Over the last two days I have felt and thought many things. I was supposed to fly to California on American Airlines on September 12 to give two workshops on trauma and I am scheduled to fly on American Airlines next week. I accumulated over ten thousand miles worth of points on United Airlines two weeks ago.    

I have flown over 50,000 miles a year on American Airlines for the last three years, to give workshops on trauma and to attend my Trauma Programs in Michigan and California. I don't know anybody who died on September 11. Compared to the people on American Airlines flights 11 and 77, and United Airlines flights 93 and 175, and compared to the people in New York and Washington who died, who were on the scene, or who lost loved ones, friends, colleagues and neighbors, I have not suffered directly. But like everyone, I have been deeply touched and changed.    

I thought that I had a good chance of never seeing combat myself, and I thought there was a good chance my children would never see combat. I have to let go of those hopes. All of North America is a war zone today. Although there is no physical combat in my personal world, I, like everyone, am at war. This affects me psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, and in all levels of my being.    

It is a different kind of war. Fundamentally, terrorism is a mind war. The targets may sometimes be military, political or physical, like the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House and Air Force One. But these physical targets are only tools in a psychological war. The terrorists are not trying to capture territory, the way Hitler did. The military objective is not physical - it is to create terror.    

The first response is not to be terrorized. Easy to say, not so easy to do. Personally, I have decided to continue flying. I have decided to post these thoughts on my web page. And I have made some commitments to myself.    

How are we, the human race, not going to become victims of terror? Denial of our feelings will not work. Turning into angry terrorists ourselves will not work either - if we become terrorists, then evil has won another battle in the war. We have become terrorists, on a small scale, when we attack innocent Muslims in our own country, even if we do so only with words, rocks, or small arms fire.    

If we try to avoid being victims by becoming perpetrators, we will spawn more destruction and violence. Does this mean we should become pacifists or do nothing? No. But we should not act blindly, out of rage or fear, as individuals or as a nation. The tactical principles for dealing with terrorism, I think, have much in common with the tactics of psychotherapy I outline in my books.    

I am in favor of a huge increase in the CIA's budget. I am in favor of declaring war on terrorists and conducting military operations against them, and against those who harbor and support them.    

But there is another aspect to the war on terrorism. This is where I feel I have expertise and a contribution to make. I understand trauma and I understand mind control and brainwashing. I have written books on both and have treated many, many victims of trauma. There appear to be two basic categories of mind control that are used by terrorists. I call them religious mind control and psychiatric mind control.    

The victims of both forms of mind control have been abused, controlled, traumatized, and robbed of their human rights. Does this mean we should feel sorry for terrorists, or be soft on them? Not in the least. I am in favor of targeted military actions against terrorists, brought with maximum force in a planned, controlled fashion with as little collateral damage as possible. I do not consider zero collateral damage to be an attainable goal in counter-terrorist military actions.    

We need a psychological profile of the terrorists. We don't have one, not in public as a culture. I have watched a lot of television in the last two days. I have not heard one word spoken about posttraumatic stress disorder. I have not heard one word of real psychological analysis concerning terrorists. I have heard that they are cowards and fanatics, but this is not an analysis.    

We cannot solve terrorism without a psychological profile of the terrorists. I mean in the long term. We have to understand the causes of terrorist mentality, and the motivations and psychology of individual terrorists, in order to combat and eliminate terrorism. We also need satellites, spies, phone calls between world leaders, the military, search and rescue personnel, adequate airport security, and many other things.    

A psychological profile of terror is only one element in a multi-faceted counter-attack, but it is an essential component.    

What do I mean by religious and psychiatric mind control? Psychiatric mind control is defined and described in my book, BLUEBIRD: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists. Psychiatrists at the leading medical schools in North America have attacked the human spirit, and the minds, bodies and civil rights of thousands of U.S. citizens over the last fifty years. They have tested LSD on children as young as five years old, and they have performed lobotomies on hundreds of prisoners without informed consent, without second opinions, without any meaningful public review, and without the consent of relatives, friends or counsel of the prisoners.    

My book, BLUEBIRD, is based entirely on documents and papers published in medical journals. American and Canadian psychiatrists have been deliberately creating mind-controlled Manchurian Candidates for over fifty years. These psychiatrists have violated the Hippocratic Oath.    

Psychiatric mind control could be used to create a terrorist like those who hijacked the airplanes on September 11. Psychiatric mind control, as I define it, involves direct participation of an individual psychiatrist or psychologist. Techniques used include hypnosis, drugs, interrogation, sensory deprivation, and physical and psychological threats. These techniques have been used extensively on mental patients by leading psychiatrists and medical schools in North America.    

Religious mind control has the same net results, but slightly different methods. In religious mind control, religious fanaticism is the primary instrument of control. The suicide bomber, or the pilots and hijackers who took over the four commercial jets on September 11, apparently believe they are carrying out the will of God and will be rewarded in the after-life. In fact, they are instruments of evil.    

Today, I ordered two books on Osama bin Laden. I plan to study terrorism and religious mind control as thoroughly as I studied psychiatric mind control. I expect to find traumatic childhoods, extreme anger at authority figures, and the psychology of perpetrators in the terrorists. I expect to find that the terrorists have abused their children and wives, and that they have been reinforced by their religious leaders.    

This will be my contribution to the war against terrorism. There are instruments of evil hiding in caves in Afghanistan. There are also evil terrorists in too many homes in North America, perpetrating abuse and neglect on their spouses and children. And there have been evil men and women operating within psychiatry, in Nazi Germany, and also at the leading medical schools in North America. My next two books, one completed, and one almost finished, are about the evil within psychiatry.    

There are many forms and degrees of terrorism. According to The Trauma Model, most, if not all, are rooted in childhood trauma, abuse and neglect, whether that abuse is perpetrated by individual parents, neighbors, and professionals, or by a culture as a whole. In the long term we cannot win against terrorists who hijack planes, if we harbor perpetrators of abuse in our homes, churches, youth organizations and medical schools. In the last ten years, more U.S. citizens have died from child abuse than from the acts of terrorists. Where are the political will and the budget to fight against child abuse and neglect? When are we going to see a Presidential appropriation of $20 billion to fight that war? I hope that the events of September 11 will awaken us to all forms of terrorism, and that we will take decisive action against the chronic childhood trauma eating at the roots of the human spirit in North America.