Michael Aquino Revisited

By Alex Constantine

(Also see: http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2007/07/satanism-and-ritual-abuse-case-by-case.html)





"The uncanny attraction of the Third Reich – Nazi Germany – lies in the fact that it endorsed and practiced both dynamism and life-worship without end and to a world-shaking degree of success." — Michael Aquino

To hear High Priest Michael Aquino tell it, his Temple of Set, a splinter group of San Francisco’s Church of Satan, is no more sinister than the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry. Setianism, he insists, "is a legitimate and ethical religion, incorporated as such in California in 1975 and enjoying since that time full state and federal recognition as a religious institution."1 Aquino bristles at any suggestion of Satanism at the Temple of Set. The cult "does not believe in ‘Satan’ – our mythology is ancient-Egyptian, after all."2 Yet he has described himself in Temple literature as the "Anti-Christ" and published essays on "Greater" and "Lesser" Black Magic.3 And Don Webb, a priest in the Temple of Set, describes it as a "Satanic religion." The Setian, Webb writes, "chooses as role model a ‘god against the gods.’ We choose an archetype that corresponds the disharmonizing part of our own psyches…. This role model is the ‘Lord of this World,’ who is rejected by the Right Hand Path as the Prince of Darkness."4 Visitors to the Temple’s Web site are met by a blazing white pentagram, and the Temple answering machine has boasted that the caller has reached "the only international Satanic religious institution’ recognized by the government.5 So perhaps it's really about Satan, after all.

The decorated veteran of the Army’s 306th Psychological Operations Battalion is as skilled in the art of black propaganda as he is black magic.

The Temple’s ranking magus was born on October 16, 1946. He set out on the Left-Hand Path during the Vietnam War. Aquino joined the Church of Satan in the late 1960s, and was ordained a priest in Kentucky, where he was stationed on leave from the war. Aquino lectured on Satanism at the University of Louisville, and mustered a small coven for rites at his home. In Southeast Asia, he engaged in tactical psyops, including the use of Hueys outfitted with ultra-high-decibel banks of loudspeakers.6

Dale Seago, a pilot assigned to the psyop crew, says they would "take them up above the cloud layer where they couldn’t be seen, where the rotor blades couldn’t be heard, but you could very clearly hear the broadcasts on the ground."7

Aquino prepared one blood-curdling tape exploiting Vietnamese-Buddhist burial customs. The local peasantry believed "the necessity of burying the body of the deceased because if they didn’t do that the souls would be condemned to wander eternally tormented by demons." Aquino’s tape "began with this wailing Vietnamese funeral music and then phased into screaming, gradually getting louder." After an eternity, the screaming subsided into the moans of a dying Viet-Minh soldier, his body abandoned by comrades. "It was chilling," Seago says, "and then finally you hear him being dragged away screaming by the demons." The psyop unit would "wait for a really severe thunderstorm and they would take the choppers up, go over the cloud layer, and through these buckets of rain and jagged lightening and thunder, you’d hear this stuff coming out of the sky. Apparently it was quite effective. He won a lot of notoriety for that in Vietnam."

Seago relates that Aquino did not participate in much killing in ‘Nam – not that it was an issue. "I remember a conversation I had with him once," Seago recalls. "Somehow the subject of killing came up – something I had never done – but the word he used to describe the experience was ‘interesting.’" Aquino admitted that he had killed "once or twice," but "he found he had no particular emotional reaction to it."

Vietnamese houseboys, Seago says, "would have nothing to do with Aquino’s quarters. He had a Baphomet plaque up on the wall, candles and a makeshift altar. He had a bit of a reputation as a magic man among the locals and nobody would go near him."

The Old Twisted Cross

Decades later, Aquino is still, to most onlookers who are not his liturgical or military brethren, as popular as a phlegmatic leper. There are the Apocalyptic teachings, the coming forth by night: "For Mankind now hastens toward an annihilation which none but the Elect may hope to avoid …" In his introduction to "The Order of the Vampire," Aquino writes that students will learn "invisibility."8 His words, but Aquino now denies that the Temple has ever dabbled in such quackery: "We do not have any particular interest in ‘invisibility.'"9

And there are the testimonials of former Setians, including H.J. Mowry, who left the Temple in 1995: "There's nothing innovative about Setianism; in fact, it's just one more ‘traditional’ herd-breeding religion .... I've discovered that Setians do little more than revel in self-deceit … a mockery and a distortion of truth."10

Another Temple defector, Kevin Filan, says that he was blackmailed and coerced: "Aquino uses embarrassing information obtained while people are members of their cult to attempt to discredit or harass them later. This is among the most odious of their tactics. I was ‘outed’ and my workplace posted to the nets with the suggestion that people ‘pay me a visit’ in an attempt to silence my criticisms of their cult."11

Lillian Rosoff of San Bruno, California was granted a temporary restraining order against Aquino in 1999. She was harassed for two months, Rosoff complained to the San Mateo Superior Court. She stated that Aquino phoned her repeatedly in the early morning to pressure her to return to the Temple. Aquino once banged on the door of her home at 3 a.m. After ten minutes of this, he shouted that he ‘was tired of playing games with her,’ that she’d ‘better watch out for his next move,’' according to the affidavit. She had "an intense fear" of Michael Aquino, and "due to past experiences" did "not know how far the defendant [would] go.''

Then there are reports of Aquino’s interest in Nazi occultism, and the 1987 child molestation charges arising at the Presidio Child Development Center.

The story took to front pages throughout northern California and soon dropped into the national news stream.

In Carmel, California, political conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell drew upon the local headlines for her weekly broadcast over KAZU-FM in Monterey. Topics of discussion for November 16, 1987: "SATAN, THE OCCULT, REICHSFUHRER SS HEINRICH HIMMLER. US DEFENSE DEPT. SAN FRANCISCO POLICE AND FEDERAL ATTORNEYS, DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, CHILD MOLESTATIONS AND RITUALS ON MILITARY & CIVILIANS, AND MIND CONTROL."

Mind control was a familiar theme to researchers of Nazi subterfuge. Terminal mind control experiments were conducted in the concentration camps and fully documented in the postwar period by the U.S. Naval Technical Mission. "Brainwashing with chemicals" at Auschwitz addressed the psychoactive effects of barbiturates and derivatives of morphine. Mescaline was studied at Dachau.

Not that the American military hasn’t curdled a few synapses in the name of "national security." The U.S. Navy undertook its own mescaline experimentation, motivated by the Technical Mission’s Nazi report, and "Project Chatter," an interrogation study, was initiated in 1947.12 The April 1972 issue of Science Digest describes the use of hypnosis to elicit multiple personality disorder in military test subjects. In this article, G.H Eastabrooks, a hypnotist and mind control pioneer, detailed covert operations concealed by a fog of induced amnesia. Intelligence data was retrieved by use of code words to trigger a pseudo-personality programmed to deliver it, leaving the host completely unaware of his role in the operation.13

"Michael Aquino was on television this week," Mae Brussell reported. "The police in San Francisco had taken some of his video tapes. He claimed they were mostly Carl Sagan’s Space, but in there you could see a photograph of the Waffen SS, just one of his belongings in a place filled with swastikas and Nazis. And the news accounts told about the Nazi uniform." The Pentagon at first denied that Aquino was even in the Army, then reversed itself and stood by Aquino and his top-security clearance. Brussell: "In 1981 he was a reserve attaché to the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a year later a student at the Foreign Services Institute, sponsored by the State Department." In 1981, [Reagan appointee] Daniel Graham – the head of ‘Star Wars,’ the ‘high frontier’ – was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency…."14

Aquino (once a national commander of the Eagle Scouts Honor Society) sneers at the Nazi allegations. The Temple’s "very minor interest" in Nazi occultism, he insists, "is every bit as responsible as that of Public Television documentaries on the topic."15 Aquino has written that Nazism is "a very powerful area of magic … unrealized by the profane?"16 He has praised the "unique quality" and "uncanny attraction of the Third Reich" in his introduction to the "Order of the Trapezoid," Occult "techniques perfected by the Nazis continue to be used/abused – generally in an ignorant and superficial fashion – by every country of the world in one guise or another.17

Carl Rashke, a professor of religious studies at the University of Denver, asks: "You can have the heart of Hitlerism without six million dead Jews?"18

In 1985, a small group defectors - including his brother-in-law William T. Butch and a ranking Setian - went on to establish a sect of their own, the Temple of Nepthys in Mill Valley, citing Aquino’s "obsession" with Nazism as the deciding grievance.19

And the SS uniform? "I have never worn a Nazi uniform in my life, in or out of a parade," he informs us.20 Most responsible clergymen do not have Nazi apparel hanging about the rectory. Perhaps he didn’t actually wear the uniform (?).

There are questions about his bloodline. On November 23, 1987, a local televised interview with Aquino kicked off with a report that his mother "was engaged to a member of the Waffen SS." Aquino denies it. In 1929, after his mother, a sculptor, graduated from Stanford University, he wrote in response to the criticisms of a Temple defector, "she went to Germany to study as an apprentice to the famous sculptor Georg Kolbe." Aquino neglects to mention that Georg Kolbe, according to the Weisenthal Center, "adapted" to Nazi rule just fine. Ms. Ford-Aquino’s mentor indulged his art throughout the Third Reich period, "cheap pathos largely geared to the Nazi mythology of the Nordic-Germanic 'master race.'" Kolbe’s studio was "a favored venue for guided tours by members of the 'Strength through Joy' organization." A artist beloved by the Nazi Party, he died in Berlin in November 1947.21

While in Germany, Aquino explains, his mother "had a romance with a university student named Karl Eitel Roth, who was not a member of the Nazi Party (or the SS). In the late 1930s, my mother returned to the United States and married my father, who served as a sergeant in Patton's 43rd Cavalry in World War II and was decorated with the Purple Heart for wounds in action."

Michael Aquino insists that his father was not a Nazi, but his own literary efforts could have been written by Goebbels. In the Crystal Tablet of Set, he claimed that the genocidal Nazis – who believed in "total war" and performed hideous terminal medical experiments on captive "subhumans" in highly-efficient death camps – worshipped "life." (And Dr, Aquino is actually regarded as an "intellectual" in some quarters.) "The ‘life," he explained, "is the life of the state, or more precisely the Volk (perhaps best translated as the ‘soul of the people’)."22 National Socialists worshipped the soul of the Caucasian volk, perhaps, and indeed they constituted the life of the state … but why is this admirable, and why is Aquino's respect for mass murderers not merely the blather of a twisted neo-Nazi?

His October 1982 "Stifling Air" rituals at Wewelsberg Castle, the haunt of Himmler’s Waffen SS, certainly smudged Aquino’s priestly polish. "I indeed performed a magical ritual in the Wewelsberg Castle in Westphalia," Aquino explained to me by e-mail, "but there was nothing in the least pro-Nazi about it. It was rather a ritual concerning the unique location of that particular castle at what certain occult lore terms ‘the middle-point of the world.’ That happens to be ‘coincidentally’ why Heinrich Himmler appropriated that same castle during the Nazi era. Its occult history and significance date back to 1604, which is, I think it is fair to say, pre-jackboot."23

On November 3, 1987, the San Francisco Chronicle offered another, more sinister perspective on Dr. Aquino’s occult rituals at Wewelsberg: "Nazis considered the black arts and satanic worship part of an ancient Germanic tradition. In his book Crystal Tablet of Set,’ [Aquino] writes that he performed the rituals to recreate an order of knighthood for followers of Satan."

True-crime reporter Michael Newton considers Aquino’s public stance on the Reich "deliberately ambiguous," a tactical position.24 (Set, the mythical Egyptian core of Aquino’s religious beliefs, was the god of confusion, and the psyops veteran often taps the well to dilute criticism and frustrate the hounds nipping at his tail.)

American society, he opines, is already "engulfed by power-seeking disguised as altruistic politics and by propaganda disguised as information. There is no exception" – thus spake political science doctorate and psychological warfare veteran Michael Aquino – a commentary on domestic politics viewed from the national security underground.25

Attic Expeditions

"Michael Aquino claims to have reported directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff…. Expert of psychological warfare, Aquino wanted to use satellites for brainwashing the US public." – S.F. Examiner, November 2, 1987

Dale Seago was there, "I joined a psychological warfare unit in 1976 at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro. I was a Spec 4. Later I went to ROTC for two years and returned to the same psyop unit with Aquino as a second lieutenant…. Aquino split from the Church of Satan and formed the Temple of Set in 1975. He was already living in Santa Barbara and working at the psyop unit and I had not yet joined the cult. The unit was the 306th Psychological Operations Battalion, which dealt with psyop on a national policy level."26

The U.S. military was heavily represented at the Temple. William Butch, Aquino’s brother-in-law, a former Pittsburgh police officer, was a naval reservist. Bruce Bibee, a former captain in Aquino’s psyop unit in San Pedro, enlisted in the Temple. Captain Willie Browning was a military intelligence officer. Setian Dennis K. Mann was a reserve Army major in the intelligence field.27 An Army CID investigative report filed with the San Francisco Police Department notes that an informal check of official records revealed that Mann and Browning were "Captains, Military Intelligence."28 Black Ops. Aquino himself has served stints as a Green Beret, a liaison officer in NATO countries, and a consulting faculty member at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff.29

The promising young Satanist’s military function in Vietnam was "human ecology" – a CIA code-word for behavior modification and mind control. Major Jack Downing, a self-professed "Man in Black," recalls, "I was working alongside the CIA as a consultant in psyops and as a specialist in ‘human ecology.’ That's a phrase that connotes different things, depending on the context, from the wholesome to the not-so-wholesome. In the capacity for which I was employed, it was a way of pinning down the psyche and behaviors of human beings in differing environments or under various circumstances. It employed the observational principles of anthropologists and psychologists alongside the more manipulative techniques of advertisers, social engineers and ‘golden age’ brainwashers. It was, in retrospect, a very unorthodox and ethically questionable thing." Downing says "we brought the MK [mind control] projects into the war. The extreme circumstances of warfare gave us excellent opportunities to observe the ways certain mind control technologies might work."

Downing was in Germany applying "some of the findings we got." He set up "some things" at Army bases stateside. "At the time of my leaving, my role … as human ecology expert was taken up by another officer, a Michael Aquino, who was trying out these [mind control] principles in the context of Anton LaVey's church."30

Reports surfaced in the 1980s that Aquino plied his knowledge of "human ecology" at the Temple of Set, as well. He refers to the case that drew national media attention as the "Presidio Scam," but the Army’s own evaluation weighed the ritual molestation charges and found them credible.

"Regarding children," Dale Seago says, "I don’t know how he feels about them in general. I do know that he virtually hates his son, Dorien." Aquino has always felt that Dorien is not really his son "by his first wife, Janet. If he felt he could get away with it – and he probably didn’t mean this literally – he would happily go into [Dorien's] room at night and smother him with pillows."

Ethical, responsible Michael Aquino was accused by the U.S. Army CID on August 11, 1989 of "Conspiracy, Kidnapping, Sodomy, Indecent Acts or Liberties With a Child, False Swearing, Intentional Noncompliance With Article 30 Uniform Code of Military Justice, Maltreatment of a Subordinate and Conduct Unbecoming an Officer," in connection with the Presidio charges. After the High Setian sued the Army to have his name stricken from the title block of the report, the court investigated and a decision was handed down by the Commanding General of the Army CID on September 28, 1990: "Plaintiff remains titled for Conspiracy, Kidnapping, Sodomy, Indecent Acts and False Swearing."31

Aquino’s pleas of innocence notwithstanding, there is little doubt that molestation occurred at the Presidio. An internal investigator told Diana Napolis, a San Diego County social worker, "he believed at least 20 pre-schoolers had been molested." Even the FBI’s Kenneth Lanning, a staunch ritual abuse debunker, has stated publicly that many children were sexually abused at the Child Development Center.32

The intelligence sector and its mind control cults have made extensive use of front organizations like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation – many of the professionals on the FMSF board have engaged in illicit classified mind control experiments, often involving children – and friendly contacts in the media to characterize ritual child abuse as an "urban legend" and "false memories" concocted by therapists to reap fraudulent medical insurance claims.

Contrarily, The Journal of Child Abuse & Neglect reported in 1993 that most therapists are extremely reluctant to treat ritual abuse survivors: "One of the first complications in the evaluation of ritualistic abuse cases is the frequent disbelief and skepticism on the part of professionals" encountering "the bizarre and extreme nature of the allegations." As therapists and police investigators gather reports of "ritualistic abuse from across the nation, and as adult and child victims disclose their experiences, evidence for the veracity of these cases accumulates." Another common deterrent to therapist involvement is fear instilled by "threats to evaluators … communicated via the children or experienced directly. Even when no overt threat exists, the horrifying nature of the allegations can engender a fearful [avoidance] response on the part of clinicians."33

The confusion bred by underhanded "experts" with a monopoly on media access gave rise to widespread ignorance. The issue of ritual abuse (a form of mind control) has provoked widespread skepticism, fundamentalist religious hysteria, fear, and even some legitimate reporting here and there.

Material evidence of the abuse is critical but hard to come by. In the Presidio case, medical evidence supported the psychological evaluation of the children. Five or more of them had a sexually transmitted infection. "A stir was created when the media announced that several of the children had been diagnosed with chlamydia," Aquino has written. "However, the Army later announced the tests were unreliable. No retesting of the children was ever conducted. Chlamydia can be transmitted by direct contact with any mucous membrane [such as mouth or eyes]. No testing of the children's parents for this disease was conducted." Aquino claims to have medical records confirming that he has never had the disease.

There is no doubt that children at the center were infected, whether or not he was responsible. Contrary to Aquino’s explanation, the Department of Health and Human Services [http://www.4woman.gov/faq/stdchlam.htm] reports that chlamydia, like HIV, is contracted NOT merely by contact with mucous membranes, but "during sexual intercourse via the exchange of bodily fluids through mucous membranes in the anus, mouth and genital areas."

Michael Aquino's contention that the children were "not retested" raises questions. Several laboratory tests, according to the DHHS, are conducted to confirm the presence of chlamydial infection and distinguish it from gonorrhea. And once a child is on medication, another test is standard procedure to determine if the child is still infected. And "because there are often no symptoms for chlamydial infection, someone infected may unknowingly pass the bacteria to their SEXUAL partners."

Aquino has yet to explain how SEVERAL children from the Presidio came to have sexual contact with the same infected pedophile outside the school. There is obviously a much higher probability that someone at the Presidio passed the disease through sexual contact.

Conspiracy Theory

Aquino’s claim to innocence couldn’t stanch the flow of headlines: "ARMY SAYS CONSTITUTION LETS SATANIST HOLD TOP SECRET JOB – PRESIDIO CARE CENTER FIRST TO FACE ARMY SCRUTINY – SATANISM LINKED TO SCORES OF S.F. CHILD ABUSE CASES – WORLDWIDE PROBE OF ARMY CENTERS – PENTAGON TACKLES PRESIDIO MOLEST CASE …"

Michael Aquino has consistently claimed that the Army CID investigation was a conspiracy motivated by military intolerance of his religion. In response to Aquino’s debunkery: "This investigation was not a ‘witchhunt.’ Plaintiff was not targeted because of his religious beliefs. In fact, as plaintiff repeatedly points out … the Army has been aware of [Aquino's] religious beliefs throughout his career and has not interfered with his religious practices. The sole reasons for this investigation and the CID decision … are the facts that point to plaintiff's sexual abuse." Kinsey Adams-Thompson, "in a completely public setting, identifies … a man who sodomized her" and forced her to "place her mouth on his penis."

Based on Aquino’s "witchhunt" thesis, one would have to accept "that there was a giant conspiracy between the parents, the daughter, the psychiatrist, the child psychiatrist that treated the girl, between the CID agents who investigated the case, between the military policemen and investigators … and between the officials in the Army Criminal Law Division who also reviewed the case."34

On May 31, 1991, Patrick Lisowski, an attorney representing the Army in Aquino’s lawsuit, opined that it was only possible to buy his claims if one also believes that "a mother and a father instructed their daughter to fabricate this story of child molestation," then "pick out someone who they didn't like" and embedded "in her somehow the fact that this was the man" who’d molested her.

At various times, Aquino has suggested that Kinsey’s therapist, her parents, the press, the police, the courts, the Army and private investigators, researchers, Temple of Set defectors, crime writers, everyone is "lying" about him, that he was "in Washington, D.C." when the ritual molestations took place. "The San Francisco Police investigated," he explained in a public statement on June 7, 1999, and "verified that Lilith [Aquino] and I had been 3,000 miles away in Washington, D.C. – where I was on duty every single day." SFPD detectives closed the case. Charges were not filed.

But don’t take his word as Gospel. Aquino left the Presidio in the summer of 1986. He was assigned to Washington, D.C., then St. Louis. But he was, according to Army investigators, "back in the Presidio in San Francisco during that summer." Aquino’s alibi is a cracked goose egg.

Army files reveal that the San Francisco Police Department dropped the 1987-88 prosecution unjustifiably. The federal Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found that the SFPD discontinued the investigation of Aquino and wife Lillith in September 1988 "for lack of sufficient evidence." The Army CID pressed on with the investigation and in August 1989 issued a report concerning "the various child-abuse and related criminal offenses investigated," and concluded that the police department’s case was stymied "because all further leads involved adults who refused to cooperate.35

To silence the children, guns were reportedly pointed at their heads and family members were threatened.36 True enough, some witnesses were not "cooperative" at all.

The Army CID maintains that the probe of Aquino and an employee of the center, Gary Hambright, "was not arbitrary or capricious. Kinsey made a certain, reliable identification of plaintiff in a non-suggestive setting, while shopping with her parents at the [Presidio] exchange. She exhibited the fear and terror that one expects upon recognition of a threat or source of harm. Her earlier statements to the child psychiatrist and her mother about ‘Mikey’ and ‘Shamby,’ persons until then unidentified, support the validity of the identification." Her description of Aquino and her "identification from a photo and video line-up also corroborate the identification at the PX. Kinsey identified plaintiff's house as the place where ‘Mr. Gary’ took her from the Child Development Center, and where she saw ‘Mikey’ in ‘Army clothes’ like her father's."

Kinsey Adams-Thompson described the blue-gray color of Aquino’s house. Photos taken at Aquino’s apartment "show masks, guns, toy animals and ceremonial items that are similar to things described by Kinsey and other children. A notebook from plaintiff's apartment contained the name ‘Mike Todo,’ and ‘Todo’ was one of the persons present at ‘Mr. Gary's’ house." Why, you might get the idea that Aquino had committed the molestations, as charged; that Aquino told "a different version of the events is irrelevant," concluded the Army.

When his military status was called into question on the Internet, he claimed in response that he is still an Army Reservist in good standing. Court documents tell another story. In 1990, an Army continuation board recommended terminating Aquino's service after conducting its own investigation of the ritual abuse charges, and he was processed out of the Army Active Reserves.37

Charles Baudelaire pondered "the sorrows of Satan" in verse; Michael Aquino experienced those pangs first-hand.

It happened this way: The newspapers reported that Gary Hambright, a Baptist minister who died of AIDS, stood charged with molesting dozens of children. Parents sued the Army for an excess of $60 million, and in some instances monetary settlements with parents were reached. Gary Hambright died, leaving behind an obituary thick with references to "my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.38

On April 19, 1988, all ten charges against Hambright were dropped by U.S. Attorney Joseph Russionello, who bluntly admitted that there was clear and convincing evidence of child molestation but "insufficient evidence" to link those charged to the crimes. Parents immediately denounced Russioniello, who had demonstrated that "the federal system has broken down," and was unable "to protect the rights of citizens age three to eight." (Russionello has been known to perform services for the intelligence sector. Jack Blum, a U.S. Senate investigator, testified before a Select Committee on October 23, 1996 that the DA returned $35,000 in cocaine profits seized in a trafficking bust to the Contras.39

And those accusatory headlines kept coming: "Satanic cult has bizarre links to Marin" (Marin Independent Journal, December, 6, 1987): "… Satanic church members, including a key figure in the Presidio child molestation case, have been linked to satanic cult activities in Marin County." William and Lynn Butch, the in-laws, were listed by the county clerk as "founders of two Marin satanic cult groups: Dark Star 9 Pylon and Meta Mates." It was reported that Aquino’s portfolio included property in Marin and Sonoma inherited from his mother, "who died of cancer in San Francisco in 1985 … a temple priestess. She left her son a $3.2 million estate, including a house … leased by Project Care for Children and the Marin County Child Abuse Council … "

Lynn Butch, Lillith Aquino’s sister, "is the daughter of Harry H. Johnson, a wealthy Mill Valley developer who was allegedly kidnapped in September by Kenneth R. Russo. Russo contends that Johnson swindled him out of more than $500,000 in a business deal."

Hell of a Note

Dr, Aquino made national headlines again in February 1997, when he and wife Lilith filed a lawsuit against ElectriCiti Inc., an Internet service provider, for its part in a "conspiracy" resulting in "negligence and infliction of emotional distress." Aquino’s complaint concerned Diana "Curio" Napolis, a researcher on the Internet posting under the alias ‘Curio,’ who "has been posting defamatory messages" about Dr. and Mrs. Aquino to various Internet newsgroups. He complained that the ISP "has not only permitted Curio to continue the postings, but has actively assisted Curio in making these postings." He sought $250,000 in damages.40

Diana Napolis, for six years an investigative social worker for the San Diego County court system, is a licensed marriage and family therapist. She is a skilled investigator. Offended that the civil criminal justice system had failed to lock him up, "Curio" obtained declassified Army documents related to the Presidio child abuse charges and Aquino's processing out of the military, and she posted them on the Net. Aquino claimed that Napolis "has posted at least 1,800 derogatory and threatening messages on as many as 38 different newsgroups," Web magazine reported that September.

But at least one of the "Curio" posts was fabricated: "I can find you [Aquino] whenever I want. And it soon will be much more than just finding for both your perv' wife and you." The threats were reported in the press far and wide … but have never been documented – were, in fact, a figment of Aquino’s fertile imagination. Napolis denies that she had anything to do with the message attributed to her, or that she has ever threatened the Satanist: "He cannot produce an authentic message, transmitted publicly or privately, with any such words written by me," she wrote in an Internet post. "Other Satanists have threatened him … but I've never done it – it's not my style. In contrast, one of his cult members threatened to cannibalize me (I didn't take it seriously)."41

The Internet provider responded that the firm "does not know the identity of Curio, or even know if Curio is an ElectriCiti customer…. ElectriCiti does not have prior knowledge or interest in either the Aquinos, Curio, or any conflict between them."42

The case was thrown out of court on June 13, 1997 with "leave to amend." "Apparently," Napolis wrote, "Aquino wants to continue to lash out blindly and punish someone, anyone." He attempted to seal the court’s file on the case. His appeal was thrown out "with prejudice" that is, he can never file his "cyber-stalking" suit – a certain threat to first amendment rights on the Internet – again. Web activists everywhere exhaled a collective sigh of relief.

Curio and her file of government documents on Aquino are not Aquino's only migraine. On July 7, 2000, Rusty Nelson, a photographer living in Omaha, Nebraska in the 1980s, stated in a spammed e-mail message that Lawrence King, an alleged participant in a local pedophile ring, passed a suitcase stuffed with bearer bonds to a familiar "dark villain" Dr. Michael Aquino, "earmarked for covert Contra operations."

John DeCamp, a veteran of the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam and a Nebraska attorney representing some of the victims in the King case, observes that Nelson – a personal photographer in the employ of King, then a Republican Party scion and fund-raiser for Oliver North’s Contra initiative – "was in a position to know." Bearer bonds, he says, "provide anonymity, the cornerstone of money-laundering. Money laundering is associated with three things: drugs, war and politics."

Aquino had a chance to respond to DeCamp’s allegations when a northern California radio station attempted to schedule a debate between them. "He was going to go on," but "at the last minute, when he found out I was going to be on with him, refused." But the Temple of Set leader changed his mind and appeared on the program after all. DeCamp: "I had information that pretty much torpedoed his main claim that none of the charges against or his removal from [the Army] were ever proven." The Nebraska lawyer recalls that he was "able to blow him apart on the radio, and it ended on a hostile note."43

Accusations from survivors of ritual abuse and "Operation Monarch" mind control, a program that Aquino was reportedly involved in, have surfaced time and again in recent years and become a cause celebré of the Patriot right. Many of these accounts remain unverified. But these and the Presidio charges continue to hound Aquino. "What I have maintained," he insists, "and continue to maintain, was that the ‘Satanic Ritual Abuse’ myth that resulted in so many scares and scams in the 1980s was based on nothing more than a fictional idea planted by [Dr. Lawrence] Pazder in his … Michelle Remembers book."44

This accounting, mind you, is the word of a Satanic psyop agent of from the same intelligence groups that recruited war criminals from the Germany after WW II – Operation Paperclip, the recruitment of Nazi scientists, is still a program that warms beating hearts in the Pentagon. And all too often, mind control is the product of an alliance between the intelligence groups that Dr. Aquino represents so colorfully, and religious cults formed and co-opted by the Department of Defense and CIA. Military intelligence involvement in a Satanic cult led by a priest with a background in psychological operations does not appear in Michelle Remembers.

Survivors of ritual abuse trauma at the Presidio represent scores of nearly identical cases that have surfaced across the country to haunt the victims for life … only to be spun into non-existence by defense attorneys and an irresponsible press exerting an explosive and divisive influence on the communities affected. Jeannette Westbrook, a social worker who has served on the Kentucky Attorney General's Task Force on Child Sexual Abuse – and an RA survivor herself – notes that the convicions are entirely dependent upon tangible evidence, and when dealing with pre-school age children the determination of such basics as precise time, dates and setting of abuse is nearly impossible.

“You've got to be specific,” she writes, to prosecute an RA case. “It's very, very difficult to know all of these things,” but if child abuse advocates don’t offer specific evidence, “you go in there, you get shot down,” and the child is sadistically “revictimized over and over and over again.”

Another factor is corruption. Before taking a case to court, Westbrook advises, it is necessary to investigate the police officers handling the case. “Find out what judge it's going to go before. There's never been a dichotomy as true as 'good-cop/bad-cop,’” and “you have to know who's playing what side of the fence.”45

Diana "Curio" Napolis has handled some 600 child abuse cases in the San Diego area. She has worked the field for ten years, and “I've seen all manner of atrocities committed against children and witnessed all types of adult games played to avoid culpability.” She has also “seen the lack of resources allotted to adequately investigate, let alone alleviate child abuse at its most simplistic level.” Child sexual abuse, she notes, “is rampant, one of the secrets in our society that nobody wants to hear about. After networking with many professionals around the country who worked in the trenches, I began to see a pattern of systematic harassment and threats." The press, Napolis says, “printed their own one-sided version of events." A number of witnesses have "told me of threats they'd received, and related their frustration and serious concern.” The Presidio case drew her interest “after meeting several parents and children who related their experiences. These people gave me newspaper articles and internal documents supporting claims that their children had been molested in the late 1980's, but there appeared to be no successful resolution for them other than a large out-of-court settlement with the Army. Some of these people are devastated to this day.”46

The devastation continues while protected perpetrators, including Dr. Aquino, and the revisionist media-at-large sing an off-tune song of innocence, drowning out cries from scores of young victims.

NOTES

1.) M. Aquino letter to A. Constantine, Sept. 27, 2000.
Ibid.
2.) San Francisco Chronicle, November 3, 1987, A-7.
3.) In Webb’s "The Black Beyond Black: The Temple of Set."
4.) San Francisco Chronicle, June 24, 1994, p. D7.
5.) Arthur Lyons, Satan Wants You.
6.) An unnamed San Francisco Examiner reporter’s typewritten transcript of 7.) Dale Seago interview, c. 1987.
8.) San Francisco Chronicle, November 3, 1987.
9) Michael Aquino, November 27, 2000 letter to the author.
10) Temple of Set dissident's statement.
11) HYPERLINK http://www.io.com/~ix/writing/setianetics.txt http://www.io.com/~ix/writing/setianetics.txt
12) Harry V. Martin and David Caul, "Mind Control," 1995; HYPERLINK http://www.sonic.net/sentinel/gvcon8.html http://www.sonic.net/sentinel/gvcon8.html
13) Summation in Colin Ross, MD letter to New Orleans therapist Valerie Wolfe.
14) Transcript of Mae Brussell broadcast, KAZU-FM, Pacific Grove, California.
15) November 27, 2000 Aquino letter to the author.
16) Quoted in Rashke’s Painted Black, p. 149.
17) Quoted in Michael Newton, Raising Hell: An Encyclopedia of Devil Worship and Satanic Crime (Avon Books, 1993),
p. 18.
18) Painted Black, p. 154.
19) Newton, also Lyons.
20) Aquino, November 27, 2000 letter to author.
21) HYPERLINK http://motlc.wiesenthal.org/pages/t040/t04015.html http://motlc.wiesenthal.org/pages/t040/t04015.html
22) "Order of the Trapezoid Statement."
23) Newton, p. 18.
25) Quote in Newton, pp. 18-19.
26) Seago interview transcript.
27) Ibid.
28) Army CID report prepared by Lt. Col. T.C. Jones, Investigative Policy and Studies Division.
29) San Francisco Chronicle, October 31, 1987.
30) Jach Downing interview transcript, November 1998.
31) United States District Court For the Eastern District of Virginia - Alexandria division – Michael A. Aquino – plaintiff, civil action v. no 90-1547-a the honorable Michael P. W. Stone – Secretary of the Army, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C., defendant.
32) Diana Napolis Internet statement, 08 May 1997.
33) Kelley, Brant and Waterman, "Sexual Abuse in Day Care Centers," Child Abuse and Neglect, Vol. 17, 1993, p. 84.
34) Michael A. Aquino –v- Michael P.W. Stone, "Hearing on Motions," May 31, 1991.\
35) U.S. Court of Appeals document, Fourth Curcuit, Aquino v. Michael P. W. Stone, Secretary of the Army.
36) In Objective Evil: Satanic Cults in U.S. Intelligence, author Roy Black, quoted in Cover-Up of the Century, by Daniel Ryder, 1994, p. 72.
37) Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
38) San Jose Mercury News, January 5, 1990 and Orange County Register, January 6, 1990 & http://www.skeptictank.org/hs/cabuse2.htm, "A Safe Haven for Pedophiles."
39) U.S. SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE HEARING ON THE ALLEGATIONS OF CIA TIES TO NICARAGUAN CONTRA REBELS AND CRACK COCAINE IN AMERICAN CITIES, October 23, 1996. See, HYPERLINK http://www.pinknoiz.com/covert/jackblum.html http://www.pinknoiz.com/covert/jackblum.html
40) ElectriCiti statement, WWW, "Aquino vs ElectriCiti Inc., Your on-line freedom is threatened!" February 17, 1997.
41) Diana Napolis newsgroup statement, "Aquino v. Curio."
42) Public ElectriCiti statement.
43) Taped July 6 telephone interview with DeCamp.
44) Aquino e-mail to the author, September 2000.
45) Jeanette Westbrook at The Second Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference, August 14-15, 1999, DoubleTree Hotel in Windsor Locks, Connecticut.
46) Usenet post, “Response to Aquino Lawsuit Status,” May 8, 1997. Napolis refers to a Journal of Orthopsychiatry study of the affected Presidio families from the early 1990s.
•••••••••••••••••••
NOTE: Since this was written, Diana Napolis has been transformed into a CIA/military mind control subject. I was in a position to witness the EM assaults on her first-hand. She suffered severe sleep deprivation and physical pain, and this went on for months on end. Ultimately, she was turned into a programmed, mind-controlled stalker. Napolis is exceptionally bright, well-informed and a first-class investigator. Her transformation is a statement that anyone can be broken and subjugated.