Return from Spookyville
On June 2 I posted a piece called A short trip to Spookyville , concerning the incredible allegations of Dr. Sue Arrigo M.D., allegedly an "ex- CIA physician with high level access".
Briefly, she maintained that HIV/Aids was deliberately unleashed on the world and that there is a vaccine which has been kept secret. She also described running secret missions for Dick Cheney and to have twice treated Osama bin Laden after 9/11. My post was picked up by several conspiracy sites.
It's not that I wasn't skeptical of her claims. In fact I wrote: "Just because someone has an M.D. after her name does not mean that she may not be suffering from mental illness. "
One thing that did intrigue me, however, was that her sister Maria Arrigo, Ph.D., described herself in a paper as "a social psychologist studying intelligence ethics and as daughter of an undercover intelligence officer."
As it turns out Sue Arrigo has another sister, Linda Gail Arrigo, Ph.D. in Sociology, who left a comment on my original post stating in part:
I am sorry to say that my sister Sue Ann Arrigo has periodic episodes of paranoid schizophrenia, and this has been over a period of ten years at least. It is amazing how her wild stories have proliferated all over the web.I have since exchanged a few emails with Linda Arrigo. She writes:
I believe that my sister Sue Ann has been having periodic bouts of paranoid schizophrenia since about 15 years ago. She is convinced that our father was both a member of the CIA and the Mafia, and that he inducted her at a young age into intelligence activities, and that she has been under mind control since then, and subject to frequent kidnapping and threats by agents, wherever she is in the world. However, she has no material or historical evidence of this other than her later memories and physical symptoms, as she reported recently for supposedly being kidnapped in Ireland in early June 2007. I talked by telephone with my mother who was with her right afterwards and accompanied her to the doctor and the police, and my mother now believes Sue Ann is subject to hallucinations.Given the incredible allegations of Dr. Sue Arrigo, the complete lack of supporting evidence, and this statement by her sister, I see no reason to give any credence to her claims. I wish her well.
Our father, born 1914, served 20 years in the U.S. military, about 1941-61, in Europe, the Pentagon, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. His work was logistics, not intelligence. I lived with him in Taiwan 1963-68; my sisters had virtually no contact with him after 1962. He is senile now, in San Francisco, and I sorted through most of his papers during the last few summers. He is not a pleasant personality, but I am certain he had no such CIA contacts or capacity.
If any consistent check were made on Sue Ann's schooling and employment for the last 30 years, it would be obvious that her current allegations of service as a CIA medic are pure fantasy, even if well-informed by public knowledge of current issues in U.S. government behavior.
There are enough real victims of U.S. military and intelligence actions; it is not surprising, perhaps, that victims of schizophrenia like my sister should feed on these accounts.
