Questioning "are we getting backstabbed by a bunch of fraudsters taking rake-offs from new wars, "accidental" quagmires", refried "cold-war"s with puppet goldstein-terrorist bogeymen" these days.
The "top" tale in this piece is the Abu Ghraib old/new alleged hard-hat / soft-hat split ( as some see it, hard hat, harder "torture sceptic" hat - but seeing as this isnt played big in that paper - see other comments from the "each11th" types). The key question put is the "what gets people to do such "evil" things" , incorporating a lot of the results from a recent book by the author - who spoke for a couple of the grunts that carried the blame for all of it in the very public - almost showtrial - courtcases. The intriguing things are
1: how much it referenced, in almost unwitting ways, research that was, in actual fact, done in those pre-Senator Church Comission days when those sort of things could get funded by the CIA itself, despite the fact that certain bits of "mkultra" research had got taken back out of state involvement, sometimes as far away as (fascist) Spain or (apartheid-era) South Africa
2 : how it spun those experimental results - almost saying that acting "against" that "systematic" set of psychological scams, programming, "subtle" mental group-spin etcetera meant you were the weird, isolated, "nutter-hero" type - when in actual fact the "secret" of thoser ploys success was to isolate those people from society AS A GROUP as much as "one-to-one" as seperate individuals under the dictats of the "dungeon-masters" . . . . yes, I AM talking about
the people who played the "guard/persecutor" roles during that role-play experiment in California in the early 1970s. . . .
The fact is, progress happens ( see brackets at end of "1") due to the fact that despite ALL these "ploys", when "society" IS allowed to come into play - much as the defence of glasgow airport bloke puts it - people DO get stood up, support each other, the situation shifts. Fraudsters HAVE used all those bits of "research" too . . . . worst practise gets around the world twice as fast . . . . but good practise DOES "get its boots on" too.
The "if snake-oil charmer/ fraudster types exist, might they use this sort of research?" question is as useful as "are we all ENTIRELY sure that ALL ex-secretpolicemen/women are honest" - or resist all blackmail, threats, etc.
As is the "are you totally sure that ALL the black budget top secret "jokeshop" gizmos never get misused by criminals" question, or the "then what if fraudsters or criminals saw a bit of research/tech they might "invent" EXTRA to that, with a bit of loot-reinvestment, that might get them loads of cheap stooges, "cut-outs" or patsies - for a bit - from people that were much "cleverer" too - might they have founds ways of getting that research done over the years?" . . . .
Might explain a lot.
Influencing peoples opinions "around the periphery" of their awareness was always the card-sharps technique . . . . blindspot here, logic-jump there, bit of "neuro-linguistic programming" here, bit of shifty layout there . . . . but with a bit of extra tech, could mesmerism have got a bit more effectual to ALL of us - less in a "chalk-is-cheese!!!!" way, more of a YUKTHISCHEESETASTESABIT. . . . etc.

That old idea that the easiest "false flag" network to run - with the use of the experimental results in the newspaper piece - was the "diabolic" group has a certain currency. Political groups had certain expectations, religious groups had certain things they refused to do, nationalist groups had certain people they refused to do them to, but if you screwed things up with "diabolic" pseudo-groups, all you had to say was that that was actually on purpose, shows how nasty we are, then threaten to blackmail people with what they did in the past to the extent that, after a bit of "investment" up front - like the semi-mythical "dealers free few bags", they paid you as they did the dirty jobs others might refuse . . . .
It was a joke, ages ago, but that sort of thinking, at least, shows its wise to have a LITTLE extra suspicion prior to the dismissal of certain bits of enquiries.
cheers.