psychic warriors and torturous tunes...

i watched ‘the men who stare at goats’ last night... having read jon ronson’s book a few years back it was disappointing that the movie didn’t quite succeed in 'capturing' the very dark humour contained within the book... hugely entertaining yes, but terribly disappointing that the seriousness was lost in the ‘hollywood-izing’ of the subject matter…

granted, the book did have comedic value – as in, if it wasn’t real it would be funny – but it was more frightening for being true – that didn’t quite come across in the movie…

the book is an expose of the american army’s venture into paranormal and psychic warfare with the aim of creating a breed of super soldiers who could become invisible at will... remote viewing was one of their 'specialties'… there are many accounts of the existence of a 'goat lab' at the special forces command center at fort bragg, north carolina (the number of de-bleated goats at any one time fluctuates between 30 and 100 depending on which account you read) - why? for the purposes of testing the psychic abilities of the 'warriors' to stop the hearts of the goats by staring at (and psychically zapping) them - the basis for the title..

jim channon (lieutenant colonel) is one of the major players in the book - on his return from vietnam in the 70s he had contact with a group called the human potential movement - and drawing on their philosophy came up with his idea of a new military to be organized along 'new age' lines - the first earth battalion…

“LTC Channon believes the Army can be the principal moral and ethical basis on which politics can harmonize in the name of the Earth. Since "Earthkind" has grown from pack to village, to tribe, to territory, and then to nation, LTC Channon envisions going from nation to planet next, and thereby declares the First Earth Battalion's primary allegiance to the planet. Making the planet whole requires the ethical use of force based on the collective conscience.” In his operations field manual titled Evolutionary Tactics, LTC Channon lists some of the important missions of the Earth Battalion as:

Urban pioneers

Counter hostage force

Disaster rescue

Eco pioneers

Animal rescue

The First Earth Battalion will organize itself informally: uniforms without uniformity, structure without status, and unity powered by diversity, since its members will be multicultural, with each race contributing to "rainbow power." As a guiding principle, members of the First Earth Battalion seek nondestructive methods of conflict resolution because their first loyalty is to the planet.”

hmmmm... "the ethical use of force" - whose ethics, and how much force? of course, what’s an army without force??

another major player was albert stubblebine (major general)… “A proponent of psychic warfare, Stubblebine was involved in a U.S. military project to create "a breed of 'super soldier'" who would "have the ability to become invisible at will and to walk through walls"...

stubblebine led the army’s intelligence and security command (inscom) for a few years and this group was actually given the go-ahead to implement some of channon's 'vision'...

“Within weeks of the publication of the First Earth Battalion operations manual in the spring of 1979, soldiers throughout the U.S. Army began seriously trying to implement his ideas. One example was when the Army's Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) began developing its own remote viewing program in 1979, which was a parapsychological intelligence gathering method that had already been experimentally tested at Stanford Research Institute** since 1972 by parapsychologists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff. Channon's principles trickled through the services and even contributed—through ramblings about lifting soldiers to a higher spiritual realm—the Army slogan Be All You Can Be. Keying off of Channon’s blueprint, a Special Operations experimental team, dubbed “Jedi Warriors,” after the Star Wars craze, were trained in a wide array of Eastern oriental martial arts and meditative techniques, combined with super strenuous physical training programs."

(** coincidentally uri geller was tested at the stanford research institute (and features promintently in the movie - george clooney's character is based on him!!) - interesting that he is considered one of the more exceptional and talented psychics by some, a fraud by others, and a de-commissioned psychic warrior by the rest - he was purportedly 'head-hunted' by stubblebine's stargate project!!!)

of course, the military being what the military is, they weren’t ever going to be 'all pacifism and peace'!!! the first earth battalion manual proposes the use of music to effect "psychic mind-change"... 'naturally', they took the  use of music to epic proportions – it became a means of torture – we’ve all heard of guantanamo bay and abu ghraib…

“In September 2003, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, approved the use of music as part of a package of measures for use on captured prisoners "to create fear, disorient ... and prolong capture shock," and as is spelled out in an explosive new report by the Senate Armed Services Committee into the torture and abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody (PDF), the use of music was an essential part of the reverse engineering of techniques, known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE), which are taught in U.S. military schools to train personnel to resist interrogation.” … from ‘a history of music torture in the war on terror’ by andy worthington, historian, journalist and author of ‘the Guantanamo files’…


if you're wanting to read more, the real story of the men who stare at goats by journalist danny penman makes for a good read... and so does "the pentagon's twilight zone" by journalist sally squires...

so, though the movie was entertaining, it 'lost something in its 'slapstick' translation'… I’d definitely recommend the book over the film...

and what better way to end this post - here's "kiss my ass" by country joe mcdonald...