermore, the suit points out: The actions taken by the defendants [the FBI, et al] against the Branch Davidian group in Waco, Texas in February-April 1993, and the defendants' explanations, justifications, and internal investigation and analyses of their actions, demonstrate that [they] have created and are further evolving a modus operandi of practices under which the defendants do not give full recognition and respect to the constitutional and civil rights of individuals whom defendants label as being associated with "cults." Classifying NAP as a "political cult" rather than acknowledging NAP as a political party, is a means of evading the high degree of constitutional scrutiny to which governmental interference with political activity must be subjected (New Alliance Party vs. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1993, p. 2). The suit, which is scheduled to be heard before Judge Constance Baker Motley in September 1993 in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, points to the chilling effect that the increasing use of the "cult" label can have on the development of new and minority political parties and organizations: In the current climate, which defendants have helped to create, giving a group the status of "cult" has a stigmatizing an injurious effect on the group... in the same was as government labeling of groups as "subversive," "totalitarian," "radical," "Black nationalist," "communist sympathizing" has impaired constitutionally protected speech and association. By giving United States Government imprimatur to an alleged status--"cult"--the defendants are facilitating actions both by private persons and by government officials that impair the exercise of constitutional rights (New Alliance Party vs. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1993, pp. 14-15). Although the investigation of the New Alliance Party is, at this point, the best know case of CAN language and concepts being applied to a political organization, the emergence of this new psychological/political category has implications that go well beyond the specifics of the NAP case to fundamental constitutional issues of free association. CAN's ability to influence, if only indirectly, the policies and thinking of a federal agency is hinted at in the NAP investigations. Its ability to influence government policy and media coverage is made all the more clear in the events surrounding the siege and massacre at Waco. WACO A key link in the chain of events which led to the FBI massacre of nearly 90 people--including 24 children, 17 of them under the age of 10--outside Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993 began over a year earlier when Rick Ross, a CAN- affiliated "deprogrammer," allegedly began targeting the Branch Davidian sect for potential kidnappings, to be paid for by relatives of members of the group (Robertson, 1993, p. 1). Ross has boasted of committing more than 200 "deprogrammings" and has a criminal record stretching back to 1975, when he was convicted of robbing diamonds estimated at $500,000 from a Phoenix, Arizona jewelry store (The State of Arizona vs. Ricky Alan Ross, 1975). Ross has been praised by CAN executive director Cynthia Kisser as being "among the half dozen best deprogrammers in the country" (Kisser, Ross promotional material). David Block, a Branch Davidian for five years, was, according to a sworn affidavit by Samuel Russell (an earlier CAN target), "deprogrammed" by Ross, Adeline Bova and CAN national spokesperson Priscilla Coates in Coates' home in Glendale, California in the summer of 1992. During the "deprogramming" Block "furnished Ross with information about the Branch Davidian sect, including details of their stored weapons" (Russell, 1993). Ross himself bragged on "Up to the Minute" on public television that long before the raid he had "consulted with ATF agents on the Waco sect and told them about the guns in the compound" (Robertson, 1993, p. 2). Attorney Linda Thompson of the American Justice Foundation, who represents some of the survivors of the massacre, maintains that "a CAN advisor to the BATF [presumably Ross] was providing disinformation for 30 days before the assault" (Thompson, 1993, p. 1). In the affidavits submitted to obtain a search warrant, ATF agents used language associated with CAN, calling the residents of the Mt. Carmel Center "a religious cult commune" (Aguilera, 1993). On February 27, 1993, the day before the initial ATF assault on Mt. Carmel, the Waco Tribune-Herald began a seven-part series on the Branch Davidians entitled "The Sinful Messiah." According to its authors, Mark England and Darlene McCormick, the piece was the result of an eight- month investigation and interviews with "more than ten" former members of the group. At least some of these sources were supplied by CAN. English and McCormick quote a man "deprogrammed" by Ross "who had been with Howell [Koresh] for at least five years"--most likely David Block. The fourth installment in the series, published the day after the shootout, included a sidebar entitled "Experts: Branch Davidians dangerous, destructive cult." It quotes Ross as declaring, "The group is without doubt, without any doubt whatsoever, a highly destructive, manipulative cult...I would liken the group to Jim Jones." Coates calls the Branch Davidians "unsafe or destructive." And both say that they believe David Koresh practices "mind control." It is clear from the article, which was written before the ATF staged its raid, that Ross had been agitating for the government to move against the group. England and McCormick report in the sidebar to part four: Ross said he believes Howell [Koresh] is prone to violence...Speaking out and exposing Howell might bring in the authorities or in some way help those "being held in that compound through a kind of psychological, emotional slavery and servitude," he said. Ross said authorities need to understand that Howell is fully capable of violence. "You could say that it is a very dangerous group," Ross said (England and McCormick, 1993). Dr. James Wood, a professor of religion at Baylor University in Waco and a resident of the city since 1955, told a reporter from the National Alliance Newsweekly, "Before February I had never heard of them [the Branch Davidians] being referred to as a cult." A check by the Tribune- Herald's librarian confirmed that before the English- McCormick series, the Branch Davidian sect--which had been in Waco since the mid-1930s--had previously been referred to in the Tribune-Herald as a "religious group," not as a "cult." On "Nightline" with Ted Koppel, broadcast on April 19 (the day of the massacre), Balenda Ganem, the mother of a Davidian survivor, put forward the claim that CAN was making "proposals" to the FBI throughout the siege: These proposals came from Cult Awareness professionals all over the country. They came in the form of faxes to the White House, to Janet Reno, to William Sessions. They came in the form of registered letters. They came in the form of live television interviews, books being distributed from the Cult Awareness Network, from Cult Awareness professionals, a team of them ("Nightline" transcript, April 19, 1993). During the House Judiciary Committee hearing on "Events Surrounding the Branch Davidian Cult Standoff in Waco, Texas" held on April 28 of this year [1993], both Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director William Sessions said in their prepared statements that the FBI had consulted "cult experts" in the course of the siege (Reno, 1993; Sessions, 1993). When questioned by Representative William Hughes about whether the Bureau had consulted with the Cult Awareness Network, neither official responded directly. When asked the same question by a reporter from the National Alliance, however, an FBI spokesperson answered in the affirmative. Whatever advisory role CAN played with the ATF (and perhaps the FBI), there is no question that CAN spokespersons (usually referred to as "national cult experts") were given ready access to the media throughout the siege. Marcia R. Rudlin, director of the International Cult Education Program of the CAN-allied American Family Foundation, gave 130 interviews between March 10 and May 13, 1993, and as the AFF's publication, The Cult Observer, notes: "The listing [of interviews] could be multiplied many times to account for the hundreds of interviews given by AFF-associated professionals during the same period" (American Family Foundation, 1993). Kisser, in her March 13 article "Nation needs to address cults' ever-present evil," called on the government to spend money on fighting the cults. "If we can educate about the dangers of drugs, AIDS and gangs," she wrote, "we can provide important information about cults...[C]ults violate constitutional rights, destroy the family and exploit the weak" (Kisser, 1993). On April 8, 11 days before the fatal attack, CAN president Patricia Ryan told the Houston Chronicle that "Officials should use whatever means necessary to arrest Koresh, including lethal force." In that same article Kisser warned that talking with Koresh was similar to talking to an insane person. "People who are in a closed system, the cult leaders, think differently than you and I" (Keeton and Pinkerton, 1993). This is not the first time that CAN-associated "deprogrammers" have apparently instigated violent law enforcement moves against a small religious group. In 1982 Priscilla Coates, then the director of CFF, and "deprogrammer" Galen Kelly helped set the stage for a similar raid on the Northeast Kingdom Community at Island Pond in northern Vermont (UPI, November 28, 1982). The supposed intent of that raid--authorized by Vermont's attorney general and later called an illegal "fishing expedition" by a state judge--was to rescue nearly 100 children, most of them African American, from the compound of the small Christian commune whose adult members were allegedly committing child abuse. In the days that followed, the state determined that the only abuse to have occurred was the raid itself. All the children were subsequently returned (Robertson, 1993, pp. 2-3). As is well known, things did not work out as well for the children of the Branch Davidians. The gas which the FBI pumped into the buildings at Mt. Carmel for six hours before the compound erupted into flame was O- chlorobenzalmalononitrile (CS), the manufacture, production, possession, and use of which were banned during the Chemical Weapons Convention in Paris in January of this year [1993]. More than 100 nations, including the United States, endorsed the ban, which is awaiting ratification. Benjamin C. Garrett, executive director of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Alexandria, Virginia, describes what effect it had on the Branch Davidians trapped inside the building. "It would have panicked the children. Their eyes would have involuntarily shut. Their skin would have been burning. They would have been gasping for air and coughing wildly...Eventually, they would have been overcome with vomiting in a final hell. It would not have been pretty" (Seper, 1993). Ironically, the justification given by Attorney General Janet Reno for approving the pumping of CS gas into the compound was the charge of child abuse first supplied by Rick Ross' victims. On the afternoon of the fire Reno said, "We had information...that babies were being beaten." That evening she told talk show host Larry King, "We were concerned for the children because there had been reports of sexual abuse of the children." The next day President Bill Clinton echoed this rationale, saying the group's children "were being abused significantly, as well as being forced to live in unsanitary and unsafe conditions." (The president failed to mention the fact that the unsanitary and unsafe conditions were a result of the ATF/FBI siege, nor did he explain how killing the children was the best way to end their alleged abuse.) At the same time that Reno and Clinton were echoing CAN allegations of child abuse, FBI director William Sessions said his agency had "no contemporaneous evidence of child abuse in the compound." After a nine-week study of the 21 children released from the compound in the early stages of the 51-day siege, the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services concluded, "None of the allegations [of child abuse] could be verified. The children denied being abused in any way by any adults in the compound...Examinations of the children produced no indication of current or previous injuries." In response to this announcement by Texas officials, CAN spokesperson Priscilla Coates told the Washington Post, "I know how these types of groups work and children are always abused" (Niebuhr and Thomas, 1993). Within a week or so after the massacre references to child abuse by the Branch Davidians had all but disappeared from the press. Before the ashes of Mt. Carmel had settled, CAN was busy putting its spin on the massacre. The night of April 19 Louis "Jolly" West was a guest on PBS's "MacNeil/Lehrer Hour," where he said of the FBI: "They knew they were dealing with a psychopath. Nobody is more dangerous or unpredictable than a psychopath in a trap" (West, 1993). That same night Kisser was the "expert" guest on an ABC News special hosted by Peter Jennings, during which she alleged that there are over 2,000 "cults" in America and warned of more violence to come. A similar "warning" came three days later when William Goldberg, a CAN-affiliated psychiatric social worker in private practice in River Edge, New Jersey, was the guest on "Informed Sources" on WNET-TV, New York City's PBS affiliate. Over footage of surviving Branch Davidians, host Maria Hinojosa spoke of "several hundred destructive cults here in our own metropolitan area," but only specified one such "cult"--the New Alliance Party. Later in the show, after Goldberg identified NAP as a "political cult," Hinojosa claimed to have information that NAP members had been engaged in weapons training and asked, "Could something like what happened in Waco happen here in New York?" (Friedman, 1993). In the Glendale [California] News-Press, Priscilla Coates warned Americans against "second guessing" the FBI's actions, explaining, "As a society I don't know that we've had that much contact with sociopaths, and sociopaths are unpredictable" (Yarborough, 1993). At the same time CAN worked to position itself as the best defense against the "cult" threat. In an interview with the Houston Post a few days after the attack, Patricia Ryan urged the federal government to make more use of CAN's "expertise," arguing that Washington has failed to study "cults," educate citizens about their danger or coordinate law enforcement strategy to prosecute their crimes (Witham, 1993). Meanwhile, CAN was attempting to move in on the lucrative business of "deprogramming" Branch Davidian survivors. On April 23 Brett Bates, and "exit counselor" for the Texas chapter of the Cult Awareness Network, began meeting with the families of survivors, seeking contracts to "deprogram" them. he was quoted in the New York Daily News: "Before they become productive members of the prosecution, they have to realize they were victims of mind control. They have to realize that this is not David Koresh, the Messiah. This was someone who led a cultic group and burned down a building with women and children." Bates told the Daily News that he thought the Branch Davidians, locked in jail and mourning the deaths of their husbands, wives, children and friends would be a "unique challenge" (Hackett and Sennott, 1993). The day after the debacle President Clinton, denying all responsibility for the deaths and echoing CAN's line on "cults," said, "There is, unfortunately, a rise in this sort of fanaticism all across the world, and we may have to confront it again...I hope very much that others who will be tempted to join cults and to become involved with people like David Koresh will be deterred by [these] horrible scenes" (Witham, 1993). The response from the religious and civil libertarian communities to the government violence at Waco was swift, but sorely undercovered in the media. In a letter to Jack Brooks, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, dated April 27, 1993, Laura Murphy Lee, director of the Washington, D.C. office of the American Civil Liberties Union, cautioned against any "new government authority to investigate unpopular or unusual religious groups, without reasonable suspicion that criminal laws have been violated, in violation of the Constitutional guarantee of the free exercise of religion." The confrontation in Waco, she warned, "raises the specter of unconstitutional surveillance of religious or political groups that was widespread during the COINTELPRO-type investigations which occurred through the mid-1970's" (Lee, 1993). During a hearing on the events at Waco held by the House Judiciary Committee on April 28, 1993, Rep. John Conyers (D- MI) told Attorney General Reno: The root cause of this problem was it was considered a military operation and it wasn't. This is a profound disgrace to law enforcement in the U.S.A. and you did the right thing by offering to resign...I would like you to know that there is at least one member of Congress that is not going to rationalize the death of two dozen children...that decision that was jointly made by these agencies bears extreme criticism (Conyers, 1993). On April 20 Joseph Bettis, a Methodist minister an professor of religious studies at Western Washington University, wrote to Attorney General Reno: From the beginning, members of the Cult Awareness Network have been involved in this tragedy. This organization is widely known for its use of fear to foster religious bigotry. The reliance of federal agents on information supplied by these people, as well as the whole record of federal activity deserves your careful investigation and public disclosure...As long as the home and church of the Branch Davidians is not protected from invasion by the government, none of our homes, churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, or shrines is safe..."Cult bashing" must end, and you must take the lead (Bettis, 1993). On April 23 Larry Shinn, vice president for academic affairs at Bucknell University, wrote to Congressman Don Edwards, chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Judiciary Committee: "[M]edia, legal institutions, and law-makers too often rely on the word of self-styled cult experts like C.A.N. (Cult Awareness Network) whose overly negative agenda often slides into a purely anti-religious attack" (Shinn, 1993). Dean M. Kelley, counselor on religious liberty to the National Council of Churches, issued a statement which concluded, in part: [W]e are confronted with the prospect of a vast military assault worthy of the Keystone Kops directed against a relatively small and thus far unaggressive religious band whose chief offense appears to have been acting like a "cult," whatever that is (beyond a religious outfit that we don't understand and don't approve of). The anti-cult harpies have suggested an ingenious rational for this intervention: it was designed to "rescue" the "hostages" held "captive" by Koresh through..."mind control" (Kelley, 1993). The association of World Academics for Religious Education issued a statement which argued: "Had the ATF and the FBI consulted and followed the advice of mainstream academic experts, the Waco tragedy could have been avoided" (AWARE, 1993). In early May a broad range of mainstream religious and civil libertarian organizations issued a statement which read in part: We are shocked and saddened by the recent events in Waco...Under the religious liberty provisions of the First Amendment, the government has no business declaring what is orthodox or heretical, or what is a true or false religion. It should steer clear of inflammatory and misleading labels. History teaches that today's "cults" may be tomorrow's mainstream religions. The statement was signed by American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A.; American Civil Liberties Union, Washington Office; American Conference on Religious Movements; Americans United for Separation of Church and State; Association of Christian Schools; International Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs; Church of Scientology International; Churches' Center for Theology and Public Policy; Episcopal Church; First Liberty Institute; General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists; Greater Grace World Outreach; National Association of Evangelicals; National Council of Churches of Christ; Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Washington Office; and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. CONCLUSION We urge you to inform yourselves, your constituents and your readers of the activities and influence of the Cult Awareness Network. Attached you will find a bibliography, and a list of experts on the constitutional, legal, psychological, and religious implications of the activities of the Cult Awareness Network. ------------------------------------------------------------ A report prepared by Ross & Green 1010 Vermont Avenue, NW, Suite 811 Washington, DC 20005 202-638-4858 / Fax 202-638-4857 7/93, (c) 1993 by Ross & Green DISCLAIMER: This text file is a partial reprint of an original copyrighted report by Ross & Green. All of the text from pages 1 through 17 of the original report has been reproduced exactly herein. The only information missing is pages 18 through 23, which contained the report's bibliography and list of experts. This file has been uploaded to CompuServe with the sole intent of disseminating important information to the World's public, and it was not the uploader's intent to plagiarize the original work of Ross & Green in any way. 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