CZ:Cold Storage/Extreme Abuse Survey

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The Extreme Abuse Surveys (EAS) are a set of online surveys that were developed as a study of the responses made by people who stated they were victims of physical or psychological abuse, as well as statements from professionals that care for those people. The EAS was created to develop a qualitative and quantitative base of data regarding the allegations of survivors of extreme abuse. Four researchers from Germany and the United States, Carol Rutz, Thorsten Becker, Bettina Overcamp and Wanda Karriker worked together to develop three different surveys to develop this base of data.

Extreme abuse is defined by the survey authors as abuse that includes torture, threats, confinements, violence, and other types of unlawful or immoral exploitation that children may have endured during the abuse, which results in debilitating after-effects. Extreme abuse is not defined in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH); the title of the report is forensic aspects of dissociative identity disorder, which resolves to multiple personality disorder in MeSH. The PubMED data base returns no hits on the term.

The Trilogy

The international online survey was divided into three parts. The Extreme Abuse Survey for adult survivors (EAS), was conducted between January 1 and March 30, 2007. The Professional-Extreme Abuse Survey (P-EAS) was conducted between April 1 and June 30, 2007. This survey was for therapists, clergy, counselors and other persons that had worked professionally with at least one victim of extreme abuse. The Child-Extreme Abuse Survey (C-EAS) was conducted between July 8 and October 8, 2007. This survey was for the caregivers of child survivors of what the authors described as extreme abuse and mind control. The authors of the study defined mind control as “all mind control procedures designed to make a victim follow directives of the programmer without conscious awareness.” Authors of the survey stated that several attacks were made on survey data, including an intense amount of port scans at low and high ports and attempts to access non-existing server pages, an attempt to hack into the server which failed and attempts to obtain the private data of some technicians and surveyors. The EAS survey was successfully completed on March 31, 2007.

Methodology

The main objective of the surveys was gather preliminary data on the nature and extent of extreme abuse. The researchers decided that the most practical way to generate a large number of responses was to announce and conduct an online survey. Survey questions were pretested, and all survey items were confirmed to have face validity. The target population of the study was defined as all survivors of extreme abuse.

Results

Fourteen hundred and seventy-one participants from more than thirty countries answered at least one question of the EAS. The survey was given in both German and English. Sixty four percent of 985 participants reported memories of incest and 48% of 977 participants reported memories of extreme abuse before they sought therapy. Sixty nine percent of 257 respondents that reported secret mind control experiments on them when they were children also reported that they were abused in a cult.

Of 1007 participants in the EAS, 65% stated that they had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. Higher percentages were found in the C-EAS and the P-EAS. High percentages of physical abuse, sexual abuse from multiple perpetrators and child pornography were found in all three surveys. In the C-EAS, medical evidence consistent with extreme abuse was found in 53% of 80 respondents, psychological symptoms consistent with extreme abuse were found in 91% of the 88 respondents and the symptoms abated when the child was able to tell about the abuse in 78 respondents.

Publicity

One of the survey authors, Wanda Karriker, issued a media packet containing some description of the survey, but mainly including what its cover page calls "Documentation that torture-based, government-sponsored mind control (GMC) experimentation was conducted on children during the Cold War." The bulk of the packet deals with allegations of U.S. and Nazi government mind control experimentation, consisting variously of a speech to the U.S. Senate Health Committee about the Central Intelligence Agency MKULTRA program (part of the larger Project ARTICHOKE), various short journalistic allegations of government programs, and a page of a self-described victim's testimony to the United States of America Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. In other words, a participant in the project principally presented, to the media, allegations of government abuse, not the actual survey information.

In 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA files be destroyed. This order was not fully followed; documents remain available. The media packet, contradicting the Kennedy speech that all records were destroyed, contains several references to hearings and court cases on MK-ULTRA. This program, which was specifically targeted on adults to explore means of interrogation. The most noted example was a government scientist, Frank Olson, who was given lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) without his knowledge by Dr Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA Technical Services Division, and who subsequently committed suicide. MKULTRA was discussed in the 1975 Rockefeller Commission report to the President, and in more detail by the U.S. Senate Church Committee. A Project ARTICHOKE summary summarizes the program.