By Wayne Madsen
Aurora
massacre: several links between James Holmes and U.S. government
research (Salk Institute involved in neurologically enhancing soldiers'
abilities on battlefield...connections to DARPA)
James Holmes, the 24-year old suspect in the mass shooting of Batman
"The Dark Knight Rises" movie goers in Aurora, Colorado that left 12
people dead and 58 injured, has had a number of links to U.S.
government-funded research centers. Holmes's past association with
government research projects has prompted police and federal law
enforcement officials to order laboratories and schools with which
Holmes has had a past association not to talk to the press about Holmes.
Holmes was one of six recipients of a National Institutes of Health
Neuroscience Training Grant at the University of Colorado Anschutz
Medical Campus in Denver. Holme is a graduate of the University of
California at Riverside with a Bachelor of Science degree in
neuroscience. Although Holmes dropped out of the PhD neuroscience
program at Anschutz in June, police evacuated two buildings at the
Anschutz center after the massacre at the Aurora movie theater. Holmes
reportedly gave a presentation at the Anschutz campus in May on Micro
DNA Biomarkers in a class titled "Biological Basis of Psychiatric and
Neurological Disorders."
Initial reports of Holmes having an accomplice in the theater shooting
have been discounted by the Aurora police. However, no explanation has
been given by police why the Anschutz campus buildings were evacuated
after Holmes was already in custody in the Arapahoe County jail.
The Anschutz Medical Campus is on the recently de-commisioned site of
the U.S. Army's Fitzsimons Army Medical Center and is named after Philip
Anschutz, the billionaire Christian fundamentalist oil and railroad
tycoon who also owns The Examiner newspaper chain and website and the
neo-conservative Weekly Standard. The Anschutz Medical Campus was built
by a $91 million grant from the Anschutz Foundation.
In 2006, at the age of 18, Holmes served as a research intern at the
Salk Institute at the University of California at San Diego in La Jolla.
It is noteworthy that for the previous two years before Holmes worked
at the Salk Institute, the research center was partnered with the
Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Columbia University,
University of California at San Francisco, University of Wisconsin at
Madison, Wake Forest University, and the Mars Company (the manufacturers
of Milky Way and Snickers bars) to prevent fatigue in combat troops
through the enhanced use of epicatechina, a blood flow-increasing and
blood vessel-dilating anti-oxidant flavanol found in cocoa and,
particularly, in dark chocolate.
The research was part of a larger DARPA program known as the "Peak
Soldier Performance Program," which involved creating brain-machine
interfaces for battlefield use, including human-robotic bionics for
legs, arms, and eyes. DARPA works closely with the Defense Science
Office on projects that include the medical research community.
Fitzsimons was at the forefront of DARPA research on the use of
brain-connected "neuroprosthetic" limbs for soldiers amputated or
paralyzed in combat.
According to his LinkedIn profile, James Holmes's father, Dr. Robert
Holmes, who received a PhD in Statistics in 1981 from the University of
California at Berkeley, worked for San Diego-based HNC Software, Inc.
from 2000 to 2002. HNC, known as a "neural network" company, and DARPA,
beginning in 1998, have worked on developing "cortronic neural
networks," which would allow machines to interpret aural and visual
stimuli to think like humans. The cortronic concept was developed by HNC
Software's chief scientist and co-founder, Robert Hecht-Nielsen. HNC
merged with the Minneapolis-based Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO), a
computer analysis and decision-making company. Robert Holmes continues
to work at FICO.
It has also emerged that Holmes, when he was 20, worked as a camp
counselor at Camp Max Straus of the Jewish Big Brothers and Sister of
Los Angeles. According to the Jewish Journal, among other tasks, Holmes
helped to teach boys between the ages of 7 to 10 archery. In another
unusual detail, the car Holmes used to drive to the Aurora movie theater
had Tennessee plates. Holmes is originally from San Diego.
James Holmes is the grandson of Lt. Col. Robert Holmes, one of the first
Turkish language graduates of the Army Language School, later the
Defense Language Institute, in Monterey, California. Graduating from the
Turkish language class in 1948, Holmes spent a career in the Army,
which likely included more than a few intelligence-related assignments.
Typically, U.S. military officers conversant in Turkish served with
either the Defense Intelligence Agency or the Central Intelligence
Agency at either the U.S. embassy in Ankara or the Consulate General in
Istanbul, or both.
Terrence Sejnowski, the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute
for Biological Studies and the director of the Computational
Neurobiology Laboratory, in an interview with Cognitive Science Online
in 2008, had the following comment about recent studies of the human
brain: "Alan Newell [cognitive psychology researcher at the intelligence
community-linked RAND Corporation] once said that when AI [artificial
intelligence] was founded not enough was known about the brain to be of
any help and in the early 1980s, symbol processing was the only game in
town. That has changed and we now know a lot about the brain, perhaps
more than we need to know [emphasis added]."
More than we need to know!
The links between the younger and elder Holmes and U.S. government
research on creating super-soldiers, human brain-machine interfaces, and
human-like robots beg the question: "Was James Holmes engaged in a
real-life Jason Bourne TREADSTONE project that broke down and resulted
in deadly consequences in Aurora, Colorado?" In any event, if the Batman
movies are now serving as a newer version of J.D. Salinger's "Catcher
in the Rye" subliminal messaging triggering mechanism, -- Salinger's
novel was of interest to a number of American political assassins --
keep in mind that August 10 is the opening date of The Bourne Legacy. It
may be wise to skip that film in the theater for a while.
from the halls of the UN negotiating chambers.
