| The story --
Senator Claiborne Pell is a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, Chair
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a long time "friend" of
parapsychology and other areas of unorthodox research. Much of his
interest is handled by his aide Scott Jones.
One rather questionable area of research that Jones has been supporting
is the misleadingly named "Reverse Speech Therapy". This makes the
rather unbelievable claim that while you are talking forward your
subconscious is talking backward, and that by special processing on
a "tape" of someone's voice played backward what they are *really*
thinking about (unknown even to themselves) can be revealed. Knowing
something of Scott (an ex Intellegence Officer) I doubt if his primary
interest is in theraputic uses of the technique -- but I am not too
worried because I consider it very unlikely that there is anything to
it.
Anyway, Scott's team apparently found the same word "simone" in
speeches by Bush, Secretary of Defense Cheney and by Secretary of State
James Baker. He then wrote a memo (on Senate stationary, thereby
making it "official") to Cheney warning that if there was something
sensitive about the word, that it might be compromised (I guess if the
Iraqis are using this same technique). Someone got a hold of the memo
and published it.
What makes this worthy of note is the circumstances that Senator Pell
is running for re-election, and this makes him look silly and out of
touch with reality. The latter is the basis of his opponent's campaign
against him -- that he has been up on The Hill so long that he has lost
touch with the real world. So although she has run a fairly clean
campaign so far, and probably will not personally promote this, plays
into her hands.
Senator Pell has reprimanded Scott Jones for, essentially, not
following proper procedures.
Topher
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