Sunday, November 07

World

And As The Sun Sinks Slowly In The East

Note: This is not satire. Not a bit. The editors of The Guardian are noted for their insensibility to irony and lack of appreciation for the absurd.

Guantanamo Serenade (an extract from The Men Who Stare At Goats, by Jon Ronson)

The more I've delved into the US military's psychological warfare, the more examples of New Age-style, First Earth Battalion tactics I've been noticing in the war on terror. I learned of one fact in particular that struck me as entirely incongruous, something at once banal and extraordinary.

And what might that be, we ask?

When I met Jamal, he began to tell me about the more bewildering abuses. Prostitutes were flown in from the US - he doesn't know whether they were there to smear their menstrual blood on the faces of the more devout detainees. Or perhaps they were brought in to have sex with the soldiers, and some psychological operations (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 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.

Yes, I know that the last time a woman stripped in front of me and rubbed her breasts in my face, I was so distraught I... Err, enough that.

What other tricks did the fiendish Yanquis employ?

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.

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.

Aieee! The inhumanity of man's inhumanity to man's fellow man, or however it goes.

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.

Matchbox Twenty?

"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 programme. 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."

Aha! Now I see the evil Yanqui scheme!

No I don't.

"Hm," said Joseph.

"Do you think ...?" I said.

Joseph finished my sentence for me.

"Subliminal messages?" he said.

Subliminal messages!

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

Underneath the music!

How could you blast someone with silent sounds "without it affecting us"? This struck me at the time as an unassailable argument, one that cut through all the paranoid theories circulating on the internet about mind-control machines putting voices into people's heads. Of course it couldn't work.

The thing is, I now realised, if silent sounds had been used against Jamal inside an interrogation room at Guantanamo Bay, there was a clue in Jamal's account, a clue that suggested that military intelligence had craftily solved the vexing problem highlighted by Colonel Alexander.

"He put the CD in," Jamal had said, "and he left the room."

Aha! Fleeing the subliminal messages! Or possibly just a music lover. (Matchbox Twenty?)

Next, I dug out the recently leaked military report entitled Non-Lethal Weapons: Terms And References. There were a total of 21 acoustic weapons listed, in various stages of development, including the Infrasound ("Very low-frequency sound which can travel long distances and easily penetrate most buildings and vehicles ... biophysical effects: nausea, loss of bowels, disorientation, vomiting, potential internal organ damage or death may occur. Superior to ultrasound ...").

You know, this is actually true. Blast someone with sufficiently loud very low-frequency sound and it basically shakes their internal organs to pieces.

They tend to notice when you do this, of course.

And then, the last entry but one - the Psycho-Correction Device, which "involves influencing subjects visually or aurally with embedded subliminal messages".

I turned to the front page. And there it was. The co-author of this document was Colonel John Alexander.

So, not Matchbox Twenty?

I'm confused.

(via Tim Blair)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:36 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 The only problem with sumliminal message theories (Only problem? Well, that's excepting the whole tinfoil hat thought process.) is that they don't work. At all. There has been exactly one study done that showed submliminal messages working and that was quickly shown to be fraudulent. Not quick enough to stop the establishment of sumliminal messages as a fact in the minds of many, of course. Besides, even the discredited theory of subliminal messaging requires that the subject be concentrating on the carrying media. Who the hell would expect somebody to concentrate on Matchbox 20?

Posted by: Jim at Tuesday, November 09 2004 09:46 AM (tyQ8y)

2 I've been warned about these same subliminal messages. Did Jamal have an overpowering urge for a Coke and Popcorn?

Posted by: Gordon at Tuesday, November 09 2004 01:57 PM (dqTOU)

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