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Filmmakers notebook #92
THE UNABOMBER:
HE WASN’T PARANOID, HE WAS CONSPIRED AGAINST -- David Kaczynski
reveals the MK-ULTRA-CIA mind control program that brother Theodore
Kaczynski (dubbed the Unabomber by the FBI) was unwittingly a part of
for three years at Harvard, and then at the University of Michigan and
probably U.C. Stanford. In recalling some of the details of his
brother’s involvement in the covert behavior modification program,
David Kaczynski says of his older brother, “In a sense, he wasn’t
paranoid; he was in a sense conspired against.” Video offers hints
into the Project Paperclip-generated mind control program that
Kaczynski along with thousands of others (universities, mental
institutions, prisons, the military...) were victims of. For details
see Walter Bowart’s 1978 privished book, Operation Mind Control: Our
Secret Government’s War Against It’s Own People and Susan Ford’s 1999
book, Thanks for the Memories. (Chautauqua, NY July 26, 2005 (10:30)
[transcript/commentary]
Filmmakers notebook #92 May 1, 2006
We first encountered David Kaczynski in Dunkirk, NY where in a
Catholic church basement he spoke to over 100 people, the culmination
of the “N.Y. Interfaith Prison Pilgrimage,” April, 2002. He was there
as the executive director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty. He
told the story of his and his wife’s fearful, protracted awareness
that his brother was “the Unabomber.” It was a fascinating story, told
with depth and intelligence, a soft-spoken critique of the criminal
Justice System and betrayal by the FBI of the Kaczynski family. A rude
awakening. Only it’s not the whole story.*
We next filmed David Kaczynski in July, 2005 at Chautauqua
Institution, N.Y. in the “Hall of Philosophy”, an event hosted by the
Chautauqua Society for Peace and Social Justice of which Karen, my
partner and wife, is a member.
Kaczynski first updated his audience on death penalty issues then
recounted a truncated version of the story we had filmed three years
earlier.
Our primary question for David Kaczynski this time stemmed from
reading David McGowan’s chaotically organized, non-indexed goldmine,
Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder (iUniverse, 2004).
On page 135, McGowan writes, “…Ted Kaczynski, who was a subject of
MKULTRA experiments while he was a young student at Harvard…”
Here was a chance to ask David Kaczynski about his brilliant,
eccentric, loving older brother, and what the U.S. government may have
done to him and with him.
Since our brief interview with David Kaczynski (July 26, 2005), we’ve
looked a trace deeper into MKULTRA. Hence the footnotes and the
seemingly forced images in the 10 min. video of this interview
(conducted at Chautauqua Institution, Hall of Missions, Department of
Religion).
-------------------------------------------------
Snowshoefilms: At what point did you experience with Ted any sign of
serious psychological abnormality? At what point did that appear?
David Kaczynski: That’s a long story. I remember being maybe nine or
ten years old and asking my father one day, ‘Dad, what’s wrong with
Ted?’ So even at a very young age I had some sense that he was
different. I remember my father saying at that time saying, ‘David,
you have to understand. Your brother is very, very brilliant. He
doesn’t have a lot of…. a lot in common with other kids his age, but
you’ll see; he’ll grow up and mature. Some day he’ll have a family of
his own and he’ll find himself.’ [#1]
At one point, I remember my mother sharing with me this story of Ted
being in the hospital as a tiny baby. I don’t think that story would
have been developed if it wasn’t developed in order to explain
something. There’s a kind of accommodation that a family makes over
many, many years. You don’t think, ‘Well, that’s a mentally ill
person…’ You think, ‘Well, that’s Ted. That’s the way he is.’
I think I really began to get alarmed in the 1980s when some of Ted’s
letters to our parents seemed so bizarre. He’d say that they never
loved him and cite evidence and seemed to ignore all the nice and
loving things all their lives long and I realized at that point that
he was looking at the world through a very, very different lens.
Snowshoefilms: Approximately how old was he at that time?
David Kaczynski: Probably around 30 years old. Somewhere in there.
Looking back…. Actually, having read some of Ted’s diaries while he
was in college I think, he probably was having psychotic breaks as
early as his early 20s. He believed, for instance, that he’d been
visited by people in his apartment at the University of Michigan who
couldn’t possibly have been there. [# 2 ] He would have delusions that
other people were talking about him, kind of paranoid delusions. It’s
odd because it was really at this point that his brilliance as a
mathematician began to blossom. Right around this time….
We later found out that he wouldn’t go to class maybe for an entire
semester but then he’d show up on the last day and hand in some piece
of original research that blew the professor away and ended up being
published. So in some…. because of his academic and his extraordinary
success – and absence of any kind of obvious violence in him – you
know, I think our family thought he was different, but not necessarily
in a bad way.
Snowshoefilms: The reason we pose the question is that since we last
spoke with you in Dunkirk, we ran across in Dave McGowan’s book
Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder. He writes that your
brother was a victim of MKULTRA at Harvard.
David Kaczynski: Yes. Something I didn’t know about at all until it
was kind of discovered by his defense team [1]and then they began to
question our mother about it.
Snowshoefilms: Would you say what it is?
David Kaczynski: Yeah. Well, the MKULTRA program was actually a CIA
covert operation within the United States where unwitting suspects
[subjects] were made guinea pigs in research about psychotropic drugs,
various kinds of psychological pressure. I think there’s pretty clear
evidence that was a program at Harvard.
Ted was in a psychological research study run by a psychologist by the
name of Henry Murray. Now there’s no clear, unequivocal link that
connects that to the MKULTRA program, but it was a fairly abusive
research project. It would certainly not pass ethical muster today.
[#3].
Ted would meet once a week for a conversation with someone
about philosophy with someone he thought – was led to believe – was
another subject within the research project but actually was a plant.
It was a graduate student, and they were actually trying to study how
‘alienated youth’ – and Ted was identified as an alienated youth at
Harvard – would respond to having their philosophy of life and their
values challenged.
So for three years, beginning at the age of 17,
Ted was in this study…. I’ve read some of the transcripts and they
were pretty awful. I mean, they included personal attacks….
So as my brother is trying to make, you know, some kind of
philosophical point, his adversary in this debate is making
disparaging comments about his appearance, about his maturity, so, you
know, an interesting possible connection is that had actually been in
the OSS which was the forerunner of the CIA during World War II and
the projects he did had to do with debriefing prisoners of war. So we
wonder if he used some of the same tactics in sort of probing and
poking young, unwitting college students, and don’t know if the CIA
was directly involved but it’s certainly not outside the bounds of
possibility.
I don’t think that necessarily created Ted’s mental
illness. It might have been a triggering factor. It might have sort of
given shape to his belief that there were, you know, conspiracies
against him and that, you know, there was something sinister about the
technology of psychology and mind manipulation, and so forth. In a
sense, he wasn’t paranoid. He was…. He was, in a sense, conspired
against.
Snowshoefilms: Did you ever talk to him about his experience in that
‘psychology’ program?
David Kaczynski: No. You know, Mom had remembered it because since Ted
was only 17* when he went into this research project, parental consent
was needed, and Mom remembered getting a form, you know, Harvard
College, asking for her permission for Ted to be in this study and Mom
said, ‘Gee, I thought Ted’s…. You know, he’s socially awkward, he
doesn’t fit in very well. Maybe being exposed to psychologists could
be very helpful to him. Well, little did she know that this study
wasn’t conducted with his benefit in mind.
Snowshoefilms: How knowledgeable was Ted’s defense team about MKULTRA?
David Kaczynski: The defense apparently put a lot of research into
this. It was going to be at least one of their arguments for
mitigation that Ted had been seriously abused in this…. this research
program that might have even been funded by the federal government. It
was hard to get research, hard to make the connection fully. They [Ted
Kaczynski’s legal team] found that numbers of the records had actually
been destroyed – not for confidentiality reasons, or something. It was
destroyed because there was a congressional investigation of the
MKULTRA program and the then director really, uh, in contempt of
Congress, destroyed many of the records of that program. They did
eventually get to look at some of Murray’s private research papers.
That was where some of these transcripts were found. They also were
able to track down just a couple of other participants in the study,
one of which was, by the way, working at Las Alamos making big bombs.
A weird irony of the whole thing.
But as far as we know – and we don’t know much – Ted was the only one
who ended up with real serious problems. (6 minutes)
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How does one account for David Kaczynski’s reluctance to pursue this
story, the US government’s destruction and protracted use and abuse of
their brainy serial killer? Most likely, it’s for personal reasons, to
spare his mother more suffering. In his book Death in the Air:
Globalism, Terrorism & Toxic Warfare, Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz makes
this observation: “Acceptance is not easy in this regard. Coming to
terms with such facts leads, by necessity, through Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
‘death and dying’ process. In her model, denial is always the first
step in integrating a horrifying painful reality. It is not pleasant
to consider the possibility that many of our public servants cannot be
trusted, but even worse, that friends and family members may have been
injured or killed by such [programs].” p. xvii
And Leon Festinger, master behaviorist in the service of the State,
lays out in his team-produced book, written explicitly for the CIA and
the corporate think tanks (Ford Foundation, etc), A Theory of
Cognitive Dissonance. Festinger’s book is foremost an explanation of
HOW TO exploit cognitive dissonance. And in a way similar to George
Estabrooks’ books on hypnotism and his public willingness to use
hypnotism in service of the State. This, e.g., is Estabrooks’ Using
Hypnotism:
“The subject in hypnotism is not ‘asleep’ in any sense of the word.
He is just as wide awake as he ever was, just as alert, just as
discerning.
But he is highly suggestible and very co-operative.
He will do anything to oblige the hypnotist, within certain limits.”
Those limits constitute, in part, the changing nature of the
collective cognitive imperative, the collective understanding of
hypnosis as Julian Jaynes points out in his book The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes
repeatedly says that one of the first manifestations of consciousness
in our species is deception, a survival tactic; the ability to do
treachery (or long-term trickery) is a survival tactic embellishment
as bicamerality broke down.
The old “consciousness” was bicamerality, a culturally-induced
collective cognitive imperative or belief system – understood as
coming from god or gods, from which no one thought of wavering; the
hierarchy of gods was heard by the “right” side of the bicameral
(two-chamber) brain and interpreted by the left (with variations,
depending on whether one is right or left handed, and so on). The work
of Michael S. Gazzaniga (e.g., The Bisected Brain and The Social
Brain) provides technical insight into the vestigial structure of
bicamerality (though Gazzaniga’s personal political naiveté is
astounding).
The phenomenon of hypnotism also closely parallels the clinically
bisected human brain (see Gazzaniga) wherein with the corpus callosum
cut, physically disconnecting the right brain from the left, the left
brain provides rationalization for what the right brain experiences.
So also, we learn here from Estabrooks (p. 77):
“There is a second characteristic of the posthypnotic suggestion which
is of the greatest
importance. This we term rationalization. The subject tends to
rationalize, to find excuses for
his actions, and, strange to say, while these excuses may be utterly
false, the subject
tends to believe them.”
The conclusion I draw here is that the new tool of consciousness
enabled the “predator” of our species to distinguish himself from the
“prey’ by the prey’s vestigial bicameral mind, the willingness to
believe, the susceptibility to authority, “the highly suggestible and
very co-operative” many) who have the propensity to seek
authorization, that culturally reinforced trusted ersatz deity and/or
security of fitting in with the right crowd.
An aside: Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in her classic work, The Spiral of
Silence (Public Opinion- Our Social Skin) indicates that perhaps 20
percent of the public is not susceptible to and uncooperative toward
the collective cognitive imperative, whether it’s agreement with the
group on the different lengths of two sticks (a la Noelle-Neumann), or
submission to the culturally promulgated (news & entertainment media,
foremost) “official story.”
This coheres with our emphasis of Jaynes’ observation of long-term
treachery and recognition of treachery as indices of consciousness in
a society in transition from bicamerality.
I suspect that the “predator” (who’s also a prey) of our species can
preside in that Manichean metaphor (or collective cognitive
imperative) only so long as one accepts the validity of the metaphor:
predator/prey, us/them, the Capital System of haves and have-nots (to
use Istvan Meszaros’ phraseology).
Jaynes’ shortcoming is his superficial examination of people and
institutions (eg all the behaviorists who went to work for the CIA
etc. as well as the Nazi doctors from Paperclip Project who came up
with new and more ‘scientific’ ways to exploit the vestigial bicameral
mind via the Rothschild-dominated media. Or perhaps Jaynes was going
to deal with some of those issues in the book he promised in 1976, The
Consequences of Consciousness. What became of it?
Furthermore, of what use could Theodore Kaczynski been to the Project
Paperclip and Henry K? The answer is suggested in Susan Ford’s book,
Thanks For The Memories (The Memoirs of…Henry Kissinger’s
mind-controlled slave). Kissinger used Ford as a courier, a spy, a sex
favor proffered to others with power. Extraordinary what uses can be
made of another human being who’s being run via deeply imbedded post
hypnotic suggestion. Clearly, Kissinger could find many uses for a
brilliant mathematician under his control. And of course, young Ted
could have been a special project of master deviant MK-ULTRA
behaviorist and chemist Sidney Gottlieb for reasons as yet unknown.
NOTES
[#1] Before Henry Murray (and Sidney Gottlieb) got hold of Ted
Kaczynski, this was Harvard’s profile of their 16 year old
mathematical genius freshman:
“The health-services doctor who interviewed Kaczynski as part of the
medical examination Harvard required for all freshmen observed: ‘Good
impression created. Attractive, mature for age, relaxed. . . . Talks
easily, fluently and pleasantly. . . . likes people and gets on well
with them. May have many acquaintances but makes his friends
carefully. Prefers to be by himself part of the time at least. May be
slightly shy . . . . Essentially a practical and realistic planner and
an efficient worker. . . . Exceedingly stable, well integrated and
feels secure within himself. Usually very adaptable. May have many
achievements and satisfactions.’ [Italics are Mr. Emory’s]
The doctor further described Kaczynski thus: ‘Pleasant young man who
is below usual college entrance age. Apparently a good mathematician
but seems to be gifted in this direction only. Plans not crystallized
yet but this is to be expected at his age. Is slightly shy and
retiring but not to any abnormal extent. Should be [a] steady
worker.’”
[#2] See Thanks For The Memories: The Truth Has Set Me Free! by Brice
Taylor. In her book, Brice Taylor (Susan Ford) disgorged her (forcibly
repressed) memories of a life time of high-level abuse, mind control
and rape. Ford’s story is quite implausible to those who continue to
assume “our government” has in any sense the public’s best interests
in mind. It is also implausible, perhaps, to those who’ve never heard
of Project Paperclip, or MKULTRA (a story outlined in 1976 by W.H.
Bowart in his book Operation Mind Control: Our Secret Government’s War
Against Its Own People).
Probably you haven’t read Bowart’s book since Dell, the publisher,
warehoused the copies, privishing it. Though there are innumerable
ways (routes) to access (understand) Ford’s book, for the established
left, it’s out of bounds, beyond the pale, not serious. A young
progressive professor friend looked at the cover of Susan Ford’s book
and told me, “This is not credible.” I asked him what he meant, how he
knew. He showed me again the book’s cover and said, “It’s not
credible.” That’s that.
We hope to review Ford’s book elsewhere. Suffice it to say here that
her primary controller was Henry Kissinger. He used the highly
versatile mind control victim in nearly every way imaginable, except
for his personal pleasure. And it would hardly surprise me if Theodore
Kaczynski had told his parents – at a period when he was trying to
break from his control -- that Henry Kissinger visited him at Ann
Arbor.
[#3] Murray was a chief researcher at Harvard, conducting
psychological experiments under the supervision of Sidney Gottlieb.
[http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Henry_Murray]
See also, LA Times 1999: http://mdma.net/mk-ultra/sidney-gottlieb.html
“Henry Murray’s experiment was intended to measure how people react
under stress. Murray subjected his unwitting students, including
Kaczynski, to intensive interrogation—what Murray himself called
‘vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive’ attacks, assaulting his
subjects’ egos and most-cherished ideals and beliefs.” (Ibid.; pp.
3-4.)
“He [Murray] lent his talents to national aims during World War II.
Forrest Robinson, the author of a 1992 biography of Murray, wrote that
during this period he ‘flourished as a leader in the global crusade of
good against evil’ . . . . (He had long shown interest, for example,
in the whole subject of brainwashing.) During the war Murray served in
the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, helping
to develop psychological screening tests for applicants and (according
to Timothy Leary) monitoring military experiments on brainwashing. In
his book The Search for the ‘Manchurian candidate’ John Marks reported
that General ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the OSS director, ‘called in Harvard
psychology professor Henry ‘Harry’ Murray’ to devise a system for
testing the suitability of applicants to the OSS. Murray and his
colleagues ‘put together an assessment system . . . [that] tested a
recruit’s ability to stand up under pressure, to be a leader, to hold
liquor, to lie skillfully, and to read a person’s character by the
nature of his clothing. .. . Murray’s system became a fixture in the
OSS.’” (Ibid.; [Part II]; pp. 10-11.)
“After the war, Murray put his OSS-related skills to work at Harvard.
“Before the war, Murray had been the director of the Harvard
Psychological Clinic. After the war Murray returned to Harvard, where
he continued to refine techniques of personality assessment. In 1948,
he sent a grant application to the Rockefeller Foundation proposing
‘the development of a system of procedures for testing the suitability
of officer candidates for the navy.’ By 1950, he had resumed studies
on Harvard undergraduates that he had begun, in rudimentary form,
before the war, titled ‘Multiform assessments of Personality
Development Among Gifted College Men.’ The experiment in which
Kaczynski participated was the last and most elaborate in the series.
In their postwar form, these experiments focused on stressful dyadic
relations, designing confrontations akin to those mock interrogations
he had helped to orchestrate for the OSS.”
Sidney Gottlieb (1918-1999) born Joseph Schneider in the Bronx, was
Murray’s supervisor at Harvard. Gottlieb joined the CIA in 1951 where
he headed the chemical division of the Technical Services staff as a
poison expert. “Sidney became known as the "Black Sorcerer" and the
"Dirty Trickster". He supervised preparations of lethal poisons and
experiments in mind control . Sidney Gottlieb was probably best-known
for his involvement with the CIA’s mind control program (MKULTRA).
In April 1953 the CIA replaced Project Artichoke with a more ambitious
effort called MKULTRA, under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, a
brilliant chemist with a degree from CalTech. Gottlieb was the
ultimate dirty trickster, having personally participated in attempts
to assassinate foreign leaders. And he immediately put his talents to
work, this time against Americans. Once MKULTRA was established, say
Lee and Shlain, “almost overnight a whole new market for grants in LSD
research sprang into existence as money started pouring through
CIA-linked conduits.” Among these conduits was the Josiah J. Macy
Foundation, whose director was an ex-OSS officer named Frank
Fremont-Smith. And among the beneficiaries of this covert funding
would be Harold Abramson, an acquaintance of Gregory Bateson's
[Margaret Mead’s husband], who was an allergist at New York's Mount
Sinai Hospital and a CIA consultant to Edgewood Arsenal's Paperclip
scientists. Another was Hyde’s group at Boston Psychopathic. The aim,
Gottlieb explained, was “to investigate whether and how it was
possible to modify an individual's behavior by covert means.” LSD, he
hoped, would turn out to be the Swiss Army knife of mind control—an
all-purpose drug that could ruin a man's marriage, change his sexual
behavior, make him lie or tell the truth, destroy his memory or help
him recover it, induce him to betray his country or program him to
obey orders or disobey them. Soon, MKULTRA was testing all conceivable
drugs on every kind of victim, including prison inmates, mental
patients, foreigners, the terminally ill, homosexuals, and ethnic
minorities. Altogether, it conducted tests at fifteen penal and mental
institutions, concealing its role by using the U.S. Navy, the Public
Health Service, and the National Institute of Mental Health as funding
conduits. During the ten years of MKULTRA's existence, the agency's
inspector general reported after its termination in 1963, the program
experimented with “electro-shock, various fields of psychology,
psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment
substances, and paramilitary devices and materials.” http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/Chase.html
Snowshoefilms Note: Alston Chase’s book Harvard and the Unabomber
covers up more than it uncovers. What happened to Henry Murray’s
victims at Harvard. He blames Kaczynski’s parents for pushing their
son too hard. And then Chase’s panable book is further panned in
various reviews [e.g. : http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0311/reviews/mchugh.html
] where Murray’s experimentation with young Theodore Kaczynski is
dismissed as a “stressful but fundamentally silly pseudo-experiment…”
MKULTRA: http://www.eh.doe.gov/ohre/roadmap/achre/chap3_4.html
Paperclip http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/operationpaperclip.htm
Paperclip / Kissinger http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/project_paperclip.htm
“Project Paperclip was stopped [Ah, but -- even the cover of Linda
Hunt’s book’s book on Paperclip shows it continued at least until
1990, after which most of the Nazi scientists were dead /
Snowshoefilms note] in 1957, when West Germany protested to the U.S.
that these efforts had stripped it of "scientific skills." There was
no comment about supporting Nazis. Paperclip may have ended in 1957,
but as you can see from Licio Gelli and his international dealings
with the CIA in Italy/P2, and Heinrich Rupp with his involvement in
October Surprise, the ramifications of Paperclip are world-wide. The
Nazis became employed CIA agents, engaging in clandestine work with
the likes of George Bush, the CIA, Henry Kissinger, and the Masonic P2
lodge. This is but one of the results of Operation Paperclip. Another
umbrella project that was spawned from Paperclip was MK-ULTRA.
A secret laboratory was established and funded by CIA director, Allen
Dulles in Montreal, Canada at McGill University in the Allen Memorial
Institute headed by psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron. For the next
several years Dr. Ewen Cameron waged his private war in Canada. What
is ironic about Dr. Cameron is that he served as a member of the
Nuremberg tribunal who heard the cases against the Nazi doctors.
When it was at its height in drug experiments, operation MK-ULTRA was
formed. This was the brainchild of Richard Helms who later came to be
a CIA director. It was designed to defeat the "enemy" in its
brain-washing techniques. MK-ULTRA had another arm involved in
Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) known as MK-DELTA. The "doctors"
who participated in these experiments used some of the same techniques
as the Nazi "doctors". Techniques used by Dr. Cameron and previous
Nazi scientists include electro shock, sleep deprivation, memory
implantation, memory erasure, sensory modification, psychoactive drug
experiments, and many more cruel practices.
“The records of all these activities were destroyed in January 1973,
at the instruction of then CIA Director Richard Helms. In spite of
persistent inquiries by both the Health Subcommittee and the
Intelligence Committee, no additional records or information were
forthcoming. And no one -- no single individual -- could be found who
remembered the details, not the Director of the CIA, who ordered the
documents destroyed, not the official responsible for the program, nor
any of his associates.” -- U.S. SENATE,
SELECT COMMITTEE ON
INTELLIGENCE,
AND SUBCOMMITTEE ON HEALTH
AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
OF
THE COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES
Washington, D.C. August 3, 1977
http://www.druglibrary.org/Schaffer/History/e1950/mkultra/Hearing01.htm
[The Search for the Manchurian Candidate by John Marks (Chapter 8:
BRAINWASHING). http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks8.htm
IN 1947 HENRY KISSINGER SERVED AS GERMAN TRANSLATOR IN ARMY
INTELLIGENCE, to help Dulles set up these secret networks. He
personally "interrogated" many of the top Nazi prisoners held by the
US Army, who were absorbed into the CIA-BND. (see: The CIA’s worst
kept secret, by M. Lee, under Archived article "Nazi echo" at http://www.consortiumnews.com
A good part of the Kissinger story is revealed in Leonard Horowitz’s
book Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola.
And this: The CIA and West Nile Virus http://www.rense.com/general3/cia.htm
-------------------
[1] Theodore Kaczynski’s defense team: Quin Denvir and Judy Clarke
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur71.htm |
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