Graham Berry sent out the sad news that Ida died yesterday. She was a fierce opponent of Scientology for decades, having lost her son to the group. She was involved in the earliest stages of speaking out about Scientology’s fraud and abuse and never stopped sending out letters to politicians like Congressman Leo J. Ryan who lost his life helping people victimized by Jim Jones.

Ida’s daughter in law Jean has advised me, and requested me to circulate, the sad news of Ida’s passing yesterday after a short illness.

As you may know, in April Ida moved from her house to a care facility where her brother John had been living for some time. About three weeks ago she had a bad fall, was taken back and forth to hospital, and went downhill quickly over these past three weeks.

Ida donated her body to medical research so there will be no viewing or funeral. However, in October there will probably be a memorial service in the community center of the retirement community she was living in. I will let you know what information I receive when I receive it.

I know each of you will be saddened by this news. Ida was such a unique, special, wonderful, vibrant, kind and generous person in our lives for so many years. She was a brave and determined veteran of many struggles. Our memories will not fade.

With sadness,

Graham Berry

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

At an open-air screening of Stanley Kubrick’s film Paths of Glory. at Somerset House on the Strand in London, Kubrick’s widow Christiane Kubrick spoke of the loss of her daughter Katharine to Hodgkin’s Disease. She also revealed to the world for the first time the loss of another of her three daughters, Vivian, to Scientology. In her remarks about Vivian she said:

But she was hugely loved. And now I’ve lost her.” She pauses. “You know that? I used to keep all this a secret as I was hoping it would go away. But now I’ve lost hope. So. She’s gone.”

A talented musician, composer, and director who composed the score for Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Vivian got involved in Scientology around the time Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut was in post-production.  Kubrick wanted her to compose the music for the film.  Vivian refused and disappeared into Scientology.

Vivian Kubrick at premiere of Eyes Wide Shut (Photo: Bauer Griffin)

Kubrick pleaded with her to no avail. She showed up at Kubrick’s funeral with a Scientology “handler.” Thereafter she broke off all communication even as her sister Katharine was dying of cancer and did not attend her funeral.

Those familiar with Scientology and its policy of disconnection will recognize what is going on here.  When Stanley Kubrick objected to Vivian’s involvement in Scientology she was obliged to “handle or disconnect”, that is, get him to shut up and stop criticizing Scientology or completely severe all communications with her family. Scientologists are required to disconnect from any family member or friend who is critical of Scientology or risk expulsion from the group.

Compliance with Scientology’s policy of disconnection is not optional; it is mandatory. All Scientologists from Greta Van Susteren down to the poorest teenager sucked into Scientology are required to disconnect at Scientology command or face being declared a Suppressive Person which would strip them of their belief system and make them an outcast to the friends and family members left behind in the group.

Failure to disconnect could have subjected Vivian to punishment by Scientology including public disclosure of confidential information in her Scientology counseling folders.

This has been the case with recent defectors like Amy Scobee,  who spoke out about Scientology abuses in the St. Petersburg Times’ important investigative report, The Truth Rundown, which set off a continuing stream of mainstream media reports about Scientology abuses including Laurie Goodstein’s front page story in the New York Times and Anderson Cooper’s five-part series at CNN, Scientology: A History of Violence.

Scobee was a high-ranking executive responsible for the Celebrity Centers that cater to Vivian and other Los Angeles entertainment industry celebrities. In response to Scobee’s revelations Scientology Public Relations spokesman, Tommy Davis, son of Scientology actress Anne Archer, smeared her with purportedly confidential personal information. Scobee said, “If my folders are confidential, why is Tommy Davis talking about my sex life?”

Also to be noted in Christiane Kubrick’s account is the presence of a handler from Scientology’s intelligence agency, the Office of Special Affairs (OSA) at Kubrick’s funeral.

Anti-Scientology criticism from Kubrick’s family made his funeral a potential source of trouble and a possible PR flap  It also presented the risk of Vivian defecting from Scientology.

OSA is responsible for all public and government relations for Scientology.  Tommy Davis is a member of OSA and Scientology’s chief spokesman. Davis accused editor Randy Sly of Catholic Online of “promoting religious hatred and violence” for criticizing Scientology in his many articles.  OSA produced a major smear job on Anderson Cooper in Scientology’s Freedom magazine and distributed copies along with a defamatory DVD in front of CNN offices in Los Angeles.

While Kubrick is now the most eminent celebrity to have his family destroyed by Scientology, Oscar-winning director Paul Haggis remains the most prominent celebrity to defect from the cult.  After 35-years in Scientology he resigned in an email to Tommy Davis, which has been widely reported in the media.

Haggis was outraged at the violation of Amy Scobee’s confidential information and Davis’ blatant lying in denying that the policy of disconnection exists. Haggis’ wife had been forced to disconnect from her own parents.

Disconnection is the most wide-spread damage Scientology does in society for it affects not only individual Scientologists, but  entire networks of family, friend, and business relationships.

There are tens of thousands of families like Kubrick’s that have been destroyed by disconnection. One of the most heart-breaking is that of Allan Henderson. Henderson died of cancer disconnected from five of his six children and all twenty-two of his grandchildren.

Christiane Kubrick has given up hope. Scientology has rendered her daughter effectively dead to her.

Other parents need not yet despair if voices in society will speak up strongly denouncing disconnection and all of Scientology’s other human rights abuses such as coerced abortion, which is becoming an increasing concern particularly in the pro-life community after the recent exhaustive report in the St. Petersburg Times – No Kids Allowed.

Amy Scobee is the former Scientology executive most knowledgeable about Scientology’s control and manipulation of Scientology celebrities like Vivian Kubrick. She has recently published a book, Scientology: Abuse At The Top available at Amazon and her website, Scobee Publishing. She may be contacted at amy@scobeepublishing.com.

Mike Rinder’s first on camera interview since leaving Scientology aired on Australia’s Today Tonight program with reporter Bryan Seymour.   

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Prior to the broadcast, these two trailers appeared for the show.

Coming up on Today Tonight: A world exclusive report with the former global spin doctor for the Church of Scientology. How they tried to silence him will shock you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s the full video of the 2004 IAS event that is briefly shown in the report.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mike Rinder had planned to make his debut on BBC’s Panorama in what will be a companion piece to reporter John Sweeney’s “Scientology and Me” broadcast.  Recently, Rinder explained why this show appeared before Panorama.

Concerning the BBC.

It was always my commitment to them that I would not do other TV interviews until their program aired. It was not a binding contract, just my own sense of what was right as they were the last program I did as Church spokesman and I blatantly lied about Miscavige to John Sweeney. I had not done that before and I felt it was appropriate that I therefore go to them first.

Their program is delayed for whatever reasons. They don’t make a habit of explaining their internal workings to me (or anyone else). Whether it be artistic or legal concerns or ratings (summer time is lowest ratings for any TV shows), they have not yet gone to air. I gave them a date certain by when I would not hold off on speaking to other media. Had they wanted to air in order to have the “exclusive” they could have as they knew well enough in advance.

Hats off to Bryan Seymour and Channel 7. They are afraid of nobody and put a show in the can and get it on air in a matter of days. It may not be as in depth as some of the more high-brow programs, but what they may lack in intellectual presentation they more than make up for with big brass balls.

This program airing — no matter how “tabloid” it may be — will make it easier for everyone else to do further reporting. From the BBC to CNN to 60 Minutes and many others.

The BBC show is not spiked. It is still in the process of being finalized and scheduled. More than that, I don’t know.

I hope this clarifies for anyone that has had questions.

Mike

Scientology has responded to the show in a fairly restrained way.  Instead of the wildly over-the-top attacks they usually spew to try to discredit someone like Rinder, they issued a lengthy letter saying how much Scientology has expanded since these “apostates” have left the group.

Read Scientology’s response to Today Tonight

Of course, this tactic fails, too.  People are discussing the show over at Why We Protest.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A Cardiff councilman has found himself in a bit of hot water because he made a tweet as he passed a Scientology Org.  A complaint was filed by Scientology six months after the tweet was made.  Now John Dixon faces a disciplinary hearing.

A COUNCILLOR is facing a disciplinary hearing after calling the Church of Scientology “stupid” in a post on the Twitter website.

Wales’ public standards watchdog said John Dixon is likely to have breached the code of conduct for local authority members with his short message last year.

The Church of Scientology, whose followers include entertainers Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kirsty Allie, made an official complaint after spotting the posting last year.

The church, created by American science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard in the 1950s, has a reputation for being fiercely litigious and has been accused in the US courts of trying to use the legal system to destroy critics.

Mr Dixon, who is Cardiff council’s executive member for health and social services, as well as being a web developer and microbiologist, is contesting the complaint saying he was writing in a personal capacity.

He posted the message on his Twitter account, then called CllrJohnDixon, when he was in London last year buying his wife-to-be a wedding ring.

It said: “I didn’t know the Scientologists had a church on Tottenham Court Road. Just hurried past in case the stupid rubs off.”

In a follow-up comment after the Scientologists registered to receive all his Twitter posts, he posted: “Just realised the Scientologists are following me. Quick everyone, pretend you’re out.”

Mr Dixon did not want to comment yesterday and said he would make a statement after the disciplinary process is completed.

He has since changed his name on the Twitter website to JohnLDixon to emphasise he is posting in a private capacity.

The complaint was made to the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales in December last year, nearly six months after the messages were posted on Twitter.

The church alleged the messages impinged on the right to religious freedom and were being made in an official capacity, given the name CllrJohnDixon.

Ombudsman Peter Tyndall has issued a summary judgement in which he found there is likely to have been a breach of the code of conduct and referred the complaint to Cardiff council’s Standards and Ethics Committee.

It is one of the more serious of the four options open to the Ombudsman if he investigates a complaint, which are: to find there is no evidence; to uphold the complaint and take no action; to uphold the complaint and refer it to the relevant council’s standards committee; or in the most serious cases to refer the finding to the adjudication panel for Wales.

No date has yet been set for the committee to hear the complaint against Mr Dixon.

It is the fourth complaint against a Cardiff councillor that has been upheld over the past year from 14 complaints made by members of the public and one complaint by a councillor.

These include deputy leader Neil McEvoy being found to have breached the code of conduct by calling a member of the public a liar at a Pact meeting.

Cardiff’s former Labour group leader Ralph Cook is also facing a hearing of the adjudication panel for Wales after Jewish council leader Rodney Berman complained that the Labour councillor had twice used Nazi-era language as an insult towards him.

The Church of Scientology did not reply to requests for a comment yesterday.

A spokeswoman for the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales said that Mr Tyndall’s decision would not become a matter of public record until it was used as evidence for the standards and ethics committee meeting.

Cardiff is the home base of the new Dr. Who series.  I say this councilman deserves his own Tardis.  The complaint has caused the tweet to be retweeted so much, it has become a twittertrend.

So it seems Councillor Dixon has joined the growing list of politicians who have found that careless tweets can damage their careers. 1-0 to the Scientologists, then?

Not so fast. When news of the case erupted on Twitter this morning, it rapidly became a cause celebre – or rather a cause for mockery of Scientologisty.

Prominent members of the Twitterati – a crowd which includes many who are free-thinkers sceptical about religion in any form – started retweeting Councillor Dixon’s original remark. Very rapidly, the term #stupidscientology became a trending topic on Twitter.

Now there are all sorts of lessons one could draw from this affair – about the dangers of social networking for politicians, the perils of taking on Twitter, the advisability of spending many hours and presumably a lot of public money investigating whether the word “stupid” is sufficiently offensive to constitute a breach of a code of conduct.

But, rather than face being hauled up in front of an ethics committee myself, I think I will allow you to draw your own conclusions.

And the complaint has gotten Dixon many new followers.

The message was posted on an account called CllrJohnDixon. He has since set up a second account, JohnLDixon, for his “more personal musings”, in which he describes himself as a “microbiologist and web developer, into science, rugby and web geekery”.

By 3pm today, Dixon’s number of followers on Twitter had trebled.

One supporter said: “Instead of a disciplinary hearing, they should canvas all the electorate to see if they agree with you. I think they just might.”

Another wrote: “We’re all behind you mate, if any disciplinary action goes ahead it will be because the stupid rubbed off on someone.”

Dixon later tweeted: “Just seen all the retweets about my ombudsman’s judgement. Um… Wow… Thanks.”

I think he handles himself quite well in this TV newscast. Much better than the anchorwoman who has done no research on Scientology at all.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For a long time, stopping Bob Minton was Scientology’s prime focus because Bob was a real-life major-league “who.”  He made it possible for people like me and other critics of Scientology to continue when we were harassed, arrested, on trial or being sued.  When they shut down Bob, they thought their troubles were over.

That is, until the net kicked into high gear and the ground work laid by critics like Bob, Andreas Heldal-Lund and so many others started to really bear fruit.  And in 2008, Anonymous sprang forward to carry the baton far and wide, online and in the streets.

Now, some dimwit has decided he is the mastermind behind it all and he wants everyone to know that it was all his work.  Every major event that has happened in the past ten years was all put in motion by this dude:

I am a 39 year old former IT professional and former real estate investor, and I retired from work at 35, which had been my goal from childhood. I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was a cult victim for seven years, and was harassed by my cult, minimally, after my family left the organization. They had a fairly robust disconnection policy, and that meant that most of our neighbors, and literally all of our friends within the organization were literally not allowed to speak to us anymore. Nobody really had to say anything about who you could and couldn’t talk to by name, it was just a rule everyone knew they had to follow; if someone left, you just never spoke to them again. Nobody much questioned it.

In 1987, when we left, my family was completely at their wit’s end. My mother picked up the telephone, and called the Cult Awareness Network. And that one phone call created Scientology’s greatest enemy.

In a lengthly, rambling manifesto which he published on the World or Warcraft website (and has since been deleted) he explained how he called Bob Minton back in 2000 and laid out a masterplan for Bob to follow that would bring Scientology to its knees.

I later would become involved in anti-cult activism beginning in 1998, specifically Scientology activism, for reasons that will be detailed later. I worked with Bob Minton, Stacy Brooks, Mark Bunker, Keith Henson, Robert Vaughn Young, Jim Beebe, and Steve Hassan.

And sometime between a lunch I had at the Turner Historic Restaurant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2000 with Robert Vaughn Young and Bob Minton’s closing of the Lisa McPherson Trust in 2001, I clandestinely got a message to Mark Bunker. The message was short: Tell Bob Minton to buy a new cell phone, check into a hotel, and call me with a pad and paper in front of him.

Because I had figured out how to kill Scientology, and if he didn’t do exactly as I asked, it was never going to work. Later that day, Mark Bunker got word back to me that Bob would call me that night, and precisely when.

Now, normally I would ignore the preposterous story that this fellow goes on to write but since he evoked my name, I think it important to point out that I did indeed meet this dude and and gave Bob his phone number. But literally nothing else he writes gibes with reality at all and I will not allow him to use me to give an air of credibility to his yarn.

I designed the following in 2000, and watched Bob Minton Implement them over
the last ten years.
• 4chan.com
• 5chan.com
• 6chan.com
• www.whatisanonymous.com
• www.whyweprotest.net
• Project Chanology
• Involving the Wachowski brothers in creating a “V for Vendetta”
movie.
• The South Park XENU story featured in the episode “Trapped in the
Closet”.
• And since I told Bob to run with it, there’s MUCH, MUCH more that I
don’t even know about yet.

That’s an evil genius for you right there. He created everything that’s happened…and things that he didn’t even know he created that haven’t happened yet. Professor Moriarty has nothing on this guy.

I’m not going to post the guy’s whole story because it is too insane. I thought I would link to it but it doesn’t appear to be easily found on the net. The only place I see it is in the Thunderdome on Why We Protest, and you need to be registered to even access it. But if you want to try to read it, here’s the link.

So why am I posting this? Because I think his nonsense mocks the good work of everyone who has so tirelessly tried to help people abused by Scientology’s fraud and abuse and especially because he lies about and diminishes the memory or Bob Minton.

… And I told Bob that I loved him. And he was the most heroic and selfless person that I had ever met. And I didn’t want him to suffer, so I was going to give him a gift… Because I like doing nice things for people I like. And I want them to be happy.

And my gift was this… That he was going to do every degrading thing you (Scientology) made him do… And he shouldn’t worry about people hating him for it, because one day they would understand why, and forgive him, because it was an important part of the plan.

And every moment that you (David Miscavige) were gloating over your victory? You were too busy autofellating your own ego to notice that he was quite literally spending the entire experience laughing his ass off at you. Because you thought you had beaten him. But he had really beaten you. And you were too stupid to figure it out.

He laughed his ass off at you. All day. Every day. Until he died. And his memory is still laughing at you.

Bob didn’t spend his last years laughing at how this idiot’s plan was working. Bob suffered greatly for standing up to Scientology and went through sheer hell. For this man to minimize Bob’s pain and to create a superhero aura around himself at the same time, sickens me.

All day he has been trying to get me to spread his message. He has had no success on his own. Anons have banned him at Why We Protest and rightly called him a troll. Even World of Warcraft seems to have cut him loose but he is determined that Thursday will be the day that his message goes global and shuts down Scientology once and for all.

I told him that if he really wants to get his message out, he should reveal his name and allow journalists to question him for the accuracy of his statements. He claims he created 4chan, for instance, but what about the newspaper stories that give someone else credit for that?

I think the Village Voice would be happy to cover the “who” behind it all. But will he give his name? No. Even though he writes this:

I dare you to come after me. Because if you or OSA lays a finger on me, or anyone I care about, ANONYMOUS 3.0 is gonna go off. It’s already written. And the entire world is gonna rise up, and you’re quite literally going to wish you’d never been born.

Bob Minton was a brave man.  He doesn’t deserve to have his hard work and memory defaced by the ramblings of this coward.

UPDATED WITH INSANE SCIENTOLOGY VIDEO

Scientology responds to a blistering week of broadcasts that exposed David Miscavige’s brutal reign by printing and distributing a new issue of Freedom Magazine, their in-house attack dog publication.    If Scientology is really a good guy and CNN had it all wrong, why does it take Scientology’s own propaganda arm to set the record straight?  Why aren’t others stepping forward?

Scientologist passing out Freedom Magazine at CNN’s L.A. headquarters.

Scientology is already losing the war on truth.  You see, I can do something Scientology can not.  I can give you the link to Scientology’s Freedom Magazine report…and the links to the Anderson Cooper broadcasts:

A History of Violence: Day One

A History of Violence: Day Two

A History of Violence: Day Three

A History of Violence: Day Four

A History of Violence: Day Five

Scientology could never say, “Look at both sides.”

We win.

UPDATE:

Here’s the video Scientology produced to smear Anderson Cooper’s name.  Its wild-eyed exaggerations and crazy leaps of logic mark it as a typical Scientology project.  Listen carefully to the sentence construction and cadence of the language and it is identical to the overwrought speeches David Miscavige does at Scientology events.  I think there’s a very strong likelihood that Slappy Miscavige wrote this work of art himself.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And what’s with the childish gay inuendo?  ”Pulled from his closet?” “Designer jeans and cargo pants?”   C’mon, Slappy.  Stop being a little bitch.

Scientology’s Applied Scholastics gets federal funds for tutoring kids in the D.C. area.