Sheila,
If you are going to quote from that website, don't leave out the rest of the section:
There are a few things about the original design of the RPF that I now certainly think were wrong, and wish I had done otherwise; in practice, on the ship at least, these things worked themselves out well and eased my conscience. The principal one I have in mind is that the RPF should be fed on the remains of the food given to the general crew. This requirement was well within the traditions of the Sea Org but nonetheless was wrong and unworkable. People have to have decent food and enough of it. I also demanded that RPF people not speak to any crew unless spoken to first. On the ship, this gave way to the practical needs of working together, and nobody made any fuss about it.
Off the ship, others set up RPFs. By all accounts, some of these became sadly distorted. By that time, the Byzantine(2) politics of the organization made my intervention pointless.
Whatever else one reads into the documents that set up and formed the RPF on the ship, I don't see how one can miss that the RPF (a) took people out of a highly enturbulated environment, (b) gave them physical tasks to do that they could complete, task by task, (c) encouraged them to do very good jobs of what they were doing, (d) gave them plenty of time in which to study and deliver auditing sessions of each other, (e) was intended to help them recover their own morale (or, in some cases, find it for the first time), (f) returned them to the regular crew.
That Jon can say that they spent all their time 'revealing their evil purposes' is ranting nonsense. In session, they were given all the rights of preclears everywhere. If there were evil purposes demanding handling they were addressed. There were technical fads from time to time that might have included checking for evil purposes. RPF members received tough Ethics handlings, yes. That was expected and accepted.
I saw a lot of people improve their own conditions markedly by working through the RPF on the ship. If some had a hard time because of incorrect ethics or technical handling I hope they have had or will have the opportunity to repair the damage completely.
This web article is Ken's response to what he perceieves as inacuracies and misrepresentations of statements by Jon Atack in a Piece of Blue Sky published in 1990, 21 years ago....
Note that Ken left the co$ in 1982!
The RPF on the ship was nothing like what it became later.
I have friends that were on the RPF in the late 70s and early 80s and the main focus during that time was progress on their co-auditing....which also meant they were pcs and needed to be sessionable and fed.
The RPF horrors started years after Ken left the SO. To think he could have done anything about what the RPF became is absurd.
PS. And, I should have read the rest of the thread before I responded, as I see things turned around later in the thread...but still, the dropped out time was important to bring up.
Have you had a chance to chat with Ken?
Marina