225 London offer to pay off the Taliban, cf NATO plan to bomb them into submission

(1) London offer to  pay off the Taliban, cf NATO plan to bomb them into submission
(2) Goyland: Where the Wild Things Are
(3) Memory is amazingly fragile and inventive - Elizabeth Loftus

(1) London offer to  pay off the Taliban, cf NATO plan to bomb them into submission

From: efgh1951 <efgh1951@yahoo.com> Date: 03.02.2010 10:13 PM

Afghanistan and NATO: Figleaf summit

The plan voiced at the London Afghanistan conference to pay off the Taliban is belied by the plan at the Brussels NATO conference two days earlier to bomb them into submission, notes Eric Walberg

Wednesday, 03 February 2010

http://ericwalberg.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=224:afghanistan-and-nato-figleaf-summit&catid=40:middle-east&Itemid=93

London has been the venue of a three-ring Middle East circus over the past month. There is the ongoing Chilcot inquiry into the (il)legality of British participation in the invasion of Iraq. Two of the five committee members are Jewish -- Sir Martin Gilbert a militant Zionist, and Sir Lawrence Freedman the drafter of Blair's invasion policy. Despite the deck being stacked, witness after witness has testified the invasion was illegal, and former British prime minister Tony Blair was booed after telling the inquiry he has no regrets. 

Then there was an impromptu conference on "saving" Yemen, which the five major Yemeni opposition parties denounced as "intended to save the political regime in Yemen." Yemen is described by a British official as "Afghanistan with a sea".

Just as farcical was last week's summit on Afghanistan, called to "move the international effort forward in key areas of security, governance, development, and regional support." In reality, it was a cosmetic follow-up to the war council held two days earlier at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where the NATO Military Committee met, bringing together the chiefs of defence of all 28 member states along with 35 "partners", wannabes and observers -- an astounding 63 nations.

The news from Afghanistan is uniformly chilling. US military deaths this January were more than double last year's record figure. Insurgents are carrying out one daring attack after another across the country, prompting NATO to launch Israeli drones in the attempt to terrify Afghans into submission. A fierce eight-hour attack on UN headquarters in Helmand last week came, ironically, as Karzai and UN Special Representative Kai Eide served up olive branches to the Taliban, removing some from their terror list and offering them a half billion dollars. Eide claims negotiations have begun, though Taliban spokesmen dismiss the offers and talk of talks.

The conferees in London piously asked that the Taliban give up their links with Al-Qaeda and stop threatening the world. But the Taliban have never tried to export their beliefs. And the supposed link with Al-Qaeda is a false flag, since the Taliban and Al-Qaeda (to what extent it even exists) have never been operating together -- until recently, when the NATO surge and Pakistani offensive against its own Taliban picked up steam, presumably boosting Al-Qaeda enlistment and encouraging the very cooperation that the West is supposedly against.

US Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke understands this, as revealed by his statement to reporters on the sidelines of the London summit that more than "two-thirds of the Taliban are not extremists." Ergo, if Obama wants to rid the world of the Al-Qaeda threat, the logical thing would be to stop invading Muslim countries and inciting the people to take up arms and work with any forces against the invaders.

The Karzai regime is by now entirely threadbare. Only London summiteers give Karzai a soapbox anymore. And the only sign of democracy in Afghanistan these days are the occasional demos by Afghans hopelessly protesting the torture and murder of their loved ones by ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) troops. What is clearer each day is that the US invasion has now hardened into a civil war, with some poverty-stricken Afghans reluctantly pretending to be an army paid in dollars to face their Muslim brothers who are fighting for their country and their faith, a horrifying reality that can only mean continuing slaughter until the invaders flee.

The poor UN is flailing about helplessly in the quagmire, supporting the US in its occupation, but at the same time, warning that "widespread and systematic" secret detention of terror suspects could pave the way for charges of crimes against humanity. Western troops, notably the US and Canadian, have been arresting "suspects" and sending them to secret detention areas on military bases, often on the slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families. These night raids have become even more feared and hated in Afghanistan than coalition airstrikes. The scandal hit the Canadian government last month and forced the Conservatives there to shut down parliament to stave off an investigation which would most likely lead to their own demise.

At the real Afghanistan conference -- the war council in Brussels, Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin, with tongue bitterly in cheek, offered to rebuild the infrastructure and factories the Soviet Union built during its own ill-fated attempt to bring Afghanistan into the 20th c, undermined by US arms supplied to US-backed mujaheddin in the 1980-90s. He understandably wants this to be funded by the West, since it was responsible for the destruction in the first place.

Rogozin told Der Speigel that Russia is far more concerned about the flow of heroin that became a flood after the US invasion, rather than any possible military threat from the Taliban. "Each year, 30,000 human lives are lost in Russia because of Afghan heroin." He did not spell this out in detail, but is no doubt aware that US forces are actually abetting the smuggling, as documented by many sources, including former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, who himself witnessed the pretend-border controls on the Afghanistan-Uzbekistan border in 2004. Scanners and sniffing dogs were simply bypassed by the chief smuggler -- current Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Afghan Army Abdel Rashid Dostum, a native Uzbek who has close working relations with Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov. Rogozin accused NATO forces of ignoring the problem: "They think it's not their problem, because Afghan heroin mostly goes to Central Asia and Russia."

The proposal by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and NATO General Secretary Fogh Rasmussen to double the Afghan Security Forces, soldiers and police to a level of 300,000 and speed up the withdrawal of foreign troops prompted a nervous Karzai to predict that foreign troops would be needed for 10-15 years.

Perhaps a few Taliban really have sat down with UN reps, possibly to draw them in with false promises. Not surprisingly, many starving young Afghans are willing to sell out their brothers to feed themselves and their families. But the many instances of Afghan police, soldiers -- even translators -- defecting to the Taliban, or suddenly turning on their masters and collaborators and killing them before themselves dying as martyrs or escaping to freedom should be a warning to the occupiers.

This is intuitively understood by most Westerners, whether or not they admire the fighters. Despite uniformly pro-war media in the West, a majority of Canadians and Europeans (even occasionally Americans) realise the war is pointless, and want their troops to come home immediately. Germans are 80 per cent against sending further forces. Only because German Chancellor Angel Merkel's Christian Democrats faced a divided opposition and apathetic electorate was she able to stay on as leader and offer up her soldiers to the US in some kind of gruesome, misguided sacrificial offering for Germany's many past sins.

The occupation of Afghanistan was not an unpremeditated blunder, just as with the occupation of Iraq or the possible occupation of Yemen. The wars are part of the extension of US power to all corners of the globe, a process that has quietly been accelerating in the past two decades, confirmed last week by US proconsul Hillary Clinton's presence at both the Yemen and Afghanistan conferences in London, as well as their outcomes.

The current composition of ISAF reflects this consolidation, with troops from South America, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, all the way to Korea, New Zealand and possibly soon India. Even Jordan, Egypt and the UAE have support personnel helping out. Consider for a moment: troops from all these countries and continents are, under US command, fighting a war in Central Asia, with the UN scurrying in behind them to give the whole operation a patina of respectability.

The fact that the mightiest war machine in history is being tripped up by a handful of ragged-trousered, determined young men is astounding. Obama's vow to start evacuating (excuse me, withdrawing) troops by next year, despite Gates' blustering denial and Karzai's hopes, now hovers over this criminal adventure as a sword of Damocles.

*** Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/

(2) Goyland: Where the Wild Things Are

From: ReporterNotebook <RePorterNoteBook@Gmail.com> Date: 04.02.2010 04:08 PM

Goyland: Where the Wild Things Are

Edmund Connelly

January 10, 2010

http://michaelsantomauro.blogspot.com/2010/02/goyland-where-wild-things-are.html

“Living so long in exile and so often in danger, we have cultivated a defensive and apologetic account, a censored story, of Jewish religion and culture.”

Michael Walzer, quoted in Kevin MacDonald. Separation and Its Discontents, p. 217


Excerpt:

Jewish historian Peter Novick describes the "the fortress-like mentality" of many American Jews, where the institutional imperative was to promote "a wary suspicion of gentiles." Consider three examples he provides from three "otherwise apparently sensible American Jews" to show how they had internalized these Jewish "collective memories — memories that suffuse group consciousness." First, a university teacher writes, "When I move to a new town, I give great thought to whom, among my gentile friends, I might entrust my children, should that ever become necessary." Next, a prominent Jewish feminist shares this thought: "Every conscious Jew longs to ask her or his non-Jewish friends, 'Would you hide me?' — and suppresses the question for fear of hearing sounds of silence." Finally, a professor of psychology reports:

Many Jews report that the unspoken question they ask themselves when interacting with a non-Jew is, "Would she or he have saved me from the Nazis?" I have asked myself this question innumerable times: sometimes I surprise myself by answering, "I don't know," when asking this question of a non-Jewish friend I had otherwise assumed was close to me. The answer is the ultimate standard by which to measure trust in a non-Jewish person.

Honestly, do you want to live with such irrationally suspicious people? Worse, do you want to live under such “fellow” Americans now that so many of them dominate the controlling heights of this country?          

Take Harvard, for instance. A leading law professorship there is a powerful position. And that’s precisely what Orthodox Jew Alan Dershowitz has held for years. Never mind that this fourth-generation America can write: "It was at Yale that I met and befriended my first Wasps, blacks, and even non-Orthodox Jews." Are we really living in the same universe?

Dershowitz admits he is so highly invested in the "Holocaust mentality" that the world in which he sometimes lives borders on the horrifically imaginary. Witness his feelings as he sat watching the accused concentration camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk on trial in Israel:

I kept looking at Demjanjuk for another reason. I imagined him as my killer. At the time he was murdering babies, I was five years old. ... I could have been one of the thousands of nameless and faceless babies he grabbed out of the hands of screaming mothers and shoved into gas chambers. I imagine him laughing with sadistic joy as he killed entire families, ending their seed forever, after taunting and torturing them gratuitously.

This vicarious sense of suffering is intense for Dershowitz and haunts not only his future but the future of Jewish children: "Every time I attend a gathering of Jewish children — at a family event, at a Bar Mitzvah, at Simchath Torah — I imagine SS guards lining up these children for the gas chambers." Isn’t this evidence enough that Dershowitz needs, at a minimum, counseling?

How might such a mentality be constructed in a place where daily life never offers the chance to experience real persecution? Try this: Jewish American journalist Marjorie Miller relates a childhood story regarding her religious school. In addition to learning the Hebrew alphabet, she also learned about the Holocaust. One Sunday her teacher, "in a scared voice," called the students to attention and told them to listen carefully: "Had we heard the radio? The government was telling the Jews that we had to convert or leave the country." This, the teacher explained, "was the first step ... maybe the beginning of another Holocaust." Not surprisingly, "Many children in the class began to cry."

This mentality is reminiscent of interviews done in the 1970s with noted Jewish men, where the question "Do you think it could happen here?" never needed "it" defined.  Nearly unanimously, the reply was the same: "If you know history at all, you have to presume not that it could happen, but that it probably will," or "It's not a matter of if; it's a matter of when" [quoted in MacDonald,  The Culture of Critique, p.245].

Reader, think about it: If you’re an average American, you quietly pay your federal taxes, likely knowing that some goes to aid Israel. (On top of that, many of you Christian Zionists support Israel further through donations and political support.) Further, it’s highly improbable that you’ve ever committed a crime against a Jew, let alone actually harmed one. The thought has probably never even crossed your mind.

Yet a good percentage of American-born Jews still consider you a lethal threat simply because you are not a Jew. At this stage in history, is there any excuse for that? Worse, such Jews are often able to translate their fantasy-based fears about goyim into cultural products such as films and TV shows—and books like Where the Wild Things Are. Through the activism of groups like the ADL, they are also able to affect legislation such as the new Hate Crimes Law that may well target people like you for potentially thinking the wrong thing. This is not good.

In any case, it will be interesting to see how the film has been adapted from Sendak’s book. My guess is that the live action animation will not have a theme about dangerous non-Jews, but I should wait until I see it before saying more. Still, it’s got the typical Jewish background of a Hollywood production. For instance, Spike Jonze, born Adam Spiegel in 1969, is the film’s director, replacing earlier director Eric Goldberg. Let’s just hope Jonze is not one of those paranoid Jewish Americans always wondering if “it” could happen here.

(3) Memory is amazingly fragile and inventive - Elizabeth Loftus

From: ReporterNotebook <RePorterNoteBook@Gmail.com> Date: 27.01.2010 07:34 PM
Subject: The diva of disclosure, memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus

Psychology Today

January, 1996

SECTION: Vol. 29 ; No. 1 ; Pg. 48; ISSN: 0033-3107, LENGTH: 5035 words

The diva of disclosure, memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus

by Jill Neimark

http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/psytoday.htm

She has been called a whore by a prosecutor in a courthouse hallway, assaulted by a passenger on an airplane shouting, "You're that woman!", and has occasionally required surveillance by plainclothes security guards at lectures. The war over memory is one of the great and perturbing stories of our time, and Elizabeth Loftus, an expert on memory's malleability, stands at the highly charged center of it.

Even in her field, opinion is divided between fury and admiration. "I have nothing good to say about Elizabetb Loftus," says Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., a psychiatrist at Harvard, who is an expert in dissociative disorders. "I have only the highest regard for Elizabeth Loftus's work," states Frederick Crews, former chair of the English department at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of the most widely debated and discussed series of cover stories the New York Review of Books has ever published on the recovered-memory movement.

Loftus has spent most of her life steadily amassing a clear and brilliant body of work showing that memory is amazingly fragile and inventive. Her studies on more than 20,000 subjects are classics that have toppled some of our most cherished beliefs. She has shown that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable, that false memories can be triggered in up to 25 percent of individuals merely by suggestion, and that memory can be interfered with and altered by simply giving incorrect post-event information.

Because her work raises doubt about the validity of long-buried memories of repeated trauma in particular--though it in no way disproves them--she has found herself asked to testify in some of the more famous trials of our time. In fact, Loftus has been called as an expert witness in more than 200 trials, from that of mass murderer Ted Bundy to accused child-killer George Franklin; has appeared on countless talk and news shows, from 60 Minutes to Oprah; has published 19 books and innumerable papers; and in 1995 received the Distinguished Contribution Award from the American Academy of Forensic Psychology.

Perhaps her voluminous mail says it best. One anonymous letter from an incest survivor concludes, "Please consider your work to be on the same level as those who deny the existence of the extermination camps during WWII." Another, from a jailed minister accused of mass child molestation, begins, "Your dedication and compassion for the innocent have earned my deepest admiration." Yet another, from a confused therapy patient, reads: "For the past two years I have done little else but try to remember. I have been told that my unconscious will release the memories in its own time and in its own way...And I need to know if I am really remembering. The guessing has become unbearable."

The war over memory is far from academic. In the mid-'80s an extravaganza of child-abuse cases swept this country, often directed at day-care workers, all of them based on testimony of children who often at first did not "remember" abuse, but when coached and asked suggestive questions, began to unravel a tapestry of magnificently horrific memories: preschoolers raped with knives, forced to drink urine, assaulted in networks of underground tunnels, tied naked to trees, and forced to watch their caretakers torture animals.

These notorious cases were quickly followed by a second wave, equally fantastic, involving adults who claimed they had recovered memories of sexual and/or satanic ritual abuse they had repressed during childhood. More than 800 lawsuits have been reported to date. Yet a third wave might have followed if we could prosecute extraterrestrials, for scores of Americans began to claim they had been abducted by UFOs and had long repressed those memories.

At the root of these claims is the belief that memory is always accurate, and that memories can be repressed--that one can bury traumatic experience in some crypt of the brain, forget it consciously, and then recover it in pristine form years or decades later. This two-pronged view of memory, imported (and distorted) from Freud into the popular culture, has been embraced by a whole sector of America, from therapists to police detectives to the tens of thousands of adult women who read The Courage To Heal, often dubbed the bible of the recovered memory movement.

Uniquely, the war over memory has galvanized and mesmerized both high and low culture. It is the subject of earnest scientific research utilizing the most sophisticated tools of biology and psychology, and it is also battled out in lurid court cases covered intensively by the mass media. It is a war that has placed everyone from Roseanne to Cardinal Bernadin on the firing line. It has powerfully shaped and reshaped legislation, in a massive see-sawing of legal and public opinion.

To memory researchers like Loftus, who for years were quietly conducting their studies in academia, all this furor has been an incredible shock, as well as an unrivaled opportunity: "If I had known what my life would be like now--the frantic phone calls, the tearful confessions, the gruesome stories of sadistic sexual abuse, torture, even murder--would I have beaten a retreat back to the safety and security of my laboratory?" she asks in her recent book, The Myth of Repressed Memory (St. Martin's Press). "No. Never. For I am privileged to be at the center of an unfolding drama, a modern tale filled with such passion and anguish that it rivals an ancient Greek tragedy."

We are now entering Act IV of the tragedy, for this past year convictions in mass-abuse cases have been overturned with amazing rapidity and laws are changing once again. George Franklin, who was sent to jail in 1990 for first-degree murder in a 1969 incident that his daughter Eileen "remembered" 20 years later, was recently set free, as were the accused in three cases where convictions for mass child molestation were overturned last fall. And in May, a New Hampshire judge barred prosecution based on repressed memories. Maryland, Minnesota, and California have now followed suit with similar rulings.

But Act V is yet to come, and may never end: for how do those innocently accused individuals put their fives back together? It is the theme that haunts Elizabeth Loftus. "I keep thinking of Oskar Schindler circling the lake with thousands of people" she says without a trace of irony, though she adds that she realizes people may misinterpret this statement as one of hubris. "If I could save one more person..." he accused have been shot at, ostracized, imprisoned, interrogated, lost jobs and homes, and forced to fight lawsuits that have sometimes bankrupted them. In some of the cases, the charges seem entirely false. As Wall Street Journal writer Dorothy Rabinowitz writes of the notorious Amirault case, where three members of a family were accused of molesting the children in their model day-care center: "No reasonable person who looked at the trial transcript could doubt that three innocent citizens were sent to prison on the basis of some of the most fantastic claims ever presented to an American jury."

"It's shocking to me," says Loftus. "I feel as if some of these accusers are willing to blow up a 747 full of people because there might be one suspected child molester on board. They dont't care that they're ripping the hearts out of families by their absolute insistence that this crime must be true, and that any attempt to cast doubt on that is backlash at best, and at worst the activities of some pedophile protector."

Though Beth Loftus is gregarious, warm, and (as one friend states) "always seems to be on a high without the aid of chemical infusion" she burst into tears twice in the first 20 minutes of our interview. We'd walked a few blocks back to her home from her favorite morning haunt, the Surrogate Hostess, pausing outside to lament with a neighbor over Loftus's "schizophrenic" tree, which wasn't growing properly. Her home is on a hill, comfortably furnished, with an eye for open space. Upstairs a loftlike, open-air bedroom offers a spectacular view of Lake Washington, set off with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Out in the garage is a cream-color sporty Mercedes, a quiet testament to the kind of money that can be earned as an expert witness (up to $ 400 an hour).

After a few minutes of chitchat, I asked her about her mother's death by drowning when Loftus was 14. I was particularly curious because of an amazing anecdote she tells in her book: On her 44th birthday, at a family gathering, an uncle informed her that she had been the one to discover her mother's dead body. Until then, she remembered little about the death itself, suddenly the memories began to drift back, clear and vivid. A few days later her brother called to say her uncle realized he'd made a mistake, that Loftus's aunt had found the body, not Loftus. Therefore, those few days of "recovered" memories were utterly false. "My own experiment had inadvertently been performed on me!" she had written. "I was left with a sense wonder at the inherent credulity of even my skeptical mind." But when I asked about her mother, she began to cry.

"It's too upsetting to start this way, I think. Couldn't we come back to this later?"

I steered the conversation to her early career, and we began looking through her photograph albums. We paused over an old picture of her ex-husband, Geoffrey Loftus, who is also a psychologist at the University of Washington. (They are still friends, though he has remarried.) He was on a motorcycle: dark and sensual, a kind of gentle echo of James Dean. Loftus began to cry again. "He was beautiful, wasn't he?'

A Next to that photo was one of Loftus lying on a towel under the motorcycle, in a miniskirt and ribbed cotton stockings, hair dark and long. Two sexier academics would be hard to find. "I wasn't really fixing the motorcycle, just pretending to," she confided. "But I showed these on the overhead when I introduced him at a meeting of the American Psychiological Society."

She quickly dried her tears, and explained without embarrassment that she has a hard time hiding her emotion around two subjects: her ex and her mother. "I was in an old abandoned castle in Holland with other memory scientists from around the world, and we were being taped for television. Somewhere in the middle of this the interviewer brought up my mother and I started crying. You know, it's with you forever. My brothers tease me, they say, Don't say the word or Beth will cry.'"

There is still family speculation about whether her mother's death was a suicide, and just how much her father's emotional coldness might have contributed to it. At 14, just before her mother died, Loftus was happy-go-lucky and boy-mad. But there was a dark undertow: her mother had earlier been sent away to treat her depression.

"Today, July 10, 59, was the most tragic day of my life," Loftus confided in her diary. "We woke up this morning and...found her in the swimming pool."

Grief and loss are common enough: Loftus keeps it alive, yet channels it unremittingly into "helper's high." "I miss the idea of having a mother, so I've gone around being a mother." When a friend lost both her sons and mentioned over coffee that she was contemplating suicide, Loftus naturally began to cry and talked to her for several hours, convincing her to remain alive for her only daughter. (The friend's husband confirmed to me that the woman never considered suicide again).

Her mother's death also drives her involvement with the shattered families she encounters. At 8:45 one morning I found her in her office, talking to a woman from Boise, Idaho, who had seen her on a talk show and called out of the blue. The woman was in hysterics: she claimed she'd had psychotic breakdowns as a result of repressed memories of childhood abuse. Loftus listened sympathetically for 20 minutes, located a Boise therapist on her computer, and suggested the woman use her name as an introduction. (Ever the researcher, she also took notes on her computer as she listened.)

Such generosity of heart is startling in someone who, ultimately, puts devotion to her work first. In fact, Loftus freely admits that it was her love of work that broke up her marriage. "I did not realize what a workaholic I was going to become." She is clearly and unabashedly sad over separating from Geoff, but at the same time "proud that my marriage lasted as long as it did, 23 years. I'm very proud of that."

Yellow Fruits and Mass Murderers

When she was growing up in Bel Air, California, Beth Fishman had no idea she was going to be one of the most famous psychologists in the world, that one day she would beat out B.F. Skinner when students at the University of Houston were given a choice between the two as guest lecturer. She was planning to be a high-school math teacher, "because math was the one thing my father and I could talk about." Two years after her mother's death, her father remarried. "Our stepmother had three children, and she was much nicer to her own kids. My two brothers and I became very close. We had all this history and tragedy and we bonded against our stepmother."

At UCLA she discovered psychology, graduated with a double major, and applied to graduate school at Stanford in mathematical psychology. There she met and in 1968 married Geoffrey Loftus. "I thought I'd take care of my husband's career just like my mother had, and then somehow in the third year of graduate school I got interested in long-term memory."

Fellowships and jobs kept the couple apart; even when they were both in New York, from the summer of 1971 to the summer of 1972, they lived in separate apartments Finally, Geoff landed at the University of Washington and a year later Beth was offered assistant professorships at both Harvard and Washington.

He gave her 24 hours to decide, and suggested that if she went to Harvard they should divorce. "I think he was hurt that I even had to think about it. I spent the next 24 hours on the phone with people. My advisors said, If you have to give up anything for Harvard don't do it, chances are you won't get tenured.' My friends said, 'If you have to give up anything for that odd marriage of yours, don't do it' But I had to find out about Geoff. I really respected and cared about him." She moved to Washington, and not long after they bought the house she is living in now.

"Then I got a fellowship to Harvard. So we spent another year apart'

All this time, Loftus had been working seven days a week on yellow fruits: specifically, she was studying how the mind classifies and remembers information. In the early seventies, she began to reevaluate her direction. "I wanted my work to make a difference in people's lives." She asked herself, "What do I talk about when I have no other reason to be talking?" An impassioned conversation about a man who'd been convicted after killing someone in self-defense suggested the answer. Perhaps she could combine her interest in memory with her fascination with crime by looking at eyewitness accounts.

Loftus obtained a grant to show people films of accidents and crimes and test their memory of such events. Thus the study of eyewitness testimony was born, a field she can literally claim as her own. At that time the world believed that eyewitness testimony was as reliable as a video camera. Loftus found that just the questions interviewers asked, and even the specific words they used, significantly influenced memory. "How fast were the two cars going when they hit each other?" will elicit slower estimates than "...when they smashed each other?"

Merely by careful questioning, Loftus could cause subjects to remember stop signs as yield signs, or place nonexistent barns in empty fields. Subsequent research has shown that violent events decrease the accuracy of memory: in fact, memory is weakest at both low (boredom, sleepiness) and high (stress, trauma) levels of arousal. The bottom line? Memory is fragile, suggestible, and can easily decay over time.

The implications for real life are obvious: witnesses of violent crimes questioned by police and detectives, who often have a bias, may not be reporting the truth. When Loftus published an article about her results in this magazine in 1974, she was suddenly hurtled from the safety of yellow fruits into the courtroom. She was called frequently to testify about the validity of eyewitness testimony for mass murderers like Bundy, Willie Mak, and Angelo Buono.

It was exciting and terrifying: "Eyewitnesses who point their finger at innocent defendants are not liars, for they genuinely believe in the truth of their testimony....That's the frightening part--the truly horrifying idea that what we think we know, what we believe with all our hearts, is not necessarily the truth ' Needless to say, her colleagues were bitterly divided about the appropriateness of her expert testimony. She was accused of exploiting trials to build her career; of taking research from windowless laboratories and applying it inappropriately to real life.

But she loved it. Her husband protested her all-encompassing involvement with work: "He wanted to hike or take walks or spend leisure time," an idea Loftus genuinely doesn't comprehend. "For her, work is play. "For instance, I don't understand how people can have country homes. Why drive to be somewhere else, why not enjoy where you are?" Her ideal day--and she'd like 365 of them a year--is to get up early, work hard for about 12 hours, and take off at night by socializing (probably with colleagues) over a few glasses of good wine.

She takes pleasure in superefficiency: She loves to open her mail in her office while reading and responding to e-mail while on the speakerphone returning phone calls. She has sent me e-mail posts at five in the morning that begin, "I've learned not to fight insomnia, just make use of it..."

Yet she is vibrant and sensual. Loftus' graduate students took the famous Demi Moore picture on the cover of Vanity Fair (Demi's Birthday Suit--in which the naked actress had a tuxedo and striped shirt painted onto her body), substituted Loftus's face, and framed it for her. It sits on the window ledge in her office.

When the couple hit their mid-30s, Geoff's father died. "He didn't want children before that, and then he wanted them." They tried. Loftus underwent surgery, and when that didn't work, they gave up. "We didn't talk about that as a factor in the divorce, but I think it was." (He has a child with his current wife).

Despite the divorce, there is still vitality in the bond. While I was in her home, Geoffrey Loftus phoned from Oklahoma; he was driving East to MIT for a sabbatical. Loftus came back from the phone call smiling. When she gets an interesting message on her faculty voice mail, she often forwards it to him. And as she took me on a tour of her home, Geoff's belongings kept showing up. Some of his ties hang in her closet; and she keeps some of her hats in the cradle he was rocked in as a baby.

Single life has not been easy, but she gives it an edge of humor in the telling. There was a Mick Jagger look-alike whom she spied in a restaurant and met by convincing her lunch mate to turn and say, "George? Is that you, George?" (It turned out the man's middle name and his father's name was George, so he was hooked.) Then there was Ply, who used to complain that she didn't buy two-ply toilet paper.

And there was Blot (so named because he used Rorshach tests), who romanced her for two months, then suddenly ended the romance and was engaged to someone else two months after that. "I was heartbroken. I got through it by asking everyone I met if they'd ever had an experience like that. I collected stories of heartbreak." She hopes she can feel about someone else "the way I feel about Geoff. But the truth of the matter is when I look around and ask, Would I want to trade my fife for someone else's?' I wouldn't. I don't feel, Gee, I'd rather have that life instead' I've learned to want what I have."

What If the World Is Flat After A!l

"Don't you ever worry that you?re protecting pedophiles and molesters?" I ask her one afternoon, as we sit on her terrace. Her neighbors are gardening and have just invited her to a block party, the sun is shining, and we seem far removed, in this sylvan suburb, from the nightmare images of pederasts and butchered babies. "How do you make your judgment call?"

"You know, I've seen so many of these cases there's a cookie-cutter quality to them now. But I do wonder," she admits. "i have these moments when I think, What if I'm wrong about memory.? What if people really do shove this collection of experience into the subconscious and bury them there, and they leak and you can recover them in some accurate form and rely on it? I'm not saying it's impossible. Even the Hungerford case--where the daughter claimed her father raped her from the age of five until 23, including just days before her wedding, and then repressed all the memories until a few years later, when she entered therapy--even that I wouldn't say was impossible.

"When working on legal cases, in the end I can't say the abuse didn't happen. I can only say if these memories are false, here's how they may have developed. And I have this history--going way back-of worrying about the falsely accused. If there's one question I have about myself, one puzzle, it's that history." She has always worried about unfair punishment and has accepted almost every death penalty case offered. Her schedule is packed with flights to various cities to participate in court cases.

Scratch the surface and you discover how skeptical she is about the view of sexual abuse as the root of life-long trauma: she herself was molested by a baby-sitter when she was six and shrugs it off. "It's not that big a deal," she says candidly. When I mention award-winning poet Michael O'Ryan's recent memoir--in which he describes his childhood molestation as the cause of a tragic life centered around sexual addiction, which psychotherapy only belatedly began to heal--she gently scoffs and suggests that O'Ryan's therapy itself may have helped him create a revisionist view of his life, in which all of his troubles were traceable to that early experience.

The science of memory is itself contradictory, offering up evidence to both sides of the war--and both sides discount the other's arguments. Loftus's classic study, Lost in the Shopping Mall, showed that children and teenagers could be induced to remember the experience of being lost in a mall when young--even though it didn't happen--simply by being questioned about it. As time passed, the memories were embellished and became more vivid, much like traumatic "repressed" memories unearthed in therapy.

Since then, Loftus and colleagues have shown that even imagining a "false" (as opposed to real) event increases subjective confidence that the event happened, that subjects can confuse dreaming and waking events when presented with a list of them; that after being told they have tested with "high perceptual" ability and must have been exposed to spiral colored disks in their kindergarten classrooms, 50 percent of subjects can be induced to recall these nonexistent kindergarten "memories"; 63 percent can "recover" nonexistent memories of being exposed to colored mobiles while in their hospital cribs--a literal impossibility since the nervous system is not developed enough to lay down explicit memories in the first few years of life.

Advocates of the phenomenon of memory repression claim that Loftus's work simply does not apply to abuse. "She doesn't study traumatic memory, she studies normal memory," asserts Judith Herman, M.D., a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. "During trauma, the explicit memory system fries," contends Connie Kristiansen, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at Carlton University in Ontario.

Indeed, recent research shows that abuse may impact the master regulator of explicit memory--a tiny, seahorse-shaped organ called the hippocampus. Survivors of childhood abuse have a smaller hippocampus than normal. According to Daniel Siegel, Ph.D., a psychologist at UCLA, if the hippocampus malfunctions during trauma, while other components of memory carry on unabated, a memory may be laid down "implicitly", without conscious recall. In fact, the work of Joseph Ledoux, Ph.d., at New York University has shown that the amygdala, a tiny, almondshaped organ in the brain, stores primitive emotional responses like fear independently of the hippocampus.

"The leap they're making, from implicit memory and Ledoux's work, is unconscionable" responds Frederick Crews, whose elegant essays in the New York Review of Books drew a direct and damning link between Freud and recovered memory. "We all know there's a wide area of mental activity that's implicit. When we drive our car down the street we are not consciously applying our skills. To say that the mere existence of implicit memory opens the door to the idea that multiple instances of incest can be completely forgotten is not only bad science, it's just flatly unethical."

"I've followed up on allegations of recovered memory made by patients in my practice" notes Richard Kluft, director of dissociative disorders at the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital. He claims that 60.7 percent were able to document at least one episode of the abuse they had alleged in therapy. "In one case a father who had perpetrated incest and denied it gave a death-bed confession. He begged his daughter for forgiveness. She'd never accused him, never confronted him, and had not recalled the incest until she was in therapy."

Loftus doesn't buy it. "Just ask him for one documented, published case. Interview the fathers. Do not, do not, do not take a second-hand report of supposed confession without investigating." As for studies on the brain: "Genuine trauma may cause neurotransmitter change, maybe even brain volume changes. But can we rewrite laws based on such speculation? These findings are so far removed from actual repression of memories, and yet, sadly, so misused."

Says Kluft: "Loftus has done some brilliant work. Confabulation isn't new. The, fact of the matter is, not only are there documentable recovered memories, there are also documentable false memories."

What's truly mystifying is that nearly every psychologist I spoke with acknowledged the possibility of truth on the other side--and yet the battle rages on, acrimonious as ever. Take Margaret Kelly Michaels--imprisoned for five years on charges of molesting children at the day care center where she worked. She's now free. But she still has eight civil suits pending against her; many parents are still convinced that she's guilty, and Michaels is filing a $ 10 million federal suit against the county, the state, and any individual involved in her prosecution. "I'm out to destroy a drooling, dark beast that never was," she has stated.

Red Licorice and Organ Donors

"I'm having an identity crisis" confesses Loftus over lunch one afternoon.

"You?" I stammer.

"I figure I have 25 years of good work left. And I'm wondering what to do next. Could I host a talk show? Could I be a columnist? Or should I start a think tank?"

She does not mean she would give up her work, just streamline it: "I could write four articles a year instead of eight, run two studies instead of six." What she really means is she wonders how to better instigate social change, and how to enlist others in that cause. Later, in an e-mail exchange, she writes me: "Yes, yes, you can live an unconventional life ... that's the point of wanting to have a perch from which to educate people who think this is not possible.

Walking back to campus, we chat idly about a colleague of hers who specializes in the study of alcoholism and is famed for his "bar" lab. He was at a faculty party the night before; like Loftus, he has been admired and decried for his research. At the party, he'd invited her to the 20th anniversary celebration of his marriage, where he planned to show a video of his wedding. She'd had a few glasses of wine, was teary and happy, and had put her arms around him, saying, "I'm so glad you're my colleague."

The conversation wanders from alcoholism to cirrhosis.

"I wonder if they could have given the Ever Mickey Mantle got to someone else," she says. By now I've learned to recognize this kind of statement as archetypal Loftus: wouldn't that be efficient and you could save a life at the same time.

We talk of organ donors. A friend of mine is waiting for a kidney transplant and is quite ill. Loftus pulls out her wallet and shows me her driver's license. Organ donor. "I had to get past the idea that maybe they'd take my organs out before I was really dead."

At one point I simply asked her, "Why are you so nice to people?" Her response, quite Skinnerian and yet elusive: "I like myself afterwards."

On my last day, at a small party for some of her students in her home, someone brought a bag of red licorice. Loftus had been proudly showing off a kinetic sculpture by a Romanian named Constantin--a melange of sharp silvery pieces that, when they moved, looked both lethal and beautiful. The sculpture was her first major art purchase, but her real delight in it (of course) seemed to be the heroic story of Constantin, who walked across Romania for six nights (hiding by day) to reach the border and freedom.

She took the licorice and turned to me.

"One of the articles about me mentioned that I love red licorice, and ever since I've gotten bags of it from all over. I was thinking after our conversation about organ donors yesterday, that if you mention it, someone out there may become an organ donor, and if even one life is saved...."

I'll do it," I promise.

"You see," she continued, confident and pragmatic, lifting her glass of wine, "you can do something like that in every article you write, and that way you can change the world.