[Peace-discuss] The Men Who Stare at Goats

[Lisa Chason]

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson 
Picador £16.99, pp240 

Jon Ronson is forced to begin his book with an extraordinary disclaimer:
'This,' he writes, with some authentic shock and awe, 'is a true story.'
As you read on, it is hard to shift the impact of those five small words
from your mind. It would be far, far better for all of us, you can't
help thinking, if it turned out that Jon Ronson had actually made up his
entire, wonderful investigation into 'psychological warfare' techniques
used by America's elite Special Forces. 

If he had not, for example, discovered that there was a Major General
Albert Stubblebine III directing operations from Arlington, Virginia,
who firmly believes he can walk through walls. Or if the existence of a
secret unit in which psyops personnel stared at goats for hours on end
with the aim of killing them was actually a figment of a warped author's
imagination. Or that the Pentagon's playlist of torture music for use at
Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was, in reality, a juvenile attempt at satire.
Terrifyingly, however, all this - and much more - is shown, as he says,
to be true. 

Ronson started out on his surrealist quest with a hunch. There was, he
believed, some deep-seated irrationality at the heart of America's war
on terror. Once he had this simple thought in mind, one thing led to
another. It began with Uri Geller, who Ronson interviewed three years
ago about his claims that he was a 'psychic spy' working for US
intelligence. Geller led him to Stubblebine and Stubblebine put him in
touch with Lieutenant Colonel (retd) Jim Channon, who first started the
madness. 

Channon had witnessed horrors as a young officer in Vietnam and he
believed that the army required a new approach to combat. Having imbibed
some of the more extreme Californian philosophies, Channon approached
military top brass with the notion of a 'First Earth Battalion' of
'warrior monks' - soldiers who would carry with them into hostile
countries 'symbolic animals' such as baby lambs, learn to greet people
with 'sparkly eyes' and give the enemy 'an automatic hug'. 
Their only weapons would be 'discordant sounds' and 'psycho-electric'
guns that could direct positive energy into crowds. Channon's ideas,
unbelievably, became current in certain branches of the US army and, in
bizarre, mutant form, have been employed in the current war on terror.
Ronson is happy to present himself as slow on the uptake in his quest,
not least because it often seems so incredible. He affects an air of
very British vagueness that wins over his uniformed interviewees, but he
has a genius for detail. Once he gets a fact, he clings to it,
interrogates it, makes it relate to other facts. 

There is a sort of gonzo spirit in his approach which sometimes lends an
air of farce to his findings, but few more earnest investigative
journalists would have had the brilliant bloody-mindedness to get what
he has got and hardly any would have the wit to present it with as much
clarity. 

He slips, too, very skilfully between registers in tone. Ronson knows
exactly what is funny - what other response is there to torturers with
Fleetwood Mac CDs in their arsenal? - but he also knows when that
laughter begins to look grotesque. His account of the use of the theme
from the children's TV show Barney - 'I Love You', which, played on a
loop, has been used to disorient prisoners - is one of the most chilling
things I have read about the war. 

At one point, Ronson describes seven photographs of a man who underwent
such an 'I Love You' torture regime in a shipping container at a disused
railway station in al-Qa'im, Iraq. 'His face is deeply lined, like an
old man's, but his wispy moustache reveals that he is probably 17...
there's an open wound on one of his skinny arms and above it someone has
written a number with a black marker pen. He might have done terrible
things. I know nothing about him other than these seven fragments of his
life. But I can say this. In the last photograph, he is screaming so
hard it looks as if he is laughing.' 

If Joseph Heller lurks in the margins of Ronson's book - who else could
have pulled off the goat-staring GIs? - so, too, does Hannah Arendt. At
least, Ronson, for all his coyness, makes you feel at times the full
force of her assertion that 'most evil is done by people who never make
up their minds to be either good or evil'. It is his acute grip on the
nuance of this idea that makes his book not only a narcotic road trip
through the wackier reaches of Bush's war effort, but also an unmissable
account of some of the insanity that has lately been done in our names. 

Guardian 30.10.2004 


 
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