The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  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 sleep deprivation, 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 revealed them to be a four-piece country rock band from Florida, who do not sound particularly abrasive (like Metal-lica and “Burn Motherfucker Burn!”) or irritatingly repetitive (like Barney and “Ya! Ya! Das Is a Mountain”). 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 program. 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.”

  11. A HAUNTED HOTEL

  Joseph Curtis (not his real name) worked the night shift at the Abu Ghraib prison in the autumn of 2003. Then he was exiled by the army to a town in Germany. The threat of a court-martial hung over him. He had given an interview about what he had seen to an international press agency, thus incurring the wrath of his superiors. Even so, against his own better judgment, and against his lawyers’ advice, he agreed to meet me, secretly, at an Italian restaurant on a Wednesday in June 2004. I’m not entirely sure why he was willing to risk further censure. Perhaps he felt he couldn’t sit back and watch Lynndie England and the other military personnel captured in the photographs be scapegoats just for following orders.

  We sat on the balcony of the restaurant and he pushed his food around his plate.

  “You ever see The Shining?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Abu Ghraib was like the Overlook Hotel,” he said. “It was haunted.”

  “You mean …” I said.

  I presumed Joseph meant that the place was full of spooks: intelligence officers—but the look on his face made me realize he didn’t.

  “It was haunted,” he said. “It got so dark at night. So dark. Under Saddam, people were dissolved in acid there. Women raped by dogs. Brains splattered all over the walls. This was worse than the Overlook Hotel because it was real.”

  “In The Shining,” I said, “it was the building that turned Jack Nicholson insane. Was it the building that turned the Americans crazy at Abu Ghraib?”

  “It was like the building wanted to be back in business,” said Joseph.

  Joseph wore a University of Louisiana athletics department T-shirt. He had the U.S. soldier’s jarhead haircut—shaved at the sides, a short crop on top. He said he couldn’t believe how much money was floating around the army these days. These were the golden days, in budgetary terms. One day he had taken his truck in for repairs, and the soldier who looked it over had said, “You need new seats.”

  Joseph said it didn’t look like the seats needed replacing.

  The soldier replied that they had two hundred thousand dollars in their budget and if they didn’t spend it by the end of the month they had to give it back.

  “So,” the soldier slowly repeated, “you need new seats.”

  Joseph said I wouldn’t believe how many plasma screens there were in Iraq, for teleconferencing purposes and so on. They’d had perfectly good TVs, but trucks full of plasma screens just arrived one day, because that’s how much money was floating around.

  In January 2004, the influential think tank and lobbying group GlobalSecurity revealed that George W. Bush’s government had filtered more money into their Black Budget than any other administration in American history.

  The amount of money an administration spends on its Black Budget can be seen as a tantalizing barometer of its proclivity toward weirdness. Black Budgets often just fund Black Ops—highly sensitive and deeply shady projects such as assassination squads, and so on, which remain secret not only to protect the Black Operators but to protect Americans, who generally don’t want to think about such things. But Black Budgets also fund investigations into schemes so bizarre that their disclosure might lead voters to believe that their leaders have taken leave of their senses. George W. Bush’s administration had, by January 2004, channeled approximately $30 billion into the Black Budget—to be spent on God knows what.

  I had to strain to hear Joseph over the late-night road-works as he told me about the darkness at Abu Ghraib, and how that darkness led to “the beast in man really coming out there” and the never-ending, bountiful budget.

  “Abu Ghraib was a tourist attraction,” he said. “I remember one time I was woken up by two captains. ‘Where’s the death chamber?’ They wanted to see the rope and the lever. When Rumsfeld came to visit, he didn’t want to talk to the soldiers. All he wanted to see was the death chamber.”

  Joseph took a bite of his food.

  “Yeah, the beast in man really came out at Abu Ghraib,” he said.

  “You mean in the photographs?” I asked.

  “Everywhere,” he said. “The senior leadership were screwing around with the lower ranks… .”

  I told Joseph I didn’t understand what he meant.

  He said, “The senior leaders were having sex with the lower ranks. The detainees were raping each other.”

  “Did you ever see any ghosts?” I asked him.

  He stopped eating and pushed his food around the plate again.

  “There was a darkness about the place,” he replied. “You just got this feeling there was always something there, lurking behind you in the darkness, and that it was very mad.”

  I asked Joseph if there was anything good at Abu Ghraib, and he paused, then said it was good that Amazon.com delivered there. Then he remembered something else that was good. He said there was a genius at making model planes there. He made them out of old ration boxes, and he hung them from the ceiling in the isolation block. One time, Joseph said, someone came up to him and said, “You’ve got to see these model planes! They’re incredible! One of the guards in the isolation block has hung a bunch of them on the ceiling. Hey, and while you’re there, you can take a look at the high values!”

  The “high values” were what the U.S. army called the suspected terrorists, insurgent leaders, rapists, and child molesters, although things were so out of c
ontrol in postwar Iraq that many of the high values might have just been passersby picked up at checkpoints because the soldiers didn’t like the look of them.

  Joseph was in charge of the superclassified computer network at Abu Ghraib. He had set up the system and handed out the user names and passwords. His job didn’t take him into the isolation block, even though it was just down the corridor. So he accepted the invitation. He got up from behind his desk and walked toward the model planes and the high values.

  A few weeks before I met Joseph, it was revealed, by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, that on April 9, 2004, Specialist Matthew Wisdom told an Article 32 hearing (the military equivalent of a grand jury): “I saw two naked detainees [in the isolation block at Abu Ghraib], one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right… . I saw SSG [Ivan] Frederick walk toward me, and he said, ‘Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.’ I heard PFC [Lynndie] England shout out, ‘He’s getting hard.’”

  The isolation block was where all the photographs were taken—Lynndie dragging a naked man across the floor on a leash, and so on.

  Joseph turned the corner into the isolation block.

  “There were two MPs there,” he told me. “And they were constantly screaming. ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’ They were screaming at some old guy, making him repeat a number over and over: 156403. 156403. 156403.

  “The old guy couldn’t speak English. He couldn’t pronounce the numbers.

  “‘I CAN’T FUCKING HEAR YOU.’

  “The guy repeated the number, twice.

  “‘LOUDER. FUCKING LOUDER.’

  “Then they saw me. ‘Hey, Joseph! How are you? I CAN’T FUCKING HEAR YOU. LOUDER.’

  “I repeated the numbers, twice.”

  Joseph said that the MPs had basically gone straight from McDonald’s to Abu Ghraib. They knew nothing. And now they were getting scapegoated because they happened to be identifiable in the photographs. They just did what the military intelligence people, Joseph’s people, had told them to do. PsyOps was just a phone call away, Joseph said. And the military intelligence people all had PsyOps training anyway. The thing I had to remember about military intelligence was that they were the “nerdy-type guys at school. You know. The outcasts. Couple all that with ego, and a poster on the wall saying BY CG APPROVAL (Commanding General Approval), and suddenly you have guys who think they govern the world. That’s what one of them said to me. ‘We govern the world.’”

  “Were there many intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib?” I asked Joseph.

  “There were intelligence people turning up there I never even knew existed,” he said. “There was a unit from Utah. All Mormons. It was a real casserole of intelligence, and they all had to come to me to get their user names and passwords. They were from all kinds of units, civilian guys, and translators. Two British guys showed up. They were older, in uniform, and were getting themselves properly installed. They had laptops and a desk.”

  An aide to Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser, visited the prison also, to inform the interrogators sternly that they weren’t getting useful enough information from the detainees.

  “Then,” Joseph said, “a whole platoon of Guantanamo people arrived. The word got around. ‘Oh God, the Gitmo guys are here.’ Bam! There they were. They took the place over.”

  Perhaps Guantanamo Bay was Experimental Lab Mark 1, and whatever esoteric techniques worked there were exported to Abu Ghraib. I asked Joseph if he knew anything about the music. He said, sure, they blasted loud music at the detainees all the time.

  “What about quieter music?” I asked, and I told him Jamal’s story about the ghetto blaster and the Fleetwood Mac all-girl covers band and Matchbox Twenty.

  Joseph laughed. He shook his head in wonderment.

  “They were probably fucking with his head,” he said.

  “You mean they did it just because it seemed so weird?” I asked. “The incongruity was the point of it?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I can imagine that might work on a devout Muslim from an Arab country, but Jamal is British. He was raised in Manchester. He knows all about ghetto blasters and Fleetwood Mac and country-and-western music.”

  “Hm,” said Joseph.

  “Do you think ... ?” I said.

  Joseph finished my sentence for me.

  “Subliminal messages?” he said.

  “Or something like that,” I said. “Something underneath the music.”

  “You know,” said Joseph, “on a surface level that would be ridiculous. But Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were anything but surface.”

  12. THE FREQUENCIES

  Perhaps, I thought, one way of solving this mystery was to follow the patents, follow them like a tracker follows footprints in the snow, and then, like in a horror film, see how the footprints vanish. Was there, somewhere out there, a paper trail of patents for subliminal sound technologies, or frequency technologies, that simply vanished into the classified world of the United States government?

  Yes. There was. And the inventor in question was a mysterious figure named Dr. Oliver Lowery.

  On October 27, 1992, Dr. Oliver Lowery, of Georgia, was the recipient of U.S. Patent #5,159,703. His invention was something he called a Silent Subliminal Presentation System:

  A silent communications system in which non-aural carriers, in the very low or very high audio-frequency range or in the adjacent ultrasonic frequency spectrum are amplitude or frequency modulated with the desired intelligence and propagated acoustically or vibrationally, for inducement into the brain, typically through the use of loudspeakers, earphones, or piezoelectric transducers. The modulated carriers may be transmitted directly in real time or may be conveniently recorded and stored on mechanical, magnetic or optical media for delayed or repeated transmission to the listener.

  The publicity material that accompanied this patent put it into plainer language. Dr. Lowery had invented a way in which subliminal sounds could be put onto a CD where they would “silently induce and change the emotional state in a human being.”

  The following emotional states could, according to Dr. Lowery, be induced by his invention:

  Positive emotions: contentment, duty, faith, friendship, hope, innocence, joy, love, pride, respect, self-love, and worship.

  Negative emotions: anger, anguish, anxiety, contempt, despair, dread, embarrassment, envy, fear, frustration, grief, guilt, hate, indifference, indignation, jealousy, pity, rage, regret, remorse, resentment, sadness, shame, spite, terror, and vanity.

  Twelve positive emotions, twenty-six negative ones.

  Four years later, on December 13, 1996, Dr. Lowery’s company, Silent Sounds Inc., posted the following message on their web site: “All schematics have [now] been classified by the U.S. Government and we are not allowed to reveal the exact details … we make tapes and CDs for the German Government, even the former Soviet Union countries! All with the permission of the U.S. State Department, of course… . The system was used throughout Operation Desert Storm (Iraq) quite successfully.”

  For weeks on end I repeatedly telephoned the number I had found for Dr. Oliver Lowery—it was a Georgia area code, somewhere on the outskirts of Atlanta—but nobody picked up the phone.

  Until, one day, someone did.

  “Hello?” said the voice.

  “Dr. Lowery?” I said.

  “I’d prefer you didn’t call me that,” he said.

  “What can I call you?” I said.

  “Call me Bud,” he said.

  I could almost hear him smile down the phone.

  “Call me Hamish McLaren,” he said then.

  I told Hamish/Bud/Dr. Oliver Lowery what I was doing, and he, in return, whoever he was, told me something about his life. He said he was seventy-seven years old, a Second World War veteran, a former Hughes aerospace engineer, and he had endu
red numerous operations, heart bypasses, and so on. Then he said, “You’re the first journalist to find us in four years.”

  “Find ‘us’?” I said.

  “You think you’re talking to Georgia?” he said.

  There was a faint mocking tone to his voice.

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  He laughed.

  “I phoned a Georgia area code,” I said.

  There seemed to be voices in the background, a lot of commotion, as if Oliver/Bud/Hamish was speaking from the middle of a busy office.

  “You’ll never be able to print what I am about to tell you,” he said, “because there is no way you’ll be able to prove that this conversation ever took place.”

  “So I’m not talking to someone in Georgia?” I said.

  “You are talking to someone in a lab where there are numerous PhDs from sixteen countries, including Brits, and the lab is in a fourteen-story building behind three layers of barbed-wire defenses that sure as hell isn’t Georgia,” he said.

  There was a long pause.

  “So you’re using call divert?” I said, weakly.

  I had no idea if this was true. Maybe he was a fantasist, or perhaps he was playing with me for the fun of it, but, as I say, there seemed to be many voices in the background. (Maybe he was just putting those voices in my head.)

  The man said that the U.S. military has been researching silent-sound technologies for twenty-five years. He likened this “massive” research to the Manhattan Project.

  He said there were good silent sounds—“children exposed to the good sounds in the womb turn out remarkably bright”—and bad silent sounds.

  “We only use the bad stuff on the bad guys,” he said.