[Reader-list] The Road to Abu Ghraib - Jon Ronson

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1339464,00.html

*[· *This is an edited extract from The Men Who Stare At Goats, by Jon 
Ronson, published by Picador on November 19 at £16.99. To order a copy 
for £16.14, with free UK p&p, call 0870 836 0875. Jon Ronson's 
three-part television series, The Crazy Rulers Of The World, starts on 
Channel 4 on November 7.]

*The road to Abu Ghraib*

In the wake of Vietnam, the US military were demoralised and prey to 
some fairly crazy ideas. They thought they could train 'super soldiers' 
with psychic powers. In this first extract from his revealing new book, 
Jon Ronson describes how their aspirations were perverted in the prisons 
of Iraq

*Saturday October 30, 2004
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>*

It is the summer of 1983. Major General Albert Stubblebine III is 
sitting behind his desk in Arlington, Virginia, and he is staring at his 
wall, upon which hang his numerous military awards. They detail a long 
and distinguished career. He is the US army's chief of intelligence, 
with 16,000 soldiers under his command. He controls numerous covert 
counter-intelligence and spying units, scattered throughout the world. 
He would be in charge of the prisoner-of-war interrogations, too, except 
this is 1983, and the war is cold, not hot.

He looks past his awards to the wall itself. There is something he feels 
he needs to do even though the thought of it frightens him. He thinks 
about the choice he has to make. He can stay in his office or he can go 
into the next office. He has made his decision. He is going into the 
next office. He stands up, moves out from behind his desk and begins to 
walk. He thinks to himself, what is the atom mostly made up of anyway? 
Space!

He quickens his pace.

What am I mostly made up of? Atoms!

He is almost at a jog now.

What is the wall mostly made up of, he thinks. Atoms! All I have to do 
is merge the spaces. The wall is an illusion.

Then General Stubblebine bangs his nose hard on the wall of his office.

He is confounded by his continual failure to walk through his wall. 
There is no doubt in his mind that the ability to pass through objects 
will one day be a common tool in the intelligence-gathering arsenal. And 
when that happens, well, is it too naive to believe it would herald the 
dawning of a world without war? Who would want to screw around with an 
army that could do that?

These powers are attainable, so the only question is, by whom? Who in 
the military is already geared towards this kind of thing? And then the 
answer comes to him. Special Forces! This is why, in the late summer of 
1983, General Stubblebine flies down to Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Fort Bragg is vast - a town guarded by armed soldiers, with a mall, a 
cinema, restaurants, golf courses, and accommodation for 45,000 soldiers 
and their families. The general's meeting is in the Special Forces 
Command Centre. "I'm coming down here with an idea," he begins. The 
commanders nod.

"If you have a unit operating outside the protection of mainline units, 
what happens if somebody gets wounded?" He surveys the blank faces 
around the room. "Psychic healing!" he says. "If you use your mind to 
heal, you can probably come out with your whole team alive and intact."

The Special Forces commanders don't look particularly interested in 
psychic healing.

"OK," says General Stubblebine. The reception he's getting is really 
quite chilly. "Wouldn't it be a neat idea if you could teach somebody to 
do this?" General Stubblebine rifles through his bag and produces, with 
a flourish, bent cutlery.

Silence. He tries again.

"Animals!" says General Stubblebine.

The Special Forces commanders glance at one another.

"Stopping the hearts of animals," he continues. "Bursting the hearts of 
animals. This is the idea I'm coming in with. You have access to 
animals, right?"

"Uh," say Special Forces. "Not really ... "

General Stubblebine's trip to Fort Bragg was a disaster. It still makes 
him blush to recall it. He ended up taking early retirement in 1984. His 
doomed attempt to walk through his wall and his seemingly futile journey 
to Fort Bragg have remained undisclosed until the moment he told me 
about them in the Tarrytown Hilton in upstate New York on a cold 
winter's day two years into the war on terror. "You know," he said, "I 
really thought they were great ideas. I still do."

What the general didn't know, as he proposed his clandestine animal 
heart-bursting programme, was that Special Forces were concealing the 
fact that they did have access to animals, there were a hundred goats in 
a shed just a few yards down the road.

General Stubblebine, I discovered, had commanded a secret military 
psychic spying unit between 1981 and 1984. The unit wasn't quite as 
glamorous as it might sound, he said. It was basically half a dozen 
soldiers sitting inside a heavily guarded, condemned clapboard building 
in Fort Meade, Maryland, trying to be psychic. Officially the unit did 
not exist. The psychics were what is known in military jargon as Black 
Op. When one of them got a vision - of a Russian warship, or a future 
event - he would sketch it, and pass the sketches up the chain of 
command. And then, in 1995, the CIA closed them down.

I tracked down a former Special Forces psychic spy to Hawaii. Glenn 
Wheaton, retired sergeant first class, was a big man with a tight crop 
of red hair and a Vietnam-vet-style handlebar moustache. He told me how 
in the mid-1980s Special Forces undertook a secret initiative, codenamed 
Project Jedi, to create super soldiers - soldiers with super powers. One 
such power was the ability to walk into a room and instantly be aware of 
every detail; that was level one.

Level two, he said, was intuition - making correct decisions. "Somebody 
runs up to you and says, 'There's a fork in the road. Do we turn left or 
do we turn right?' And you go" - Glenn snapped his fingers - "We go right!"

"What was the level above that?" I asked.

"Invisibility," said Glenn. "After a while we adapted it to just finding 
a way of not being seen."

"What was the level above invisibility?" I asked.

"Uh," said Glenn. He paused for a moment. "We had a master sergeant who 
could stop the heart of a goat ... just by wanting the goat's heart to 
stop. He did it at least once."

"Where did this happen?" I asked.

"Down in Fort Bragg," he said, "at a place called Goat Lab."

Goat Lab, which exists to this day, is secret. Most of the soldiers who 
live and work within Fort Bragg don't even know of its existence. Those 
military personnel not in the loop, said Glenn, assume that the rickety 
clapboard hospital buildings dating from the second world war, are 
derelict. In fact, they are filled with one hundred de-bleated goats.

Goat Lab was originally created as a clandestine laboratory to provide 
surgical training for Special Forces soldiers. During this more 
conventional phase of the goats' lives, each one was taken through a 
soundproofed door into a bunker and shot in the leg using a bolt gun. 
Then the Special Forces trainees would rush the goat into an operating 
theatre, anaesthetise it, dress the wound and nurse it back to health. 
Goat Lab used to be called Dog Lab, but it turned out that nobody wanted 
to do all that to dogs, so they switched to goats. It was apparently 
determined within Special Forces that it was just about impossible to 
form an emotional bond with a goat.

I pressed Glenn: "Whose original idea was the goat staring?"

Glenn sighed. He said a name. Over the next few months, others gave me 
the same name. It kept coming up. It is a name few people outside the 
military have ever heard. But this one man, armed with a passion for the 
occult and a belief in superhuman powers, has had a profound and 
hitherto unchronicled impact on almost every aspect of US army life. 
General Stubblebine's doomed attempt to pass through his wall was 
inspired by this man, as was - at the other end of the scale of secrecy 
- the US army's famous TV recruitment slogan, "Be All You Can Be".

The man was named Jim Channon, and he, too, lives in Hawaii.

Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon (retired) remembers exactly how it all 
began, the one precise moment that sparked the whole thing off. It was 
his first day in combat in Vietnam, and he found himself flying in one 
of 400 helicopters, thundering above the Song Dong Nai river, towards a 
place known to him as War Zone D. They landed among the bodies of the 
Americans who had failed to capture War Zone D four days earlier.

"The soldiers," said Jim, "had been cooked in the sun and laid out like 
a wall."

An American soldier to Jim's right jumped out of his helicopter and 
began firing wildly. Jim shouted at him to stop but the soldier couldn't 
hear him. So Jim leapt on him and wrestled him to the ground.

And then a sniper fired a single shot at Jim's platoon. Everyone just 
stood there. The sniper fired again, and the Americans started running 
towards the one and only palm tree in sight. Jim was running so fast 
that he skidded face first into it. He heard someone behind him shout: 
"VC in black pyjamas one hundred metres."

About 20 seconds later, Jim thought to himself, Why is nobody shooting? 
What are they waiting for? They can't be waiting for me to instruct them 
to shoot, can they?

"TAKE HIM OUT!" screamed Jim.

And so the soldiers started shooting, and when it was over a small team 
walked forward to find the body. But, for all the gunfire, they had 
failed to hit the sniper. Moments later, the sniper killed one of Jim's 
soldiers with a bullet through his lungs. His name was Private First 
Class Shaw.

When he returned to the US, it was Jim's job to drive around the country 
to meet parents and give them citations and the personal belongings of 
their dead children. It was during these long drives that Jim replayed 
in his mind the moments that had led to the death of Private First Class 
Shaw. Jim had yelled for his soldiers to kill the sniper, and they had 
all, as one, and with every shot, fired high. "This came to be 
understood as a common reaction when fresh soldiers fire on humans," Jim 
said. "It is not a natural thing to shoot people."

(What Jim had seen tallied with studies conducted after the second world 
war by the military historian, General SLA Marshall. He interviewed 
thousands of American infantrymen and concluded that only 15-20% of them 
had actually shot to kill. The rest had fired high or not fired at all, 
busying themselves however else they could.)

It was heartbreaking for Jim to realise that Private First Class Shaw 
had died because his fellow soldiers were impulsively guileless and 
kind-hearted, and not the killing machines the army wanted them to be. 
"The kind of person attracted to military service has a great deal of 
difficulty being ... cunning. We suffered in Vietnam from not being 
cunning. We just presented ourselves in our righteousness and we got our 
butts shot off."

And so, in 1977, Jim wrote to the vice chief of staff for the army in 
the Pentagon, saying he wanted the army to learn how to be more cunning. 
He wanted to go on a fact-finding mission. The Pentagon agreed to pay 
Jim's salary and expenses.

It was early in Steven Halpern's career as a composer of a series of 
meditation and subliminal CDs (titles include Achieving Your Ideal 
Weight and Nurturing Your Inner Child) that he met Jim Channon in 1978 
at a New Age conference in California. Jim said he wanted somehow to use 
Steven's music to make the American soldier more peaceful, and he also 
hoped to deploy Steven's music in the battlefield to make the enemy feel 
more peaceful too. "He said he needed to convince the higher-up military 
brass; the top ranks," said Steven. "These are people who had never 
known a meditative state. I think he wanted to get them into it without 
naming it."

Or maybe hypnotise them with subliminal sounds?

Steven told me a little about the power of subliminal sounds. One time, 
he said, an American evangelical church blasted the congregation with 
silent sounds during the hymns. At the end of the service, they found 
their donations had tripled.

Almost all the people Jim visited during his two-year journey were, like 
Steven Halpern, Californians. Jim went through Reichian rebirthing, 
primal arm-wrestling, and naked hot-tub encounter sessions at the Esalen 
Institute. He saw it as America's role "to lead the world to paradise".

He returned from his journey in 1979 and produced what he called First 
Earth Battalion Operations Manual. The manual was a 125-page mixture of 
drawings and graphs and maps and polemical essays and point by point 
redesigns of every aspect of military life. The new battlefield uniform 
would include pouches for ginseng regulators, divining tools, foodstuffs 
to enhance night vision and a loudspeaker that would automatically emit 
"indigenous music and words of peace". Soldiers would carry with them 
into hostile countries "symbolic animals" such as lambs. The soldiers 
would learn to give the enemy "an automatic hug".

There was, Jim accepted, a possibility that these measures might not be 
enough to pacify an enemy. In that eventuality, the loudspeakers 
attached to the uniforms would be switched to broadcast "discordant 
sounds". Bigger loudspeakers would be mounted on military vehicles, each 
playing acid rock music out of synch with the other to confuse the enemy.

Back on base, robes and hoods would be worn for the mandatory First 
Earth Battalion rituals. The misogynistic and aggressive old chants ("I 
don't know but I've been told, Eskimo pussy is mighty cold ...") would 
be phased out and replaced by a new one: "Om."

First Earth Battalion trainees would "attain the power to pass through 
objects such as walls, bend metal with their minds, walk on fire, 
calculate faster than a computer, stop their own hearts with no ill 
effects, see into the future, be able to hear and see other people's 
thoughts".

Now all Jim had to do was sell these ideas to the military.

He presented his great plan to his commanders at the officers' club in 
Fort Knox in the spring of 1979 - four-star generals and major generals 
and brigadier generals and colonels - and he had them captivated. Word 
spread.

General Stubblebine was a West Point man with a master's degree in 
chemical engineering from Columbia. He learned about the First Earth 
Battalion when he was stationed at the army's Intelligence School in 
Arizona. Stubblebine's tenure as commander of Military Intelligence 
coincided with huge slashes in his budget. These were the post-Vietnam 
"draw down" days, and the Pentagon wanted their soldiers to achieve more 
with less money. Learning how to walk through walls and the like was an 
ambitious but inexpensive enterprise. And so it was that Jim Channon's 
madcap vision, triggered by his post-combat depression, found its way 
into the highest levels of the US military.

In May 2003, shortly after President Bush had announced "the end of 
major hostilities" in the war in Iraq, a little piece of the First Earth 
Battalion philosophy was put into practice by PsyOps (US army 
Psychological Operations) behind a disused railway station in the tiny 
Iraqi town of al-Qa'im, on the Syrian border. The people of al-Qa'im did 
not know that Baghdad had fallen to coalition troops, so Sergeant Mark 
Hadsell and his PsyOps unit were there to distribute leaflets bearing 
the news. Adam Piore, a Newsweek journalist, was tagging along, covering 
the "end of major hostilities" from the PsyOps perspective.

At that time it was pretty calm in al-Qa'im. By the end of the year, US 
forces would be under frequent guerrilla bombardment in the town. In 
November 2003, one of Saddam Hussein's air defence commanders - Major 
General Abed Hamed Mowhoush - would die under interrogation right there 
at the disused train station. ("Natural causes," said the official US 
military statement. "Mowhoush's head was not hooded during questioning.")

One night, Adam was hanging out in the squadron command centre when 
Sergeant Hadsell wandered over to him. He winked conspiratorially and 
said, "Go look out by where the prisoners are." Adam knew that the 
prisoners were housed in a yard behind the train station. The army had 
parked a convoy of shipping containers back there, and as Adam wandered 
towards them he could see a bright flashing light. He could hear music 
too. It was Metallica's Enter Sandman. From a distance it looked as 
though some weird and slightly sinister disco was taking place.

A young American soldier was holding a really bright light and he was 
flashing it on and off, on and off, into the shipping container. Enter 
Sandman was echoing violently around the steel walls. Adam stood there 
for a moment and watched. The song ended and then, immediately, it began 
again.

The young soldier holding the light glanced over at Adam. He carried on 
flashing it and said, "You need to go away now."

"Did you look inside the container?" I asked Adam when he was telling me 
this story two months later, back in the Newsweek offices in New York.

"No," said Adam. "When the guy told me that I had to go away, I went 
away." He paused. "But it was kind of obvious what was going on in there."

Adam called Newsweek from his cellphone and pitched them a number of 
stories. Their favourite was the Metallica one. "I was told to write it 
as a humorous thing," said Adam. "They wanted a complete play-list." So 
Adam asked around. It turned out that songs blasted at prisoners 
included the soundtrack to the movie XXX; a song that went "Burn 
Motherfucker Burn"; and, rather more surprisingly, the I Love You song 
from Barney the Purple Dinosaur's show, along with songs from Sesame 
Street.

I first learned about the Barney torture story on May 19, 2003, when it 
ran as a funny, "And finally"-type item on NBC's Today show:

Ann Curry (news anchor): US forces in Iraq are using what some are 
calling a cruel and unusual tool to break the resistance of Iraqi POWs, 
and trust me, a lot of parents would agree! Some prisoners are being 
forced to listen to Barney the Purple Dinosaur sing the I Love You song 
for 24 straight hours ...

NBC cut to a clip from Barney, in which the purple dinosaur flopped 
around amid his gang of ever-smiling stage-school kids. Everyone in the 
studio laughed. Ann Curry put on a funny kind of 
"poor-little-prisoners"-type voice to report the story.

It's the First Earth Battalion, I thought.

I had no doubt that the notion of using music as a form of mental 
torture had been popularised and perfected within the military as a 
distortion of Jim's manual. Before he came along, military music was 
confined to the marching-band-type and other rousing music to fire up 
the troops. It was Jim who came up with the idea of using loudspeakers 
in the battlefield to broadcast "discordant sounds" such as "acid-rock 
music out of synch" to confuse the enemy, and the use of similar sounds 
in the interrogation arena.

I called Jim right away.

"They're rounding people up in Iraq, taking them to a shipping 
container, and blasting them repeatedly with children's music while 
repeatedly flashing a bright light at them," I said. "Is that one of 
your legacies?"

"Yes!" Jim said. He sounded thrilled. "I'm so pleased to hear that!"

Why?

"They're obviously trying to lighten the environment," he said, "and 
give these people some comfort, instead of beating them to death!"

I think Jim was imagining something more like a crèche than a steel 
container at the back of a disused railway station. "I guess if they 
play them Barney and Sesame Street once or twice," I said, "that's 
lightening and comforting, but if they play it, say, 50,000 times into a 
steel box in the desert heat, that's more ... uh ... torturous?"

"I'm no psychologist," said Jim, a little sharply.

"But the use of music ..." I said.

"That's what the First Earth Battalion did," said Jim. "It opened the 
military mind to how to use music."

Barney had become the funniest joke of the war. Within hours of Adam 
Piore's Newsweek article appearing, the internet was aflame with Barney 
torture-related wisecracks such as "An endless loop of the theme song 
from Titanic by Celine Dion would be infinitely worse! They'd confess 
everything within 10 minutes!"

Adam himself had told me that he was finding the impact of his Barney 
story quite baffling. It was picked up everywhere, and was invariably 
treated as a humorous story. "It was sort of outrageous to be in this 
shit hole up on the border in an abandoned train station, totally 
uncomfortable, unable to take showers, sleeping on cots, and when we 
finally got cable a couple of days later, scrolling across the screen is 
this ... Barney story."

Kenneth Roth, of Human Rights Watch, was clearly sick of talking about 
Barney by the time I caught up with him. "They have," said Kenneth, 
"been very savvy in that respect."

"Savvy?" I said.

He seemed to be implying that the Barney story had been deliberately 
disseminated just so all the human rights violations being committed in 
post-war Iraq could be reduced to this one joke.

When I returned to the UK, I found I had been sent seven photographs. 
They were taken by a Newsweek photographer, Patrick Andrade, in May 
2003, and captioned, "An escaped detainee is returned to a holding area 
in al-Qa'im, Iraq." There is no sign of loudspeakers, but the pictures 
do show the interior of one of the shipping containers behind the 
disused railway station.

In the first of the photographs, two powerfully built American soldiers 
are pushing the detainee through a landscape of corrugated iron and 
barbed wire. He doesn't look hard to push. He is as skinny as a rake. A 
rag covers his face. One of the soldiers has a handgun pressed to the 
back of his neck. In all the other photographs, the detainee is inside 
the shipping container. He is barefoot, a thin plastic strap binds his 
ankles and he's crouched against the silver corrugated wall. The metal 
floor is covered with brown dust and pools of liquid. Right at the back 
of the shipping container, deep in the shadows, you can just make out 
the figure of another detainee huddled on the floor, his face masked by 
a hood.

Now the rag only covers the first man's eyes, so you can see his face, 
which is lined, like an old man's, but his wispy moustache reveals that 
he's probably about 17. There's an open wound on one of his skinny arms. 
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 almost looks as if he's laughing.

* <http://www.guardian.co.uk>* A week or two passed. And then the other 
photographs appeared. They were of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib 
jail on the outskirts of Baghdad. A 21-year-old US reservist called 
Private Lynndie England had been snapped leading a naked man across the 
floor on a leash. She featured in many of the photographs. It was she 
who knelt laughing behind a pile of naked prisoners. They had been 
forced to build themselves into some kind of human pyramid. The pictures 
could hardly have been more repulsive. Here were young Muslim men - 
captives - being humiliated and overwhelmed by what looked like 
grotesque US sexual decadence. It struck me as an unhappy coincidence 
that Lynndie England and her friends had created a tableau that was the 
epitome of what would most disgust and repel the Iraqi people, those 
people whose hearts and minds were the great prize for the coalition 
forces - and also for the Islamic fundamentalists.

The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, flew to the jail. He told the 
assembled troops that the events shown in the pictures were the work of 
"a few who have betrayed our values and sullied the reputation of our 
country. It was a body blow to me. Those who committed crimes will be 
dealt with, and the American people will be proud of it, and the Iraqi 
people will be proud."

Lynndie England was arrested. By then she was back in the US, five 
months pregnant, performing desk duties at Fort Bragg. Then word got out 
through Lynndie England's lawyers that her defence was that she had been 
acting under orders, softening up the prisoners for interrogation, and 
that the people giving the orders were none other than Military 
Intelligence, the unit once commanded by Major General Albert 
Stubblebine III.

It was sad to remember all that nose-banging and cutlery-bending, and 
see how General Stubblebine's good intentions had come to this. I called 
the general and asked him, "What was your first thought when you saw the 
photographs?"

"My first thought," he said, "was 'Oh shit!'"

"What was your second thought?"

"Thank God that's not me at the bottom of that pyramid."

"What was your third thought?"

"My third thought," said the general, "was 'This was not started by some 
youngsters down in the trenches. This had to have been driven by the 
intelligence community.' Yep. Someone much higher in intelligence 
deliberately designed this, advocated it, directed it, trained people to 
do it. No doubt about it. And whoever that is, he's in deep hiding right 
now."

"Military Intelligence?" I asked. "Your old people?"

"It's a possibility," he said. "My guess is no."

"Who then?"

"The Agency," he said (meaning the CIA).

"In conjunction with PsyOps?" I asked.

"I'm sure they had a hand in it," said the general. "Sure. No doubt 
about it. You know, if they'd just stuck to Jim Channon's ideas ... "

"By Jim Channon's ideas, do you mean the loud music?" I asked.

"Yeah," said the general.

"So the idea of blasting prisoners with loud music," I said, "definitely 
originated with the First Earth Battalion?"

"Definitely," said the general. "No question. So did the frequencies." 
Frequencies, he said, dis-equilibrate people. "There's all kinds of 
things you can do with the frequencies. Jesus, you can take a frequency 
and make a guy have diarrhoea, 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!"

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

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

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].

Maas : Who told you to do that?

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."

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, and that 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 getting out and scaring the whole world?

Joseph Curtis (not his real name) worked the night shift at the Abu 
Ghraib prison in the autumn of 2003. When I talked to him he had been 
exiled by the army to a town in Germany. The threat of a court martial 
hung over him. He had previously 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 judgement, and against his 
lawyers' advice, he agreed to meet me, secretly, at an Italian 
restaurant in June 2004.

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."

I assumed Joseph meant the place was full of spooks: intelligence 
officers - but the look on his face made me realise 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.

"It was like the building wanted to be back in business," he said.

Joseph remarked that he couldn't believe how much money was floating 
around the army these days. These were the golden days, in budgetary 
terms. This was not a side issue. 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. Black Budgets often just fund 
Black Ops - highly sensitive and deeply shady projects such as 
assassination squads, and so on. But Black Budgets also fund schemes so 
bizarre that their disclosure might lead voters to believe their leaders 
have taken leave of their senses. Bush's administration had, by January 
2004, channelled approximately $30bn into the Black Budget - to be spent 
on God knows what.

"Abu Ghraib," Joseph was telling me, "was a tourist attraction. 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.

"There was a darkness about the place," he replied.

Joseph was in charge of the super-classified computer network at Abu 
Ghraib. His job didn't take him into the isolation block, even though it 
was just down the corridor, but on one occasion he was invited to see 
the model planes someone had made - and also to take a look at the "high 
values". (The "high values" were what the US army called the suspected 
terrorists, insurgent leaders, rapists or child-molesters.) He accepted 
the invitation.

The isolation block was where all the photographs were taken - the human 
pyramid, and so on. Joseph turned the corner into the 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 guy couldn't speak English. He couldn't pronounce the numbers.

"'I CAN'T FUCKING HEAR YOU.'

"'156403. 156403.'

"'LOUDER. FUCKING LOUDER.'

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

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, told them to 
do. PsyOps were 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.' "

An aide to Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser, 
visited the prison, to inform the interrogators sternly that they 
weren't getting useful enough information from the detainees. "Then," 
Joseph said, "a whole platoon of Guantánamo people arrived. The word got 
around. 'Oh God, the Gitmo guys are here.' Bam! There they were. They 
took the place over." Perhaps Guantánamo Bay was Experimental Lab Mark 
1, and whatever esoteric techniques worked there were exported to Abu 
Ghraib.

Perhaps this is the way it happened: in the late 1970s Jim Channon, 
traumatised from Vietnam, sought solace in the emerging human potential 
movement of California. He took his ideas back into the army and they 
struck a chord with the top brass who had never before seen themselves 
as New Age, but in their post-Vietnam funk it all made sense to them. 
Then, over the decades that followed, the army, being what it is, 
recovered its strength and saw that some of the ideas contained within 
Jim's manual could be used to shatter people rather than heal them. 
Those are the ideas that live on in the war on terror

© Jon Ronson, 2004.










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