If I understand correctly "thought reform" and "brainwashing" are terms that you use interchangeably, I also understand that you regard Margaret Singer as an cult authority. I quoted from her book the excerpt on your web-site,
Quote
The tactics of a thought-reform program are organized to:
Destabilize a person's sense of self,
Get the person to drastically reinterpret his or her life's history and radically alter his or her worldview and accept a new version of reality and causality,
Develop in the person a dependence on the organization, and thereby turn the person into a deployable agent of the organization.
and then made an abbreviated correlation between what happens in AA and the tactics she describes as "brainwashing". The only thing you could possibly question is my interpretation of the process AA uses to ensnare people because the other things come directly from your site. I am confident that further investigation would confirm my findings. If you ask 10 people that were successfully brainwashed and 10 that weren't brainwashed I bet you would get a 50% agreement with me, doing what you do for a living I'm sure you know that those that get sucked in can never see it for what it is or they would have avoided it. I believe a neutral person who went to an AA meeting and feigned being in a crisis and put on the desperate airs would confirm all of this.
It seems to me this field of "cult study" is very subjective and that getting AA classified as a cult is more a matter of opinion than anything based upon empirical data. According to information available on your web-site I easily made the connection between AA's recruitment tactics and "brainwashing" or "thought reform", which is #2 on Robert Lifton's list of 3 characteristics of a cult. Bill Wilson is their venerated (although very dead) guru, and they harm people by "brainwashing" them into thinking their continuous involvement in AA is the only thing that will "save" them.