[NYTr] Guantanamo Serenade: PsyWar and Psychological Torture

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

The Guardian - Nov 6, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1343775,00.html


[Jon Ronson knew from his investigation into US military intelligence 
that top brass had adopted some strange practices. Jamal al-Harith, the 
Briton released from Guantánamo in the spring, confirmed it: here, in 
our second extract from Ronson's revealing new book, he describes the 
discordant sounds and apparently random music played to him during 
all-day interrogation sessions, and four psychological warfare experts 
give their reaction.]


Guantánamo Serenade

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. It 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 mentioned it to me only as an afterthought when I met him 
in the coffee bar of the Malmaison Hotel, near Manchester Piccadilly 
station, one June morning this year.

Jamal is a website designer. He lives with his sisters in south 
Manchester. He is 37, divorced, with three children. He said he assumed 
MI5 had followed him here to the hotel, but he's stopped worrying about 
it. He said that he keeps seeing the same man watching him from across 
the street, leaning against a car, and that whenever the man thinks he's 
been spotted, he looks briefly panicked and immediately bends down to 
fiddle casually with his tyre.

Jamal laughed when he told me this. He was born Ronald Fiddler into a 
family of second-generation Jamaican immigrants. When he was 23, he 
learned about Islam and converted, changing his name to Jamal al-Harith: 
he liked the sound of it. He says al-Harith basically means "seed planter".

In October 2001, Jamal visited Pakistan as a tourist, he says. 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 Guantánamo 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 scorpions that crawled around the base. But these were not 
sensational revelations.

He spoke to ITV's Martin Bashir, who asked him (off-camera), "Did you 
see my Michael Jackson documentary?"

Jamal replied, "I've, uh, been in Guantánamo Bay for two years."

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. But for the guys who did 
speak, that's what we heard." I asked Jamal if he thought that the 
Americans at Guantánamo 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 about 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 Guantánamo, or as old as torture 
itself, but they seemed pretty weird to him. His description of life 
inside the Brown Block made Guantánamo Bay sound like an experimental 
interrogation lab, teeming not only with intelligence agents, but also 
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, sometimes for decades, in the unsatisfactory realm of the 
theoretical - into practice.

First there were the noises.

"I would describe them as industrial noises," said Jamal. "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 synthesiser?"

"Yes, a synthesiser 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 CCTV camera and a two-way mirror. Jamal would be 
brought in for 15-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.

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 Effect1. 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 reveals them to be 
a four-piece country rock band from Florida, who do not sound 
particularly abrasive (like Metallica and Burn Motherfucker Burn!) nor 
irritatingly repetitive (like Barney The Purple Dinosaur 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 (like Metallica and Barney), had been blasted into the 
shipping containers where detainees were held at al-Qa'im in Iraq. 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 
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."

"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."

Subsequently, I talked to Joseph Curtis (not his real name), who worked 
on the night shift at the Abu Ghraib prison, in charge of the computer 
network. I asked 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 said, and 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 Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib were anything but surface."

Jamal seemed fine when I met him in Manchester. I asked if he felt at 
all unusual after listening to Matchbox Twenty and he said no. But one 
shouldn't read too much into this. There is a very strong chance, given 
the history of the goat staring and the wall walking and so on that US 
military intelligence honchos went in for, that they blasted Jamal with 
silent sounds and it just didn't work.

In late June 2004 I sent an email to Jim Channon and everyone else I'd 
met during my two-and-a-half-year journey who might have some inside 
knowledge about the current use of the kinds of psychological 
interrogation techniques that had first been suggested in Jim's First 
Earth Battalion manual. I wrote:

Dear ---

I hope you are well.

I was talking with one of the British Guantánamo detainees (innocent - 
he was released) and he told me a very strange story. He said at one 
point during the interrogations the MI [military intelligence] officers 
left him in a room - for hours and hours - with a ghetto blaster. They 
played him a series of CDs - Fleetwood Mac, Kris Kristofferson, etc. 
They didn't blast them at him. They just played them at normal volume. 
Now, as this man is western, I'm sure they weren't trying to freak him 
out by introducing him to western music. Which leads me to think ... 
Frequencies? Subliminal messages?

What's your view on this? Do you know any time when frequencies or 
subliminal sounds have been used by the US military for sure?

With best wishes,

Jon Ronson

I received four replies straight away.

Commander Sid Heal (the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department non-lethals 
expert who told me about the Bucha Effect): "Most interesting, but I 
haven't a clue. I know that subliminal messages can be incorporated and 
that they have a powerful influence. There are laws prohibiting it in 
the US, but I'm not aware of any uses like you describe. I would 
imagine, however, that it would be classified and no one without a 'need 
to know' would be aware anyway. If it were frequencies, it would 
probably need to be in the audible range or they wouldn't need to mask 
them with other sounds."

Skip Atwater (General Stubblebine's former psychic spying headhunter): 
"You can bet this activity was purposeful. If you can get anybody to 
talk to you about this, it would be interesting to know the 'success 
rate' of this technique."

Jim Channon: "Strikes me the story you tell is just plain kindness 
(which still exists)."

I couldn't decide if Jim was being delightfully naive, infuriatingly 
naive, or sophisticatedly evasive.

Then Colonel John Alexander responded to my email. He remains the US 
army's leading pioneer of non-lethal technologies, a role he created for 
himself in part inspired by Jim's First Earth Battalion manual.

Colonel Alexander: "Re your assertion he was innocent. If so, how did he 
get captured in Afghanistan? Don't think there were many British 
tourists who happened to be travelling there when our forces arrived. Or 
maybe he was a cultural anthropologist studying the progressive social 
order of the Taliban as part of his doctoral dissertation and was 
mistakenly detained from his education. Perhaps if you believe this 
man's story you'd also be interested in buying a bridge from me? As for 
the music, I have no idea what that might be about. Guess hard rockers 
might take that as cruel and unusual punishment and want to report it to 
Amnesty International as proof of torture."

Jokes about the use of music in interrogation didn't seem that funny any 
more - not to me, and I doubt they did to him, either. I emailed him 
back: "Is there anything you can tell me about the use of subliminal 
sounds and frequencies in the military's arsenal? If anyone alive today 
is equipped to answer that question, surely you are."

Colonel Alexander's response arrived instantly. He said my assertion 
that the US army would ever entertain the possibility of using 
subliminal sounds or frequencies "just doesn't make sense".

Which was strange. I dug out an interview I'd conducted with the colonel 
the previous summer. I hadn't been that interested in acoustic weapons 
at that point, but the conversation had, I now remembered, briefly 
touched on them.

"Has the army ever blasted anyone with subliminal sounds?" I had asked him.

"I have no idea," he said.

"What's a 'psycho-correction' device?" I asked him.

"I have no idea," he said. "It has no basis in reality."

"What are silent sounds?" I asked.

"I have no idea," he said. "It sounds like an oxymoron to me." The 
colonel gave me a hard look, which seemed to suggest that I was 
masquerading as a journalist and was, in fact, a dangerous and 
irrational conspiracy nut.

"I'm confused," I said. "I don't know much about this subject, but I'm 
sure I've seen your name linked with something called a 
'psycho-correction device'."

Yes, he said, he had sat in on meetings where this sort of thing was 
discussed, but there was no evidence that machines like this would ever 
work. "How would you do that [blast someone with silent sounds] without 
it affecting us? Anybody who's out there would hear it."

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 Guantánamo 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."

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 ...").

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.

[1] In the 1950s, helicopters started falling out of the sky, crashing 
for no apparent reason, and the pilots who survived couldn't explain it. 
They had been flying as normal and then suddenly they felt nauseous, 
dizzy and debilitated; they lost control of their helicopters. A Dr 
Bucha was called in to solve the mystery. What he found was that the 
rotor blades were strobing the sunlight, and when it reached an 
approximation of human brainwave frequency, it interfered with the 
brain's ability to send correct information to the rest of the body.

(c) Jon Ronson, 2004.

[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 tomorrow.

Jamal al-Harith is one of four Britons released from Guantánamo in 
March, after more than two years' imprisonment, who claim they were 
repeatedly tortured at the camp and, it was announced last week, are 
suing Donald Rumsfeld and other US military leaders for £6m compensation 
each.]

(c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004