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When Oliver Field of AMA's Bureau of Investigation turned down the U.S. attorney's suggestion that the medical association plant a doctor-spy in the Church of Scientology, he did so because such a procedure was contrary to AMA policy.
He knew from experience that there was a better, a more effective way. In a communication to an Ohio scientist who was thirsting for Hubbard's blood, he wrote: "We notice in copies of correspondence you enclosed that Dr. Milstead of the Food and Drug Administration has indicated that investigation is going forward so far as the device the 'E-meter' is concerned, and perhaps that activity is the only immediate hope of achieving any interference with the activities of the Scientologists." (Emphasis added.)
At the time Field wrote the letter just quoted, the FDA already had a secret agent named Taylor Quinn enrolled in the academy of the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington. His assignment was to entrap the Scientologists by gathering material that would purport to show that the E-meter was used to diagnose and treat disease.In an earlier chapter, I have drawn attention to the fact that almost from the time it was set up as a federal agency, the FDA has acted as the enforcement arm of the American Medical Association. Under the guise of combatting "quackery", and using the awesome police powers of the government, FDA commissars have ruthlessly persecuted any individual or organization whose views and practices were inimical to those of orthodox medical dogma. Victims of this court-supported inquisition have included all kinds of "heretics" from lecturers on nutrition to brilliant and advanced medical researchers such as Dr. Andrew Ivy and Dr. Wilhelm Reich.
At the same time, the egregious quackery of AMA-approved psychiatry, with its fraudulent diagnoses and inhuman treatments, has been permitted to flourish.
Nothing more effectively illustrates how completely the reins of government have escaped the hands of the people in America than the operation of federal agencies such as FDA, IRS, FTC and others.
These bureaucratic hierarchies have become, in practice, sovereign rulers, with almost limitless powers to impose their will upon the people. Acting in direct conflict with America's traditional philosophy of self-rule, they combine within a single administration all three powers of government - legislative, executive and judicial. Thus, they not only make their own laws, but they interpret and enforce them. They have the power, if not the right, to indict the citizen, prosecute him before their own courts, and mete out punishment. This does not mean, however, that their despotic rule is based upon clearly established statutes or well-settled precedent cases. Instead, a defending legal counsel is faced with a huge pandect of complex, crossindexed, vague and often ad hoc regulations.
Such confusion and ambiguity is not accidental. As Hannah Arendt has aptly observed: "Thus does the bureaucrat shun every general law, handling each situation separately by decree, because a law's inherent stability threatens to establish a permanent community in which nobody could possibly be a god because all would have to obey a law."
Having become arrogant overlords rather than civil servants, it is inevitable that federal functionaries would be unresponsive to, when not openly contemptuous of, criticism, whether it comes from individuals, the press or even from the Congress itself.
When a Senate sub-committee was investigating FDA practices in 1965, Senator Edward V. Long, chairman, reported that FDA officials had been unco-operative, misleading and evasive. He said that throughout his committee's inquiry into the agency's activities, the one thing that stood out clearly was the rejection of any suggestion that an improvement in the bureau's procedures was called for. FDA regarded itself as above reproach.
Dr. Szasz told the Commission that, while he was not himself a Scientologist, he agreed to a large extent with the movement's attack on psychiatry. He said the practice of involuntary psychiatry was a communistic ideology and that psychiatry was making "a cancerous invasion" of the law, politics and religion in America. Striking close to home, Dr. Szasz informed the commissioners that in some quarters in the U.S., racism was assumed to be symptomatic of mental disease.Mr. Matonis upset the commissioners' comfortable conclusion that Scientology was not a religion by citing the case of Aaron Barr, a young ministerial student whom a New York Court of Appeal had granted exemption from military service on the ground that he was a duly ordained Scientology minister.
Dr. Hamlyn likewise dealt harshly with the well-settled notion that there was something about Scientology that was disastrously harmful to health. Only a few days previously Dr. M. G. Feldman, spokesman for the Medical Association of South Africa, had testified that Scientology, "with its confused application of confused concepts", could be harmful.
Dr. Hamlyn said Scientology had provided him the answer to treating psychosomatic illness, which he had been seeking for twenty years. After taking a course in Dianetics, he had decided that the system would be of enormous value to the medical profession and took another course which qualified him to train others in Dianetic auditing.David Gaiman, a man of subtle intelligence, who heads Scientology's public relations worldwide, countered the thrusts of Dr. Harwood, counsel for the Commission, with ripostes worthy of the most accomplished verbal fencing master.Referring to the Scientology policy letter cancelling rules relating to second dynamic activities, the counsel asked Mr. Gaiman if that did not "put a premium on fornication".Gaiman replied in the famous words of Edward III, now the motto of Britain's Order of the Garter: Honi soit qui mal y pense (Evil to him who evil thinks).In another exchange, Harwood asked the Scientology spokesman what reason T. J. Stander (director of the South African Council for Mental Health) could have for maliciously attacking Scientology as the witness had testified. Gaiman replied that "no reason is unreason", and suggested that he could not go beyond this without tarnishing somebody's reputation.As David Gaiman had no doubt foreseen, Harwood pressed him to give his opinion, assuring him that anything defamatory would be privileged testimony in the setting of an official inquiry.Gaiman then stated: "Unless Mr. Stander is a Communist, I find it difficult to see why malice should bite so deep."
Thus far, two of the principal witnesses against Scientology have given sworn statements retracting their testimony before the Commission.One of them, a private secretary named Eileen Drummond, stated in her affidavit that her assertions at theInquiry to the effect that Scientology was responsible for family upsets and had changed her daughter for the worse, were false.Mrs. Drummond declared that her statement that her daughter had cut herself off from her because of Scientology's policy of disconnection should be clarified. "I am clear in my own mind that the reason she seldom contacted me had nothing to do with the philosophy or policy of Scientology."Even more startling was the recantation of Jan Hendrik du Plessis, former police captain, who had been the featured witness against Scientology.During his appearance before the Commission, du Plessis had aired a series of unsubstantiated charges and personal opinions aimed at creating suspicion and dread of Scientology. At one point, he even submitted a book on the life and practices of Aleister Crowley, the notorious British Satanist (known as "the wickedest man in the world") and asserted that Hubbard had once been his disciple. Although there was no reference of any kind in the book, either to Hubbard or to Scientology, Commission Chairman Kotze accepted the volume in evidence.
Apparently in a penitential mood two and a half years later, du Plessis retracted the evidence he had given. In an astonishing affidavit sworn to on February 3, 1972, he stated that his testimony before the Commission had been biased, misleading, untrue, and motivated by a desire for revenge. Among the specific false allegations cited in his lengthy recantation were the following:
"I believe the statements I made with regard to the religious nature of Scientology to be misleading. The facts I reported about the Church selling its property as being a purely business proposition and this being an indication that this was contrary to the behaviour of a religious body had nothing whatsoever to do with the issue at hand and were made solely with the intent to slander the Church.
"The statements I made in testimony comparing the organisations of Scientology with the criminal organisation commonly known as the Mafia were completely unwarranted and completely false in material facts, namely:
"The story which I related before the Commission that I had been followed, and subjected to anonymous and threatening telephone calls is false in all details and was stated by myself to lend credence to my earlier statements about the use of intimidation by the Scientology organisation, of which I have no evidence of any kind whatsoever. "I gave considerable testimony relating to an article published in the Sunday Times (a London newspaper) which claimed to connect L. Ron Hubbard with the black magician, Aleister Crowley, namely.
"I stated in the course of the Commission hearing that some of L. Ron Hubbard's writings were 'the ravings of a diseased mind'. This is not true and I apologise for the statement unreservedly."I said that on visiting the London premises of the Church of Scientology one evening, I found it full of people sleeping on the floor and on benches, which is an untrue statement. I also stated that a London police official told me that they knew about this and that the police raided the organisation every so often. This is definitely not true and in fact the London Scientology organisation has never been raided to my knowledge."As I write, three years have elapsed since the Inquiry was initiated, but the Commission has not issued a report. The South African speech and drama festival continues. When the final curtain descends on that stage, it will no doubt rise elsewhere for yet another run.Advance men are already at work in Holland, for example, where as yet there are not more than a hundred Scientologists in the entire country. When a small Scientology mission was established in the Netherlands in 1970, the British National Association for Mental Health arranged a meeting between their representatives and officers of their Dutch counterpart. One of the latter, was the publisher of the newspaper Vrij Nederland, which soon thereafter launched an attack on Scientology, based in part upon material obtained by intimidation from Dutch Scientologists.
There are indications that in the future, the assault on Scientology will be handled in a less obvious and more indirect way. In the Province of Ontario, Canada and in Rhodesia, a law to restrict the practice of psychology has been drafted. In both countries the measures, based partly on the Victorian legislation, ostensibly regulate the practice of psychology, but are sufficiently broad in terms of reference to include Scientology.In fact, during the Parliamentary debate in Rhodesia, one of the Senators complained that "the present definition of psychological practices as appearing in the Bill, which is a verbatim representation of the definition which appeared in the Victoria Act, is a definition of so wide a scope that it would be almost impossible to imagine any communication between one human being and another not to be psychological practice".
A study commissioned by the Province of Ontario and carried out by Prof. John A. Lee of Toronto, included not only Scientologists, but also sectarian healers (such as Christian Scientists and Spiritualists) whom medical and psychiatric practitioners would like to see suppressed.It remains to ask: can the embattled Scientologists survive in their heroic resistance against the organized might of their powerful enemies throughout the world?L. Ron Hubbard believes they can. "Our opponents," he said,---area small clique running against the trend of the world. They will lose."I am inclined to agree. As London columnist C. H. Rolph once aptly observed: Scientology is an anvil that will wear out all the hammers.
Since being written, events have rolled on.The FDA case has resulted in a major win for the Scientologists. All the materials looted from the Founding Church in January 1963, have had to be returned by the FDA to the Church.In Australia, Federal recognition of the Church has led to the repeal of the West Australian Act against Scientology, Another major win by the Church-and credit to the Government in Western Australia.In South Australia, Repeal is on the Parliamentary Order Paper and is expected to go through Parliament shortly: again, a nice win for the Scientologists.Western Australia has also dropped the proscription on the word "Scientology" - another Scientology win.In Victoria, relations between the Church and the Government I have broken through the prior ice pack, and are the best for 10 years.
Predictably, South Africa published the report on the inquiry, omitting totally, evidence from Dr. T. Szasz or the documented evidence on Mr. T. J. Stander. No action on the report has been taken by the new Minister of Health - no doubt due to the retractions by two principal antiScientology witnesses: a welcome boost for Scientologists in South Africa.In England, two books concerning the Scientology fight on Rights for the mentally ill have both commented very favourably on the steps and actions taken by the Church. The National Association for Mental Health now prefers to be known as 'MIND', and Miss Mary Applebey, one of the key antagonists against the Scientologists, quietly left the National Association in December 1973.On February 14, 1974, the British Home Office opposed the Scientologists in their plea to take the alien ban restrictions to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. The Home Office had argued that its view was so clearly right as to preclude the necessity of the case going to Luxembourg. "I am wholly unable to accept that contention", said Mr. Justice Pennycuick, who allowed the Scientologists to make a historical precedent by being the first British organization ever to refer a case to Luxembourg.
The case will be heard in six months' time or so. Meanwhile it is yet another victory for the Scientologists,
And finally, the biennial reference guide, the Encyclopedia Britannica Year Book, stated that Scientology was the 'largest of the new religions'.