From: dst@cs.cmu.edu (Dave Touretzky)
Subject: WKCR interview transcript
Date: 28 Jan 2005 21:18:44 -0500
Message-ID: <41faf284$1@news2.lightlink.com>

Below is the transcript of my interview on WKCR FM 89.9 on the subject of Scientology. Thanks to an anonymous critic for recording the show, and to Rob Clark for transcribing it. The actual interview lasted about 40 minutes. The reporter, Jesse Chanin, did a fine job of editing it down to the 20 minutes available for the show. Kudos to her, and to WKCR for having the guts to take on Scientology.

-- Dave Touretzky: "Howard Stern on line 1."

Q Good evening, and welcome to Late City Edition. You are listening to WKCR FM, 89.9 New York. My name is Jesse Chanin, and I will be your host for the next half hour. It is currently 9:00 p.m.

Tonight's show is about Scientology, the religion, or as some claim, cult. It's perhaps most famous for its vocal celebrity adherents, who include John Travolta, Tom Cruise, and Kirstie Alley. The Church recently opened a branch in Harlem on 3rd Ave and 122nd Street, and currently offers free daily seminars for anyone interested. The space is filled with soft chairs, what appear to be self-help brochures, plenty of leafy plants, and a good-sized eight-pointed cross hung from the ceiling. All books and pamphlets on display had listed as author L. Ron Hubbard, the man who developed and founded Scientology in the 1950s. Representatives from the Church declined to comment for this show.

Instead, we will hear from Dave Touretzky, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and a vocal opponent to Scientology. He is, from the Scientologists' point of view, a controversial figure, accused by them of transgressions ranging from plans to build illegal bombs to racism.

So, how did you come to be interested or involved with Scientology?

A Back in 1995, I was interested in Internet free speech issues, and I heard over a Usenet newsgroup -- it's sort of like a bulletin board on the Internet -- that Scientology was censoring messages that were posted to a discussion group dedicated to Scientology. So, I went over there to take a look. I didn't know anything about Scientology. My interest was in censorship.

But when I started reading this Scientology discussion group, it was -- it's called alt.religion.scientology, or ARS for short. Just as I got there, a guy posted a court document called the Fishman Declaration, and he said you'd better get this document quickly, you'd better download this quickly, because the Scientologists are going to cancel my posting in a few hours. And that just didn't seem right to me, that other people could cancel this guy's posting, and stop the public at large from reading it.

Q How did they have the power to do that on an Internet newsgroup?

A Well, the way these newsgroups work, people are able to cancel their own postings, and if you know what you're doing, you can forge a cancellation message from the true author.

So I saw this legal document that this guy had posted. It was a court document from the courts in Los Angeles, and I thought well, that's not right, that these people are going to cancel this guy's posting. I wonder what they would do if someone turned this posting into a website. So I decided to do the experiment, and I downloaded this 35 page legal document, turned into a website on my website at Carnegie Mellon, and I posted my first ever message to this newsgroup, saying the Fishman Declaration is available at the following URL, and I gave the URL, and I went home and went to sleep.

And all Hell broke loose. The Scientologists phoned, faxed, and FedExed the University, saying that they were going to sue not only Carnegie Mellon, but me personally, if this stuff didn't come down right quick. And that got me really interested. Well, you know, what was in here that they were so upset about? And it turned out that in this Fishman Declaration, there was a document called OT III, which Scientology regarded as not only copyrighted, but a spiritual trade secret.

It's the story of Xenu, the evil space alien, who supposedly massacred millions of other space aliens many years ago, and their tortured, disembodied souls infest all of us today. Now, you're not supposed to know about that stuff until you've been in Scientology for a number of years, and paid them several hundred thousand dollars in course fees. And yet here this thing was floating out on the Internet, and they were desperate to suppress it.

Q So is this how the story about Xenu first got revealed?

A It's actually not the first time that Xenu -- Xenu's story was told. It's been told several times, but before the Internet, you know, things would come out in a newspaper article and then, people would forget about it, you know, or it'd come out in the book, and Scientology would sue the publisher of the book, or they'd buy up all the copies, so it wasn't until the advent of the Internet that people really had a way of mass communication that wouldn't go away.

Q Uh-huh. So that sort of bred an enmity between you and the Church.

A Well, it certainly got me interested in who these people were --

Q Yeah.

A -- and what motivated them, and the more I learned, I became both fascinated and horrified. They're a dangerous, abusive cult. They need to be exposed, and the Internet is doing that.

Q So, you wouldn't consider them a religion. I noticed that a lot of the things on their websites are asserting that they are a bona fide religion.

A I don't think that they are a legitimate religion, for this reason: legitimate religions go beyond one person. Any legitimate religion has a literature. It has scholars who write -- who extend the literature of the belief system. And Scientology does not. In Scientology, it's not permitted for people to write their -- to publish their original Scientology ideas. L. Ron Hubbard is the only person whose writings are permitted. And so, that means that there can be no original thought. There can be no creativity. There can be no free expression within Scientology. And that, to me, is clear evidence that this is a cult and not a legitimate religion.

Q What would you cite as other examples of how Scientology differs from mainstream religions?

A Well, another example is that Scientology is basically a bait and switch game. So, when you come in, they first present themselves as kind of a self-help group. They're -- they give out these free personality tests. In fact, you can -- if you go to the website for the Church of Scientology of Harlem, there's a link right on there to get a free personality test. And then introductory courses, where they try and hook you into joining Scientology, are sort of these innocuous Personal Efficiency Course, Success through Communications Course. They just seem sort of, you know, better yourself, improve your skills, kinds of things. And then, when you get a little further into Scientology, they start with Dianetics, when you learn that everything bad that ever happened to you is encoded in your mind, and you need therapy for that stuff.

So now, they become more of a kind of a quasi-psychotherapy group.

And then when you get further into Scientology, when you get up to these higher levels, you discover that you're infested by the spirits of murdered space aliens. These are the people that were murdered by Xenu, and all these murdered space aliens, they need therapy too, and you have to pay for it.

Q So, you see it as -- basically as a scheme to make money for L.

Ron Hubbard, or his heirs right now, since he's passed away.

A Well, money is certainly a big part of it. These courses, they start out cheap, but they get very, very expensive. And you don't get to meet Xenu until you've paid a couple hundred thousand dollars in fees to these folks. And it doesn't get any cheaper. Once you meet Xenu, the higher level courses are more expensive still. So, moneymaking is definitely a big part of what Scientology is about.

Q And what would you cite as some of the other motives, that you see behind what the Church has been doing?

A Well, they would like to live in a world where Scientology dominates the world. They would like this -- their stated goal is to Clear the Planet. What that means -- in Scientology, there's this notion of going Clear, and that's the end goal in the Dianetics book.

Hubbard wrote this self-help book, Dianetics, in 1950, and that was the precursor to Scientology. And in Dianetics, when you've done all these mental exercises that Hubbard lays out, and you've rid yourself of all your painful memories, you go Clear, and supposedly, you have marvelous powers when you're clear. Perfect memory, free from disease, and so on.

And they want a Clear planet. They want everybody to be a Scientologist. They want to run things. I guess you can say world domination is their goal. They're not doing too well at it. Things are looking pretty grim for them on that front, but that's certainly what their ultimate goal is.

Q How do you explain how popular the religion has been in at least some sense, in that -- I mean, it is expanding. There are more churches being built, and why? What drives people to this?

A Well, I think it's a lie on their part to say that they're expanding. For many years, they claimed to have eight million members, although they also claimed to be the fastest growing religion on the planet, so how can the numbers stay at eight million for 10 years? But insiders, people who have worked in Scientology -- in fact, one guy who used to manage the address list, said that there's fewer -- far fewer than 100,000 members worldwide, and half of those are in the U.S. And if you ask them, you know, who counts as a member, and people have asked Heber Jentzsch, who is the President of the Church of Scientology, that question. If you press him on it, what he'll say is that anybody who has ever bought a book, or ever taken a single course or done anything, counts as a member.

Q That was Dave Touretzky, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, talking about what he perceives to be the dangers of Scientology. I am Jesse Chanin, and you're listening to late City Edition here on WKCR. The second half of the interview will be broadcast shortly, but first, I want to remind our listeners that reports like the one you are currently hearing are only possible through your financial support. The number here is (212) 851-2699, and we're looking for listener donations.

[Long fund raising segment snipped.]

Q All right. It is now 9:20 or so p.m., and we are going to return to our topic of the day, Scientology. I interviewed Dave Touretzky, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University about his opinions on the group yesterday.

He explained what separates the doctrine of Scientology from Eastern religions, with which it shares many of its ideas.

A Scientology does share a belief in past lives with other religions, that's true. But Scientology takes a very different view of the human nature than these other religions do. So Scientology practices what I call mechanistic dualism. They believe that the spirit is separate from the body, and that the spirit is eternal, but they also believe that the spirit, or the mind -- it's the same thing to them -- is kind of a machine, in that it can be controlled by rather simplistic procedures. And so, Scientology auditing, which is their brand of therapy, is all about controlling the spirit.

So, Hubbard writes all this gobbledygook about energy and intention beams, and he's got this whole science fiction quasi-physics about how the mind works, and how energy flows and memories are encoded, and so on. And they have this sort of rigid dogma about the spirit and the mind, that the mind is a machine, and they have the procedures, and you follow their procedures, and you can, therefore, clean up your mind, get rid of all your bad memories, and become a super-being, and eventually, rid yourself of the need to be reincarnated over and over.

They even have a machine to assist with this. The machine's called an E-meter, which is short for electropsychometer. It's basically a lie detector. It measures skin resistance. So what you do when you're being audited, that is, when you're undergoing Scientology therapy with this E-meter, you sit and you hold these two electrodes in your hand. They look like soup cans. In fact, they actually used to use soup cans. So you hold these things in your hand, and they're connected by wires to this meter, and the auditor, that is, the Scientology counselor, will run you through some procedure. He might tell you to think of things on a certain list of items, or he might ask you questions and listen to your responses. And while you're doing this, he's looking at movements of this needle, and what Scientology believes is that thoughts have mass that can be measured by electrical resistance changes in the body, and so the people who are trained to use this meter, they actually watch the needle for different kinds of movements. Staring at this thing, trying to interpret what these needle movements mean, and in this way, guide you through their therapeutic procedure, which is supposed to rid you of your traumatic memories.

So, it's a very mechanistic view of the mind and the soul, not the kind of thing that you'd get in, say, Buddhism or Hinduism.

Q Yeah, and incidentally, New Yorkers might have seen these E-meters in the subways, because Scientologists administer what they call stress tests, and they have been in Times Square and Grand Central Station, where they offer free readings on the E-meters to passerby.

A The FDA actually raided Scientology and seized a bunch of these E-meters in 1963, because Scientology was making illegal medical claims, claiming that with the E-meter, they could cure disease. And several lawsuits resulted from this seizure action, and the end result of the lawsuit was that Scientology was required by the court to put a warning plaque on every E-meter. And I can read you what that plaque says. "By itself, this meter does nothing. It is solely for the guide of Ministers of the Church in Confessionals and pastoral counselling.

The Electrometer is not medically or scientifically capable of improving the health or bodily function of anyone and is for religious use by students and Ministers of the Church of Scientology only."

Q As we mentioned before, the Church that we're focusing on today recently opened in Harlem, in East Harlem, in May, which does not seem, upon first glance, to be ideal in a scheme to get money out of people. So, why do you believe that the Church would choose to open a branch in East Harlem?

A Scientology has several goals in targeting minorities. And they are doing that. They're not just moving into Harlem, but they're also targeting minority groups in other parts of the country. One reason to go after minorities is that minorities are less wired. They're less likely to be on the Internet, and therefore, they're easier to recruit into Scientology.

Another reason is that Scientology's own internal memo, which got published on the Internet last year, says that minorities are good to recruit, because African-Americans are more likely to join staff than white Scientologists. So, if you don't have money, you can still be useful to the Church if you join staff. Now, staff members receive very little pay. They work long hours. They're exploited and abused, but they need staff people in order to send out advertising, in order to give these stress tests, in order to be out on the street giving out their personality tests. So they're always looking for new staff, and the fact that African-Americans are more likely to join staff -- at least Scientology believes that's true -- makes Harlem a fertile recruiting ground.

I think the third reason they're targeting minorities today is because they're -- they have a big emphasis on trying to infiltrate civilized society through drug education and through tutoring groups.

So, they have a number of front groups who are supposedly separate from Scientology, but that's not actually true. They're actually controlled directly by Scientology. One of them is Narconon, which is a drug education group. The name is confusingly similar to Narcotics Anonymous, but Narconon is not Narcotics Anonymous.

The other thing they have is a bunch of different kind of tutoring groups. One of them is called the Hollywood Education and Literacy Project, or HELP, and there is a branch in Harlem called HELP Harlem.

And these tutoring groups are, again, Scientology front groups. They use Scientology materials. They glorify L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, as being an authority figure on education, and the, you know, the intent is to infiltrate civilized society, and try and get L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology accepted as a desirable, good thing.

Q So, lastly, I mean you've clearly become more involved in fighting this cult than just their abuse of free speech. And I know there have been some -- I mean, there are websites that the Scientologists have made, libelous of your character and things like that. I mean, how do you react to that?

A Well, you go to war, people are going to shoot at you. I knew from the beginning that Scientology has a long history of attacking its critics. They have a policy called Fair Game, that says that anyone who's an enemy of Scientology can be sued, tricked, lied to, or destroyed.

So they have a long history of going after people, and it's no surprise to me that they're coming after me now. I'd be quite surprised if they didn't. I've had a long stretch of legal threats from them over various things on my website, and I've had various bits of harassment from them, which I won't even dignify by recounting over the radio.

But nothing that they've done has diminished my enthusiasm for exposing these people. I think it's just tremendous fun to use the Internet to shine a light on these scammers, and to get the word out on what they're really doing.

Q All right. Well, David Touretzky, thank you for speaking with me.