The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson

[Don Genaro]

I see there is a thread that discusses the movie but none for the book so here it goes...

I ordered this book after watching Jon Ronson in an interview with Conan O’Brien that someone posted on Facebook. It was a short interview in which they talked about psychopathy and so, being intrigued, I decided to order “The Men Who Stare at Goats”. I thought it might be another good book to show psychopathy in action. In some ways it is. In other ways it’s quite bizarre.

Wikipedia has this to say about it:

Primary themes
The book examines connections between military programs and psychological techniques being used for interrogation in the War on Terror. The book traces the evolution of these covert activities over the past three decades, and sees how they are alive today within U.S. Homeland Securityand the Iraq War. It examines the use of the theme tune to Barney & Friends on Iraqi prisoners-of-war, the smuggling of a hundred de-bleatedgoats into the Special Forces command center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and the connection between the U.S. military and the mass-suicide of members of the Heaven's Gate cult in San Diego.[2]

as well as this:

TV documentary
The book accompanies a three-part TV series broadcast on Channel 4 in Britain, Crazy Rulers of the World. The three parts were titled "The Men Who Stare at Goats", "Funny Torture" and "Psychic Footsoldiers" respectively. The idea of the project was to explore "the apparent madness at the heart of U.S. military intelligence." The series discusses and includes members of Psychological operations, First Earth Battalion, and also discusses Project MKULTRA and Frank Olson, including interviews with his son, Eric Olson.

Yeah right, "apparent madness" - sure they're just a bunch of loonies; what harm could they do?

To be honest, I found the book a bit bizarre. Nicklebleu said in another thread devoted to a different book by the author in question, something which I think is relevant:

…I was very much in two minds about it ...

…BUT, at the same time it blunts the message totally...

…The feeling I had of this book - and maybe I am imagining things - is that it adresses a problem that has come into focus more and more and tries to defuse it. It takes a lot of true facts and dilutes them and puts a slant on them that leaves the reader with the feeling "Yeah, it IS a problem, but no more so than other problems". It detracts from the fact, that this is THE PROBLEM, from which a lot of different problems are derived.

To me this smells a bit of "damage control" (or Cointelpro?), having read this book, the reader can safely slip back into sleep, after all it's just another problem, like all the others ...

Also the previous quote in the same thread by biggreenpea has some relevance here:

i am today trying to decide whether or not to buy this book...and my doubting finally brought me to the review posted on sott...which i recommend everyone read. i am only operating on "hunch"...based on my past readings, which include hare and lobaciewski, the daily show interview, and ronson himself. my sense was that the interveiw was light and more funny than the topic merits...but that is jon stewart for you. my sense is that the mainstream will take a while to comprehend this topic. ronson himself seems to prefer maintaining a skeptical distance...one that seems based in "intellectual arrogance". again, that is a hunch. but the book is rather small and like "men who stare at goats", seems more about entertainment than education. ronson has to make a living too...and i actually enjoy his writing...i am just not sure if this is yet a book to get excited about. hopefully many more people will read it and be drawn to the deeper issues...mentioned in the review on sott (a link is a few comments above mine). my feelings are part based in my experience with facebook conversations. not only will there be many who are slow to accept this new information because of intellectual arrogance, but there are still many "new agey' types who think we can just "love" anyone into health...or flow...if you find flow you will never have to meet a psychopath. except that you may accidentally vote for one.

Anyway, I think part of the problem is that this book comes across as too light-hearted indeed for the topic at hand. There are times when he’s talking about the use of torture and he chooses to talk about the more bizarre and ridiculous methods that don’t even sound like real torture. At times it feels like you’re reading a Bill Bryson book and feel almost inclined to laugh at the ideas he discusses until you remember what it is he’s actually talking about. He makes a valid point about the use of Barney the Dinosaur music by soldiers in Iraq as a form of torture. He tells of how he was sent out by an officer to check out what was going on in an industrial container at the back of a disused railway station. He saw a soldier standing outside the container who warned him to keep away but says that from what he could perceive, they were really blasting repeatedly, the song “I Love You, You Love Me” and flashing this very bright light into the container. As the author suggests, this may all have been a Psy Ops operation for the benefit of the people back home since when it was leaked, there were a great many jokes by the newscasters reporting that “ha ha, that would definitely drive me mad!” The making light of torture and the planting in the minds of the public the idea that “it can’t be that bad really”. I’m aware that it has been mentioned here before that another reason for the torture “leaks” may have been as a warning to the dissenters so these stories may have been damage control or they may have been another aspect to the whole torture story. As the author also points out, he wasn’t allowed near the container so he didn’t actually see what was going on in there for sure. It may indeed have been all that was going on in that particular chamber- I get the impression that these guys without conscience probably try both “fun” and cruel methods of torture as a study technique.
I guess it’s a book worth reading in conjunction with watching the documentary Psywar - The real battlefield is your mind

The reason I am inclined to think that it’s mainly a damage control and disinfo book is that the author got regularly accepted into military confidence and I’m quite sure that even though quite a lot of the strange stories are in essence true, I feel that they also performed quite a bit of psyops on the author himself- after all, that’s what psyops is all about.
I’m including an excerpt here of the story of one British man who ended up spending two years in Guantanamo. Observe the really weird nature of the ghetto blaster story. As we have been made aware before, programming can take many forms. One can only wonder what’s in Kris Kristofferson’s Greatest Hits that could be used as psyops? My point is that the stories are almost too fun in such an horrific tale. The book is almost too entertaining which suggests psyops to me. Anyone got any ideas on this?

A few weeks after I received this email I learnt of a fact that struck me as so bizarre, so incongruous, that I didn’t know what to do with it. It was at once banal and extraordinary, and utterly inconsistent with the other facts that encircled it. It was something that happened to a Mancunian called Jamal al-Harith in a place called the
Brown Block. Jamal doesn’t know what to make of it either, so he has put it to one side, and only mentioned it to me as an afterthought when I met him in the coffee bar of
the Malmaison Hotel, near Manchester Piccadilly Station, on the morning of 7 June 2004.

Jamal is a website designer. He lives with his sisters in Moss Side. He is thirty-seven, divorced, with three children. He said he assumed MI5 had followed him here to the
hotel, but he’s stopped worrying about it. He said he keeps seeing the same man watching him from across the street, leaning against a car, and whenever the man thinks he’s been spotted he looks briefly panicked and immediately bends down to fiddle casually with his tyre.

Jamal laughed when he told me this.

Jamal was born Ronald Fiddler into a family of second-generation Jamaican immigrants. When he was twenty-three he learnt about Islam and converted, changing his name to Jamal al-Harith for no particular reason, other than that he liked the sound of it. He says al-Harith basically means ‘seed planter’.

In October 2001, Jamal visited Pakistan as a tourist, he says. He was in Quetta, on the Afghanistan border, four days into when the American bombing campaign began. He quickly decided to leave for Turkey and paid a local truck driver to take him there. The driver said the route would take them through Iran, but somehow they ended up in Afghanistan, where they were stopped by a gang of Taliban supporters. They asked to see Jamal’s passport, and he was promptly arrested and thrown in jail on suspicion of being a British spy.

Afghanistan fell to the coalition. The Red Cross visited Jamal in prison. They suggested he cross the border into Pakistan, and make his own way back home to Manchester, but Jamal had no money, so instead he asked to be put in contact with the British Embassy in Kabul.

Nine days later – while he waited in Kandahar for the embassy to transport him home – the Americans picked him up.

‘The Americans,’ Jamal said, ‘kidnapped me.’ When he said ‘kidnapped’ he looked surprised at himself for using such a dramatic word.

The Americans in Kandahar told Jamal he needed to be sent to Cuba for two months for administrative processing, and so on, and the next thing he knew he was on a plane, shackled, his arms chained to his legs, and then chained to a hook on the floor, his face covered in earmuffs and goggles and a surgical mask, bound for Guantanamo Bay.

In the weeks after Jamal’s release, two years later, he gave a few interviews, during which he spoke of the shackles and the solitary confinement and the beatings – the
things the outside world had already imagined about life inside that mysterious compound. He said they beat his feet with batons, pepper-sprayed him and kept him inside a cage that was open to the elements, with no privacy or protection from the rats and snakes and scorpions that crawled around the base. But these were not sensational revelations.

He spoke with ITV’s Martin Bashir, who asked him (offcamera), ‘Did you see my Michael Jackson documentary?’

Jamal replied, ‘I’ve, uh, been in Guantanamo Bay for two years.’

When I met Jamal he began to tell me about the more bewildering abuses. Prostitutes were flown in from the States – he doesn’t know whether they were there only to smear their menstrual blood on the faces of the more devout detainees. Or perhaps they were brought in to service the soldiers, and some PsyOps boffin – a resident cultural analyst – devised this other job for them as an afterthought, exploiting the resources at the army’s disposal.

‘One or two of the British guys,’ Jamal told me, ‘said to the guards, “Can we have the women?” But the guards said, “No, no, no. The prostitutes are for the detainees who don’t actually want them.” They explained it to us! “If you want it, it’s not going to work on you.”’ ‘So what were the prostitutes doing to the detainees?’ I asked.

‘Just messing about with their genitals,’ said Jamal. ‘Stripping off in front of them. Rubbing their breasts in their faces. Not all the guys would speak. They’d just come back from the Brown Block [the interrogation block] and be quiet for days and cry to themselves, so you know something went on but you don’t know what. But for the guys who did speak, that’s what we heard.’

I asked Jamal if he thought that the Americans at
Guantanamo were dipping their toes into the waters of exotic interrogation techniques.

‘They were doing a lot more than dipping,’ he replied.

And that’s when he told me about what happened to him inside the Brown Block.

Jamal said that, being new to torture, he didn’t know whether the techniques tested on him were unique to Guantanamo, or as old as torture itself, but they seemed pretty weird to him. Jamal’s description of life inside the Brown Block made Guantanamo Bay sound like an experimental interrogation lab, teeming not only with intelligence agents, but also with ideas. It was as if, for the first time in the soldiers’ careers, they had prisoners and a ready-made facility at their disposal, and they couldn’t resist
putting all their concepts – which had until then languished, sometimes for decades, in the unsatisfactory realm of the theoretical – into practice.

First there were the noises.

‘I would describe them as industrial noises,’ Jamal said. ‘Screeches and bangs. These would be played across the Brown Block into all the interrogation rooms. You can’t
describe it. Screeches, bangs, compressed gas. All sorts of things. Jumbled noises.’

‘Like a fax machine cranking up into use?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Jamal. ‘Not computer-generated. Industrial. Strange noises. And mixed in with it would be something like an electronic piano. Not as in music, because there was
no rhythm to it.’

‘Like a synthesizer?’

‘Yes, a synthesizer mixed in with industrial noises. All a jumble and a mish-mash.’

‘Did you ever ask them, “Why are you blasting these strange noises at us?”’ I said.

‘In Cuba, you learn to accept,’ said Jamal.

The industrial noises were blasted across the block. But the strangest thing of all happened inside Jamal’s own interrogation room. The room was furnished with a CCTV camera and a two-way mirror. Jamal would be brought in for fifteen-hour sessions, during which time they got nothing out of him because, he said, there was nothing to get. He said his past was so clean – not even a parking ticket – that
at one point someone wandered over to him and whispered, ‘Are you an MI5 asset?’

‘An MI5 asset!’ said Jamal. He whistled. ‘Asset!’ he repeated. ‘That was the word he used!’

The interrogators were getting more and more cross with Jamal’s apparent steely refusal to crack. Also, Jamal used his time inside the Brown Block to do stretching exercises, keeping himself sane. Jamal’s exercise regime made the interrogators more angry, but instead of beating him, or threatening him, they did something very odd indeed.

A Military Intelligence officer brought a ghetto blaster into his room. He put it on the floor in the corner. He said, ‘Here’s a great girl-band doing Fleetwood Mac songs.’

He didn’t blast the CD at Jamal. This wasn’t sleepdeprivation, and it wasn’t an attempt to induce the Bucha Effect. Instead, the agent simply put it on at normal volume.

‘He put it on,’ said Jamal, ‘and he left.’

‘An all-girl Fleetwood Mac covers band?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ said Jamal.

This sounded to me like the tip of a very strange iceberg.

‘And what happened next?’ I asked.

‘When the CD was finished, he came back into the room
and said, “You might like this.”

And he put on Kris Kristofferson’s greatest hits. Normal volume. And he left the
room again. And then, when that was finished, he came back and said, “Here’s a Matchbox Twenty CD.”’

‘Was he doing it for entertainment purposes?’ I asked.

‘It’s interrogation,’ said Jamal. ‘I don’t think they were trying to entertain me.’

‘Matchbox Twenty?’ I said.

I didn’t know much about Matchbox Twenty. My research reveals them to be a four-piece country rock band from Florida, who do not sound particularly abrasive (like
Metallica and ‘Burn Motherfucker Burn!’) nor irritatingly repetitive (like Barney and ‘Ya! Ya! Das Is a Mountain’). They sound a bit like REM. The only other occasion when I
They sound a bit like REM. The only other occasion when I had heard of Matchbox Twenty was when Adam Piore from Newsweek told me that they too had been blasted into the shipping containers in al-Qā’im.

I mentioned this to Jamal and he looked astonished.

‘Matchbox Twenty?’ he said.

‘Their album More Than You Think You Are,’ I said.

There was a silence.

‘I thought they were just playing me a CD,’ said Jamal. ‘Just playing me a CD. See if I like music or not. Now I’ve heard this I’m thinking there must have been something else
going on. Now I’m thinking, why did they play that same CD to me as well? They’re playing this CD in Iraq and they’re playing the same CD in Cuba. It means to me there
is a programme. They’re not playing music because they think people like or dislike Matchbox Twenty more than other music. Or Kris Kristofferson more than other music.
There is a reason. There’s something else going on. Obviously I don’t know what it is. But there must be some other intent.’

‘There must be,’ I said.

Jamal paused for a moment and then he said, ‘You don’t know how deep the rabbit hole goes, do you? But you know it is deep. You know it is deep.’

 

[Gonzo]

These reports of playing conventional music makes me wonder if they added a subliminal layer or of one was added all along. The latter thought makes me wonder about Barney's theme song.

The tune itself is much older than Barney. In my childhood, the tune was used for the song/nursery rhyme "This Old Man" (knick knack paddy wack, give the dog a bone, this old man goes rolling home).

What a perfect design, to program young children with commands embedded in a popular kids' show theme song and then, later in their lives, trigger the commands with something else, perhaps more adjusted popular music.

When you think about the stories of Laurel Canyon, we are reminded how close the security and intelligence establishment can work with the recording companies and entertainment industry.

How deep the rabbit hole indeed.

Although I hadn't read the book, I certainly felt there was a form of minimizing psyops while pretending to show disdain for "the dark side". The allegation in the movie was that the unit was formed to uncover and design non-lethal weapons based on the human potential. And the original unit members were dismayed to see their unit repurposed for more nefarious means - mind control, torture, etc.

While there may have been interest in developing non-lethal abilities, I think the purpose would have ultimately been to control people and possibly to unleash these abilities on larger populations. This is not peaceful, merely less physically violent.

It reminds me of how certain scientists who have helped develop technologies for a government are shocked when that government uses the technology for military purposes. Atomic energy is an example that comes to mind.

Gonzo