The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

“They disequilibrate people,” he said.

  “There’s all kinds of things you can do with the frequencies. Jesus, you can take a frequency and make a guy have diarrhea, make a guy sick to the stomach. I don’t understand why they even had to do this crap you saw in the photographs. They should have just blasted them with frequencies!”

  There was a silence. “Come to think of it, though,” he added, a little ruefully, “I’m not sure what the Geneva convention would say about something like that.”

  “The loud music and the frequencies?”

  “I guess no one’s even thought about that,” said the general. “That’s probably an untested set of waters from a Geneva convention perspective.”

  On May 12, 2004, Lynndie England gave an interview to Denver-based TV reporter Brian Maas:

  BRIAN MAAS: Did things happen in this prison to those Iraqi prisoners worse than what we’ve seen in these photographs?

  LYNNDIE ENGLAND: Yes.

  BRIAN MAAS: Can you tell me about that?

  LYNNDIE ENGLAND: No.

  BRIAN MAAS: What were you thinking when those photographs were taken?

  LYNNDIE ENGLAND: I was thinking it was kind of weird. ... I didn’t really, I mean, want to be in any pictures.

  BRIAN MAAS: There’s a photograph that was taken of you holding an Iraqi prisoner on a leash. How did that come about?

  LYNNDIE ENGLAND: I was instructed by persons in higher rank to “stand there, hold this leash, and look at the camera.” And they took a picture for PsyOps and that’s all I know… . I was told to stand there, give the thumbs-up, smile, stand behind all of the naked Iraqis in the pyramid [have my picture taken].

  BRIAN MAAS: Who told you to do that?

  LYNNDIE ENGLAND: Persons in my higher chain of command ... They were for PsyOps reasons and the reasons worked. So to us, we were doing our job, which meant we were doing what we were told, and the outcome was what they wanted. They’d come back and they’d look at the pictures and they’d state, “Oh, that’s a good tactic, keep it up. That’s working. This is working. Keep doing it, it’s getting what we need.”

  Lynndie England seemed to be saying that the photographs were nothing less than an elaborate piece of PsyOps theater. She said that the PsyOps people who told her to “keep doing it, it’s getting what we need” did not wear name tags. I was beginning to wonder whether the scenarios had, in fact, been carefully calculated by a PsyOps cultural specialist to present a vision that would most repel young Iraqi men. Could it be that the acts captured in the photographs were not the point at all, and the photographs themselves were the thing? Were the photographs intended to be shown only to individual Iraqi prisoners to scare them into cooperating, rather than to get out and scare the whole world?

  After I heard the interview with Lynndie England, I dug out my notes of my time at PsyOps. The unit had let me into their Fort Bragg headquarters to show me their CD collection in October 2003, the same month as the Abu Ghraib pictures had been taken. I skimmed through all the talk of “unfulfilled needs” and “desired behavior” until I found my conversation with the friendly boffin in civilian clothing, the “senior cultural analyst” named Dave, who specializes in the Middle East.

  Our conversation had at the time seemed innocuous. We were talking about PsyOps “products” in general. All PsyOps materials were known as “products”—their radio shows, their leaflets, and so on.

  As I reread my notes, what he had said to me took on a whole new resonance.

  “We think about how an Iraqi will react to our products, not how an American will react to our products,” he said.

  He told me they had boards—committees of military analysts and specialists—who look at each product to see whether it furthers the cause of U.S. foreign policy.

  “And if it passes muster,” he said, “we’ll produce it, either here or forward [in Iraq].”

  Then Dave spoke about how the target audience for their “products”—Iraqi forces or Iraqi civilians or Iraqi detainees—were not always the most willing customers.

  “It’s not like selling Coke,” he said. “Sometimes you’re trying to sell someone something that you know they might not want in their hearts. So it causes ambiguities, and problems. And they have to think about it. It’s more like selling someone vitamin D to drink. Something they may not want, but they need it to survive.”

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “It causes ambiguities,” he said.

  10. A THINK TANK

  In early 2004 I heard a rumor that Jim Channon had begun privately meeting with General Pete Schoomaker, the new chief of staff of the United States Army.

  President Bush had appointed General Schoomaker to the post on August 4, 2003. His “arrival message,” to use the military vernacular for an acceptance speech, included the following sentences:

  War is both a physical reality and a state of mind. War is ambiguous, uncertain and unfair. When we are at war, we must think and act differently. We must anticipate the ultimate reality check—combat. We must win both the war and the peace. We must be prepared to question everything. Our soldiers are warriors of character… . Our azimuth to the future is good.

  Azimuth? I looked it up. It is “the direction of a celestial object.” News of General Schoomaker’s meetings with Jim Channon did not come as a great surprise to me. (In addition to the linguistic clues, in fact, the timeline of General Schoomaker’s career fit. He had been a commander of Special Forces at Fort Bragg between February 1978 and August 1981, and also in the latter half of 1983, during the periods when the Jedi Warriors and the goat starers were at their most active within his corner of the base. I can’t believe he hadn’t known about, or indeed sanctioned, their endeavors.)

  The rumor was that General Schoomaker was considering bringing Jim back from retirement to create, or contribute to, a new and secret think tank, designed to encourage the army to take their minds further and further outside the mainstream.

  Jim had been a member of a similar group back in the early 1980s. It was called Task Force Delta, and it comprised three hundred or so high-ranking soldiers who met four times a year for rituals and brainstorming sessions at Fort Leavenworth, and spent the time in between communicating with one another through something they called the Meta Network, which was an early incarnation of the Internet.

  It was a Task Force Delta soldier named Colonel Frank Burns, one of Jim Channon’s oldest friends, who launched this technology for the army in the late 1970s. In 1983 Colonel Burns wrote a poem in which he envisioned how his fledgling communications network might one day influence the world:

  Imagine the emergence of a new meta-culture.

  Imagine all kinds of people everywhere

  getting committed to human excellence,

  getting committed to closing the gap

  between the human condition

  and the human potential …

  And imagine all of us hooked up

  with a common high tech communications system.

  That’s a vision that brings tears to the eyes.

  Human excellence is an ideal

  that we can embed

  into every formal human structure

  on our planet.

  And that’s really why we’re going to do this.

  And that’s also why

  The Meta Network is a creation

  we can love.

  Notwithstanding Colonel Burns’s failure to foresee that people would use the Internet mostly to access porn and look themselves up on Google, his prescience was admirable. This same colonel is also widely believed, along with Jim Channon, to be the inspiration behind the recruitment slogan “Be All You Can Be,” and the related jingle that all but single-handedly transformed the army’s fortunes in the 1980s. Colonel Burns attributed his ideas to reading Jim’s First Earth Battalion Operations Manual.

  A lack of recruits had been the great crisis facing the army back then. It was no wonder, now that General Schoomaker, a
Jim Channon fan, was in charge of the army, that these men would be enlisted once again to contribute their ideas to the new crisis, the War on Terror.

  Jim e-mailed to say that the General Schoomaker think-tank rumors were true. The idea had come about, he explained, “because Rumsfeld has now openly asked for creative input on the war on terrorism ... mmmm.”

  Jim added that he didn’t want me to contact General Schoomaker for a comment: “I cannot bear the thought you would interrupt this man’s important day with such a gratuitous request. Get a grip! This is media sickness and is grinding the world to a halt! I know you understand.”

  But Jim did offer some information about his input into George W. Bush’s foreign policy:

  The Army has requested my services to teach the most highly selected Majors. The First Earth Battalion is the teaching exemplar of choice. I have done that in the presence of General Pete Schoomaker … I am in contact with players who are or have recently been in Afghanistan and Iraq. I have sent in exit strategy plans based on Earth Battalion ideals.

  I talk weekly with a member of a stress control battalion in Iraq who carries the manual and uses it to inform his teammates of their potential service contribution. Remember, the battalion mythology operates like folklore. It is passed [on] in stories, not assignments or real world artifacts. The results are ubiquitous, infectious, but not archived well by definition.

  Although Jim professed no interest in the “real world artifacts” inspired by him, scattered around the War on Terror, I had become somewhat obsessed with identifying them.

  Little pieces of the First Earth Battalion were turning up all over postwar Iraq. A former military spy I spoke to divided Jim’s modern-day fans into two categories—the Black Ninjas and the White Ninjas—and that’s how I came to see them too.

  The 785th Medical Company Combat Stress Control unit, based in Taji, twenty miles north of Baghdad, were White Ninjas. One of their soldiers, Christian Hallman, e-mailed me:

  I utilize many FEB technologies—meditation, yoga, qigong, relaxation, visualization—all part of the FEB toolbox for treating combat stress. It would be great if you came over to Iraq to interview me, but I have to clear it with my commander first. He has read some of the FEB literature that I gave him and has even spoken with Jim over the telephone.

  The next day Christian e-mailed me again: “My commander needs to speak with the XO before making his decision.”

  And then, on the third day:

  My commander has declined permission. He doesn’t want to run the risk of possibly distorting what we do and our reputation. Sometimes politics wins out.

  Peace in the Middle East,

  Christian.

  A few weeks after I received this e-mail I learned 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 had 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 mentioned it to me only as an afterthought when I met him in the coffee bar of the Malmaison Hotel, near Manchester Piccadilly Station, on the morning of June 7, 2004.

  Jamal is a web site designer. He lives with his sisters in Moss Side. He is thirty-seven, divorced, with three children. He said he pressumed that MI5 had followed him there to the hotel, but he’d stopped worrying about it. He said he kept seeing the same man watching him from across the street, leaning against a car, and whenever the man thought he’d been spotted he looked briefly panicked and immediately bent down to fiddle casually with his tire.

  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 learned 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 said that al-Harith basically means “seed planter.”

  In October 2001, Jamal visited Pakistan as a tourist, he said. He was in Quetta, on the Afghanistan border, four days into his trip, 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 (off-camera), “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 didn’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 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 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, som
etimes 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 mishmash.”

  “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 closed-circuit TV 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.