The assassination of Robert Kennedy never received the scrutiny it deserves
Lisa Pease
Monday, Nov 21, 2011
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/21/the_other_kennedy_conspiracy
Each November, the media recalls the assassination of President Kennedy and its attendant controversies. Rarely, however, is a second Kennedy anniversary acknowledged. On Nov. 20, 2011, Robert Kennedy — JFK’s brother and devoted political partner — would have turned 86 years old had he not also been assassinated. Although the mainstream media has been all but silent on this case, the facts scream out for a deeper investigation.
The story of Robert Kennedy’s assassination seems deceptively simple. After winning the California Democratic presidential primary on June 4, 1968, Sen. Robert Kennedy traversed a pantry at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. A young Palestinian Christian named Sirhan Sirhan pulled a gun and fired. Kennedy died roughly 25 hours later. Five others were wounded. Sirhan was tried and convicted. End of story, right?
Not so fast. A crime is like a jigsaw puzzle. You can’t solve the puzzle by forcing a piece where it doesn’t belong. The theory that Sirhan killed Kennedy is an ill-fitting piece not supported by the physical evidence. Here are some facts that are not in dispute.
Fact: The medical evidence showed that Kennedy was shot four times from behind from a distance of 1 to 6 inches. The fatal shot entered Kennedy from 1 inch behind Kennedy’s right ear.
Fact: All witnesses placed Sirhan in front of Kennedy. Not one witness put Sirhan’s gun muzzle closer than a foot to Kennedy, and most witnesses placed the muzzle about 3 feet away.
Based on these two facts alone, Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi wrote in his memoir, “Thus I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.”
Fact: Seven bullets were recovered from six pantry victims. Another bullet was lost in the ceiling space. Sirhan’s gun could only hold eight bullets. But an FBI agent photographed four additional “bullet holes” in the pantry. This so worried Los Angeles County officials that, nine years later, they asked the FBI essentially for a retraction, noting that if those were, in fact, “bullet holes,” as the bureau unequivocally stated, “We should certainly find out who else was firing.”
In recent years, an audiotape recorded by Stanislaw Pruszynski, a Polish reporter covering the 1968 presidential campaign for Canadian newspapers, resurfaced that supported the FBI’s finding. Sound engineer Philip Van Praag used sophisticated equipment to analyze the tape and found at least 12 shot sounds on the tape. He also found that two pairs of shots came too close together to have been fired from a single gun.
The evidence clearly points to at least two shooters that night in the Ambassador pantry. In addition to the physical evidence, multiple witnesses spotted other men with drawn guns in the pantry.
Fact: Richard Lubic, a televison producer, was standing behind Kennedy during the shooting. Lubic saw an arm to his right with a gun but could not see who was holding the gun. After Kennedy fell, Lubic knelt to help Kennedy and saw a security guard, Thane Eugene Cesar, with his gun drawn and pointing toward the floor. The Los Angeles Police Department later put enormous pressure on Lubic to change his story. Lubic was visited at home by LAPD investigators, who told him, “Don’t bring this up, don’t be talking about this.”
Fact: Donald Schulman, a young runner for a local TV station, claimed he saw security guard Cesar fire his gun. Schulman also told the LAPD he saw three guns in the pantry. (Some authors have mistakenly suggested Schulman wasn’t in the pantry, but LAPD records confirm that he was.)
Fact: Sandy Serrano, a Kennedy campaign volunteer, told NBC News reporter Sander Vanocur on live TV about seeing a young woman in a polka dot dress and a male companion who had passed her on a fire escape. The woman in the polka dot dress said, “We shot him, we shot him!” Serrano asked whom they shot. The woman said, “Senator Kennedy,” and ran off. A witness in the pantry, Vincent DiPierro, told the LAPD about a woman in a white dress with dark polka dots who seemed to be “holding” Sirhan just before the shooting.
Fact: The police were so interested in this “girl in the polka dot dress” that they issued an APB for her and specifically asked nearly all the witnesses interviewed whether they had seen anyone fitting her description. But when the story started to gain traction in the press, the LAPD declared that a blond girl on crutches in a bright green dress with yellow lemons dotting it was “the girl in the polka dot dress” and closed the book on this subject.
A new novel called “The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress” conjures an imaginary history for this illusory character. It’s a shame the novelist didn’t review the actual record, as the LAPD files suggest an even more provocative back story, which has not yet appeared in print, but will, when I finish the nonfiction book I’m writing about this case.
If one accepts the existing evidence, at least two people were firing bullets. And if two people were shooting, not only was there a conspiracy, it was such a sophisticated one that it has eluded prosecution for over 40 years.
The piece that has never fit has been Sirhan himself. Why did he never identify his co-conspirators? In addition, Sirhan has always claimed he had no memory of this crime. He had no idea why he shot Kennedy, nor did he remember writing in a notebook, over and over, “RFK must die.”
Could Sirhan have been hypnotized? I know how crazy this sounds to people who haven’t studied the history of mind control. It sounds like the stuff of Hollywood fiction. (On the other hand, where do you think Hollywood gets those stories? William Bryan, a renowned hypnotist who consulted on the making of the film “The Manchurian Candidate,” called a radio show shortly after Kennedy was shot to suggest Sirhan had been hypnotically programmed.)
Several witnesses, including some of the Los Angeles police officers who interacted with Sirhan immediately after the shooting, commented on Sirhan’s preternatural calmness before, during and after the shooting. LAPD officer Randolph Adair said in later years, “The guy was real confused. It was like it didn’t exactly hit him what he had done. He had a black, glassed-over look on his face — like he wasn’t in complete control of his mind at the time.”
Both Sirhan’s defense team and the prosecution tried and failed to get Sirhan to recall shooting Kennedy under hypnosis. Both, however, presumed his guilt and tried to get him to “admit” it while in a trance, which Sirhan never did.
Sirhan’s current attorney, William Pepper, recently had an expert hypnotize Sirhan in an open-ended fashion, during which Sirhan finally recalled that the touch of a girl in the pantry sent Sirhan into a mode where he thought he was firing at a target on a range. Could the girl in a polka dot dress DiPierro saw “holding” Sirhan moments before the shooting began have triggered his act?
On Channel 4 in the U.K. last month, hypnotist Derren Brown tested this scenario on his TV show “The Experiments.” He took a highly hypnotizable subject and, over a two-month period, trained him to shoot and “kill” a celebrity. The subject, however, did not know this was the experiment’s goal. Brown gave his subject a two-part trigger that would send him into a hypnotic state: a polka dot pattern and a unique cellphone ring tone. When he saw this pattern and heard the tone, the young man was taught to touch his head to focus his concentration, and then fire a gun at a target on a range. But his final test occurred not at a range, but at a taping of British entertainer Stephen Fry’s show. As the subject watched the show from a back row, a hidden camera showed a girl in a polka dot dress enter and sit in front of the subject. The cellphone rang. The girl turned to the subject and whispered, “The target is Stephen Fry.” The subject hesitated a moment, then touched his forehead, opened the case, pulled out a gun loaded with blanks, stood, and fired. Stephen Fry, who was wired with squibs (the exploding fake blood packets used in movies to simulate gunshots), fell down “dead.” The hypnotized man showed no reaction at the time. When shown a video of his act later, the subject seemed genuinely surprised at what he had done.
If Sirhan was hypnotized, is there any chance he could be “innocent” of the crime, as his current lawyers are pleading? While I’m not aware of any American precedent to such a claim, there was a similar case in Denmark in the 1950s. Palle Hadrup, who had committed a murder, was charged only with temporary insanity because the jury believed he had killed under the hypnotic influence of another man, a hardened criminal who directed Hadrup to commit crimes.
Robert Kennedy had many enemies, but which of them were capable of such a sophisticated plot? Could the mob have hypnotized Sirhan? Could Aristotle Onassis have suppressed the FBI’s evidence of conspiracy? Could Jimmy Hoffa have made sure that no troubling facts about the case were ever presented to a jury? Who had that kind of power?
The CIA had strong relationships with the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, and L.A. county officials. The CIA had enormous influence over the media, including national coverage of both Kennedy assassinations, as Carl Bernstein’s explosive October 1977 expose in Rolling Stone magazine later demonstrated. Even powerful FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover had never been able to rein in the CIA. If anyone had the power to pull this off and completely cover their tracks, it would be a small handful of people from the covert side of the agency.
Perhaps most significantly, the CIA was, by 1968, extremely experienced in various mind-control scenarios that involved drugs, hypnosis and a combination of the two. One of the CIA’s initial forays into this area came through a project code-named ARTICHOKE. One ARTICHOKE document presents the question: “Can an individual … be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of ARTICHOKE?” This program later evolved into the MKULTRA program, an umbrella designation for hundreds of experiments that involved drugs, hypnosis and biological and chemical warfare.
But why would the CIA want to kill Robert Kennedy? Weren’t they in bed together on the Castro assassination plots when RFK was serving as his brother’s gung-ho attorney general? That’s a widely believed myth. The 1967 CIA Inspector General report on the anti-Castro plots explicitly asks, “Can CIA state or imply that it was merely an instrument of policy?” and answers, “Not in this case,” explaining that while RFK was informed of plots against Castro from the past, he was not informed of the plots that were continuing.
During his brother’s administration, Robert was a constant thorn in the CIA’s side. After the agency’s disastrous Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961, President Kennedy asked his brother to closely monitor the CIA, which infuriated the operatives who had for years prided themselves on their independence from authority. After RFK was elected to the Senate from New York in 1964 and became a growing critic of the war in Vietnam and the Johnson administration, the CIA began to keep a close watch on him.
Fact: The CIA was so concerned about Robert Kennedy in the last year of his life that it put spying on him on a par with spying on the Soviet Union, according to a report in the Washington Post after it obtained this data.
Perhaps the CIA was also anxious about RFK because, as David Talbot (the founder and current CEO of Salon) recounted in his 2007 book, “Brothers,” Robert Kennedy harbored suspicions about the CIA’s possible complicity in his brother’s death. One of Robert’s first calls after JFK’s assassination was to the CIA to ask if the agency had killed his brother. If members of the CIA were involved in the death of JFK, could they afford to let Robert ascend to an office where he’d have the power but to do something about that?
I’m well aware that extraordinary claims deserve extraordinary evidence. I have much more to support what I’ve said here, which I am laying out in book form. I hope only to have cracked your mind open, because Occam’s Razor fails us when the simplest explanation is the carefully planned cover story.
Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney John Howard once said of Sirhan, “If he isn’t guilty, it’s the sweetest frame in the world.” I think Howard got that right. He isn’t. And it is.
Lisa Pease is an expert on the assassinations of the '60s in general and the Robert Kennedy assassination in particular. She has appeared on numerous radio shows and on the Discovery channel to talk about various aspects of Cold War history. Several of her articles were published in "The Assassinations" (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003), a book she also co-edited. She is a regular contributor to ConsortiumNews.com, Common Dreams, Truthout and Michael Moore’s site.
Showing posts with label Lisa Pease. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lisa Pease. Show all posts
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Facts Behind 'Men Who Stare at Goats'
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/111609a.html
Facts Behind 'Men Who Stare at Goats'
By Lisa Pease
November 16, 2009
Can people really influence the physical world with thought alone? And if so, dare we use that power for evil, instead of good? Or will the effort come back to haunt us?
That is the quandary posed by the film “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” and, even more so, by the book of the same name that inspired the film.
First, run — do not walk, do not pass Go — to the theater to see “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” Films that are both hilarious and intelligent, provocative yet madcap, are hard to come by.
And because this film teaches us, in a wildly entertaining manner, about recent military and intelligence history, I have a feeling certain people will work hard to rush this movie right back out of the theaters. So see it before showings of it, like some of the characters in the film, disappear.
The film presents a largely fictitious story based on all-too-real projects and programs conducted by various agencies of the government. Very little of it is literally true, yet many of the stranger events in the film happened in a manner similar to the one portrayed.
The film presents a story of a journalist, played by Ewan McGregor who – to prove his manliness to his ex-wife – finds a way into Iraq to cover the war there by hitching a ride with military man Lyn Cassidy, played by George Clooney.
Clooney claims to be on a military assignment. But Clooney’s mission turns out to have been self-assigned, due to a vision.
He felt a former mentor, a man who brought New Age religion to the post-Vietnam Army and helped spawn a wave of activity that unfortunately led to the “dark side” of new and improved ways to torture people and turn their minds to putty, had called him psychically. Cassidy doesn’t know his mission, but trusts he’ll figure it out when he arrives.
That through-line is entirely fictional. Journalist Jon Ronson, on whose book of the same name the film is loosely based, did not go to Iraq. George Clooney’s character is a composite. The character that Kevin Spacey plays is the nearly entirely fictitious.
And yet, there really was a man who stared a goat to death, or so it appears. There really was a project within the Army, called Project Jedi, to create soldiers with superpowers. There really is a device called the “Predator” which looks like a toy yet can be used to inflict incredible pain.
And there really was a man similar to the character portrayed by Jeff Bridges. His real name is Jim Channon.
Walking Through Walls
The film opens with a Major General trying to walk through a wall. According to Jon Ronson, the source of this incident was a real life Major General himself, Albert Stubblebine III.
We are, after all, simply a collection of atoms, and atoms are more space than mass. Why shouldn’t our mind have the power to rearrange, temporarily, those spaces to allow us to pass through walls?
But theory is not reality, and Stubblebine, for all his faith and concentration, did indeed smash nose-first into his office wall in 1983. You should know that, from 1981 to 1984, General Stubblebine was the head of the U.S. Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, with authority over some 16,000 enlisted personnel.
In that position, General Stubblebine inherited control of some of the Army’s “remote viewers,” defined as people with the purported ability to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means or extra-sensory perception.
According to one of the most highly regarded one of them, Joseph Moneagle, the remote viewers served clients in the CIA, DIA, Secret Service, Naval Intelligence Command, the NSA, the National Security Council, the FBI, the ATF, and the DEA, among others.
Despite the ever-present “giggle factor,” clearly, something of value was being produced, or at least some influential officials in the U.S. intelligence agencies must have thought so.
General Stubblebine became so convinced of man’s psychic nature that he appealed to the Special Forces program leaders at Fort Bragg to pursue programs in psychic healing (for teams without access to medical facilities). His suggestion was met with silence.
How about investigating the probability that time was simply another axis in space and that we should be able to travel through space in past and future time as easily as we traveled through space in the present time. More silence.
The General then suggested that soldiers could be trained to burst hearts with thought, and suggested experimenting on animals.
While overtly the Special Forces evinced no interest in General Stubblebine’s suggestions, they did, indeed, have a set of 300 goats in a shed just a few yards away that had been de-bleated, to keep their presence on the base covert.
At “goat lab,” the goats were de-bleated, apparently to hide their presence from the local ASPCA, as the goats were shot up and then surgically repaired there as part of a medical training program. And the lab really was originally called “dog lab”, but people became too attached to the dogs.
For whatever reason, people do not seem to form emotional attachments as easily to goats, hence their grisly fate. And, most amazingly of all, a man at Fort Bragg really did, it appears, eventually succeed in mentally downing a goat.
Hamster’s Death
In the film, one of the character shows the journalist a film documenting his staring his own hamster not quite to death. That incident actually happened. Guy Savelli showed Ronson a film of himself stunning, but not killing, his pet hamster.
And, as in the film, the reason Savelli says he didn’t show the tape of him actually killing the hamster was because his wife wasn’t sure how Ronson would react to seeing him kill a real animal.
Savelli also appears in the character of Lyn Cassidy, played by Clooney. According to Savelli, who really does run a dance studio, he did down a goat in this manner. He made one goat collapse by thinking strongly about it, and apparently killed another, goat #17 (out of 30) by accident while trying to kill goat #16 on purpose.
Or so Savelli claims. Col. John Alexander has countered with the story, sent to me and others by e-mail, that Savelli downed the goat with a karate chop, not psychically. However, given Col. Alexander’s background with covert operations, it’s also possible that Col. Alexander is either telling the truth as he heard it, which may not be the truth, or he is putting out a cover story to muddy the waters.
Not one but several people told Ronson that a man had killed a goat simply by willing it to die. So either a group was running an operation against Ronson (or people in the military) to convince him (or them) that goats were killed by mental power, or it really happened. I’m not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe the former, so I am stuck contemplating the latter.
Whatever the truth about the goats, it’s no secret that Jim Channon (“Bill Django” in the film, portrayed by Jeff Bridges) really did envision a New Age-type army of warriors who used their powers for peace. Channon noted that in Vietnam, most of the soldiers were essentially good people who were not eager to kill another human being.
Could this humanitarian instinct be repurposed into a new kind of weapon?
In the wake of America’s utter failure in Vietnam, the military establishment genuinely considered alternative solutions to traditional warfare, and gave Jim time and money to explore other avenues for conquering the enemy.
Channon sat naked in hot tubs, took seminars at the Esalen Institute, experienced Reichian rebirthing, and talked to a man who composed subliminal message CDs to help people lose weight and find inner peace. (Ronson wrote that an evangelical church in America found its donations tripled after it blasted its congregation with subliminal sounds during the hymns.)
After these explorations, Jim wrote a confidential paper to his superiors in the Army that opened with this line: “The U.S. Army doesn’t really have any serious alternative than to be wonderful.”
Jim’s document was his “First Earth Battalion Operations Manual.” His recommendations included approaching enemy combatants with soldiers holding symbols of peace, like baby lambs in their arms, of greeting people with “sparkly eyes,” and hugging the enemy.
Channon was also the one who came up with the Army’s most successful recruiting slogan of all time: “Be all that you can be.”
‘Warrior Monks’
Channon proposed a set of “Warrior Monks” who had conquered personal lust, and designed his program to weed out sheer mercenaries. But Channon’s suggestions were not all peaceful. Channon also proposed the use of nonlethal weapons.
Or maybe that was the influence of the document’s co-author, the aforementioned Col. John Alexander.
One of Col. Alexander’s “nonlethal” inventions was “sticky foam,” designed to literally freeze the enemy in its tracks. This foam was featured in a recent incarnation of “The Incredible Hulk,” the latest Dan Brown novel The Lost Symbol, and America’s 1995 military engagement in Somalia.
Unlike the fictional application in the Hulk film, when the foam was used in the real world to create a barrier between food and a rioting crowd, the crowd simply waited for the foam to harden and then climbed over it.
The foam had also been used in an attempt to subdue violent prisoners before they were moved to a new facility, however, as Ronson reported, the practice was discontinued because the prison authorities found it impossible to move the prisoners once the foam had solidified (begging the question of what happened to the prisoners unlucky enough to be the first test subjects).
The foam was taken to Iraq for use on the expected Weapons of Mass Destruction, which were, of course, never found.
Another nonlethal weapon Channon/Alexander suggested was the blasting of combatants with “discordant sounds” designed to disorient, confuse, and sicken.
This technique was used at Waco, where the FBI blasted the Branch Davidians with discordant rock music, the sound of dentist drills, Buddhist chants (a move protested by the Dalai Lama), dying rabbit noises, and other strange noises that served no obvious purpose, but which may have carried subliminal sounds.
The FBI even tried to hire Dr. Igor Smirnov, who had, at the behest of the Soviet government, blasted subliminal messages to Soviet troops en route to Afghanistan in the 1970s telling them, “Do not get drunk before battle.” The FBI wanted to know if Smirnov could put the “voice of God,” directly into the mind of David Koresh.
God was to be played by — and I’m not making this up — Charlton Heston. Dr. Smirnov said it was possible, but when the FBI also wanted him to sign something effectively taking responsibility should the Branch Davidians end up killing themselves, Dr. Smirnoff refused to participate.
Sleep Deprivation
Yet some of these theories have been put into practice, often in sinister ways. For instance, repeated playing of songs over and over, sometimes accompanied by flashing lights, is a method of torture that was used in Iraq.
The media laughed when it was revealed that one of the songs used to torture captured Iraqis was the “I Love You” song from the popular icon of children, the purple dinosaur named Barney. The media totally avoided the far more serious fact that music, especially when played in ways that cause serious sleep deprivation, can be horrific instruments of torture.
Songs can even, as another children’s show composer learned, provably reduce knowledge. Ronson talked to Christopher Cerf, the longtime composer for the beloved children’s show Sesame Street. Cerf told how the Sesame Street team includes education researchers who test the results of his work to see if it really helps children learn.
In one case, a song he wrote provably helped kids unlearn something they already knew.
“So I figure if I have the power to suck information out of people’s brains by writing these songs, maybe that’s something that could be useful to the CIA for brainwashing techniques,” Cerf told Ronson.
I find it profoundly disconcerting that a man tasked with writing music to help educate children on a popular PBS show could also be interested in helping the CIA brainwash people.
Ronson’s book suggests that some of the torture methods used in the recent wars were more similar to the infamous Nazi experiments that tested human limits than any intelligence-gathering exercise, the standard excuse for this war crime.
Both the CIA and the military have sought to control minds — from within and from without — for years.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the CIA conducted numerous mind-control experiments designed in some cases to break down people’s defenses so they would tell the truth when captured and designed in other cases to produce operational amnesia so that the truth could never be extracted if the agent was captured. (One wonders if the fact that these goals were mutually exclusive seemed to bother anyone.)
The CIA experimented with drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, flashing lights, sleep deprivation, and other torturous techniques, sometimes in “terminal” experiments.
CIA scientists tried to completely control people’s behavior. They discussed fragmenting minds through trauma and then rebuilding the fragmented parts into multiple personalities that could be separately programmed, so that personality A would not know what personality B was doing even though both personalities shared the same body.
Mind Over Matter
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, studies proliferated showing that the mind was not something simply to be broken and/or reprogrammed, but could be used, by specially talented people, to influence the world in a physical way.
The best-selling 1973 book Supernature, by Lyall Watson, described, among many other examples, a Soviet experiment in which a woman was captured on film using nothing but the power of her mind to separate a yolk from an egg after it had been broken into a saline solution in a container six feet in front of her.
In America, at the Stanford Research Institute, scientists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff used films of such Soviet experiments, along with other data, to convince the CIA to invest in their studies of psychic research. The program evolved into both remote influencing and remote viewing experiments.
The program showed conclusively that some people really do seem to have an ability to learn things they have no direct way of knowing. But since the results were never 100 percent accurate nor 100 percent reproducible on demand, the program was eventually phased out, only to resurface later from time to time under the auspices of agencies that included, among others, the Army, the CIA, the Air Force, and NASA.
One of these programs was exposed rather dramatically in 1995 on national television when Ed Dames, a remote viewer from these programs, discussed his work. One of the remote viewers speculated to Ronson that perhaps the program was exposed to publicize its “cancellation” while deeper, blacker operations continued.
Most people react to the thought of man being able to use psychic power (whether for good or evil) in one of two unfortunate ways: they either discount it entirely, or believe it uncritically. The truth, it appears, is likely somewhere between those extremes.
Whatever the truth, this “technology” of remote viewing and remote influencing, such as it is, has moved into the private sector. Most of the people involved in these programs have started their own private enterprises, selling their psychic services and offering training programs, at a price, of course.
It’s ironic that, at the same time this film has come to the fore, Dan Brown’s latest novel also takes on the topic of the power of thought. One of his characters describes how thoughts may actually have discernible, if beyond miniscule, mass, and that if enough people share the same thought, that thought attains somewhat of a critical mass, enabling it to exert a kind of gravity over other thoughts.
When you couple that with the research that shows most people appear to have at least some psychic ability, whether they realize it or not, perhaps we all have the power to pull this country out of its “means justify the ends” mindset regarding torture and to move our national mindset onto a path that enables us to more gracefully cohabitate this planet with others.
Now that’s a thought worth contemplating, with whatever power we have. Then perhaps we could, like Clooney’s character in the “The Men Who Stare At Goats,” experience a much needed redemption from our past.
Lisa Pease is a historian and writer who specializes in the mysteries of the John F. Kennedy era. She is also a movie buff.
Facts Behind 'Men Who Stare at Goats'
By Lisa Pease
November 16, 2009
Can people really influence the physical world with thought alone? And if so, dare we use that power for evil, instead of good? Or will the effort come back to haunt us?
That is the quandary posed by the film “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” and, even more so, by the book of the same name that inspired the film.
First, run — do not walk, do not pass Go — to the theater to see “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” Films that are both hilarious and intelligent, provocative yet madcap, are hard to come by.
And because this film teaches us, in a wildly entertaining manner, about recent military and intelligence history, I have a feeling certain people will work hard to rush this movie right back out of the theaters. So see it before showings of it, like some of the characters in the film, disappear.
The film presents a largely fictitious story based on all-too-real projects and programs conducted by various agencies of the government. Very little of it is literally true, yet many of the stranger events in the film happened in a manner similar to the one portrayed.
The film presents a story of a journalist, played by Ewan McGregor who – to prove his manliness to his ex-wife – finds a way into Iraq to cover the war there by hitching a ride with military man Lyn Cassidy, played by George Clooney.
Clooney claims to be on a military assignment. But Clooney’s mission turns out to have been self-assigned, due to a vision.
He felt a former mentor, a man who brought New Age religion to the post-Vietnam Army and helped spawn a wave of activity that unfortunately led to the “dark side” of new and improved ways to torture people and turn their minds to putty, had called him psychically. Cassidy doesn’t know his mission, but trusts he’ll figure it out when he arrives.
That through-line is entirely fictional. Journalist Jon Ronson, on whose book of the same name the film is loosely based, did not go to Iraq. George Clooney’s character is a composite. The character that Kevin Spacey plays is the nearly entirely fictitious.
And yet, there really was a man who stared a goat to death, or so it appears. There really was a project within the Army, called Project Jedi, to create soldiers with superpowers. There really is a device called the “Predator” which looks like a toy yet can be used to inflict incredible pain.
And there really was a man similar to the character portrayed by Jeff Bridges. His real name is Jim Channon.
Walking Through Walls
The film opens with a Major General trying to walk through a wall. According to Jon Ronson, the source of this incident was a real life Major General himself, Albert Stubblebine III.
We are, after all, simply a collection of atoms, and atoms are more space than mass. Why shouldn’t our mind have the power to rearrange, temporarily, those spaces to allow us to pass through walls?
But theory is not reality, and Stubblebine, for all his faith and concentration, did indeed smash nose-first into his office wall in 1983. You should know that, from 1981 to 1984, General Stubblebine was the head of the U.S. Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, with authority over some 16,000 enlisted personnel.
In that position, General Stubblebine inherited control of some of the Army’s “remote viewers,” defined as people with the purported ability to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means or extra-sensory perception.
According to one of the most highly regarded one of them, Joseph Moneagle, the remote viewers served clients in the CIA, DIA, Secret Service, Naval Intelligence Command, the NSA, the National Security Council, the FBI, the ATF, and the DEA, among others.
Despite the ever-present “giggle factor,” clearly, something of value was being produced, or at least some influential officials in the U.S. intelligence agencies must have thought so.
General Stubblebine became so convinced of man’s psychic nature that he appealed to the Special Forces program leaders at Fort Bragg to pursue programs in psychic healing (for teams without access to medical facilities). His suggestion was met with silence.
How about investigating the probability that time was simply another axis in space and that we should be able to travel through space in past and future time as easily as we traveled through space in the present time. More silence.
The General then suggested that soldiers could be trained to burst hearts with thought, and suggested experimenting on animals.
While overtly the Special Forces evinced no interest in General Stubblebine’s suggestions, they did, indeed, have a set of 300 goats in a shed just a few yards away that had been de-bleated, to keep their presence on the base covert.
At “goat lab,” the goats were de-bleated, apparently to hide their presence from the local ASPCA, as the goats were shot up and then surgically repaired there as part of a medical training program. And the lab really was originally called “dog lab”, but people became too attached to the dogs.
For whatever reason, people do not seem to form emotional attachments as easily to goats, hence their grisly fate. And, most amazingly of all, a man at Fort Bragg really did, it appears, eventually succeed in mentally downing a goat.
Hamster’s Death
In the film, one of the character shows the journalist a film documenting his staring his own hamster not quite to death. That incident actually happened. Guy Savelli showed Ronson a film of himself stunning, but not killing, his pet hamster.
And, as in the film, the reason Savelli says he didn’t show the tape of him actually killing the hamster was because his wife wasn’t sure how Ronson would react to seeing him kill a real animal.
Savelli also appears in the character of Lyn Cassidy, played by Clooney. According to Savelli, who really does run a dance studio, he did down a goat in this manner. He made one goat collapse by thinking strongly about it, and apparently killed another, goat #17 (out of 30) by accident while trying to kill goat #16 on purpose.
Or so Savelli claims. Col. John Alexander has countered with the story, sent to me and others by e-mail, that Savelli downed the goat with a karate chop, not psychically. However, given Col. Alexander’s background with covert operations, it’s also possible that Col. Alexander is either telling the truth as he heard it, which may not be the truth, or he is putting out a cover story to muddy the waters.
Not one but several people told Ronson that a man had killed a goat simply by willing it to die. So either a group was running an operation against Ronson (or people in the military) to convince him (or them) that goats were killed by mental power, or it really happened. I’m not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe the former, so I am stuck contemplating the latter.
Whatever the truth about the goats, it’s no secret that Jim Channon (“Bill Django” in the film, portrayed by Jeff Bridges) really did envision a New Age-type army of warriors who used their powers for peace. Channon noted that in Vietnam, most of the soldiers were essentially good people who were not eager to kill another human being.
Could this humanitarian instinct be repurposed into a new kind of weapon?
In the wake of America’s utter failure in Vietnam, the military establishment genuinely considered alternative solutions to traditional warfare, and gave Jim time and money to explore other avenues for conquering the enemy.
Channon sat naked in hot tubs, took seminars at the Esalen Institute, experienced Reichian rebirthing, and talked to a man who composed subliminal message CDs to help people lose weight and find inner peace. (Ronson wrote that an evangelical church in America found its donations tripled after it blasted its congregation with subliminal sounds during the hymns.)
After these explorations, Jim wrote a confidential paper to his superiors in the Army that opened with this line: “The U.S. Army doesn’t really have any serious alternative than to be wonderful.”
Jim’s document was his “First Earth Battalion Operations Manual.” His recommendations included approaching enemy combatants with soldiers holding symbols of peace, like baby lambs in their arms, of greeting people with “sparkly eyes,” and hugging the enemy.
Channon was also the one who came up with the Army’s most successful recruiting slogan of all time: “Be all that you can be.”
‘Warrior Monks’
Channon proposed a set of “Warrior Monks” who had conquered personal lust, and designed his program to weed out sheer mercenaries. But Channon’s suggestions were not all peaceful. Channon also proposed the use of nonlethal weapons.
Or maybe that was the influence of the document’s co-author, the aforementioned Col. John Alexander.
One of Col. Alexander’s “nonlethal” inventions was “sticky foam,” designed to literally freeze the enemy in its tracks. This foam was featured in a recent incarnation of “The Incredible Hulk,” the latest Dan Brown novel The Lost Symbol, and America’s 1995 military engagement in Somalia.
Unlike the fictional application in the Hulk film, when the foam was used in the real world to create a barrier between food and a rioting crowd, the crowd simply waited for the foam to harden and then climbed over it.
The foam had also been used in an attempt to subdue violent prisoners before they were moved to a new facility, however, as Ronson reported, the practice was discontinued because the prison authorities found it impossible to move the prisoners once the foam had solidified (begging the question of what happened to the prisoners unlucky enough to be the first test subjects).
The foam was taken to Iraq for use on the expected Weapons of Mass Destruction, which were, of course, never found.
Another nonlethal weapon Channon/Alexander suggested was the blasting of combatants with “discordant sounds” designed to disorient, confuse, and sicken.
This technique was used at Waco, where the FBI blasted the Branch Davidians with discordant rock music, the sound of dentist drills, Buddhist chants (a move protested by the Dalai Lama), dying rabbit noises, and other strange noises that served no obvious purpose, but which may have carried subliminal sounds.
The FBI even tried to hire Dr. Igor Smirnov, who had, at the behest of the Soviet government, blasted subliminal messages to Soviet troops en route to Afghanistan in the 1970s telling them, “Do not get drunk before battle.” The FBI wanted to know if Smirnov could put the “voice of God,” directly into the mind of David Koresh.
God was to be played by — and I’m not making this up — Charlton Heston. Dr. Smirnov said it was possible, but when the FBI also wanted him to sign something effectively taking responsibility should the Branch Davidians end up killing themselves, Dr. Smirnoff refused to participate.
Sleep Deprivation
Yet some of these theories have been put into practice, often in sinister ways. For instance, repeated playing of songs over and over, sometimes accompanied by flashing lights, is a method of torture that was used in Iraq.
The media laughed when it was revealed that one of the songs used to torture captured Iraqis was the “I Love You” song from the popular icon of children, the purple dinosaur named Barney. The media totally avoided the far more serious fact that music, especially when played in ways that cause serious sleep deprivation, can be horrific instruments of torture.
Songs can even, as another children’s show composer learned, provably reduce knowledge. Ronson talked to Christopher Cerf, the longtime composer for the beloved children’s show Sesame Street. Cerf told how the Sesame Street team includes education researchers who test the results of his work to see if it really helps children learn.
In one case, a song he wrote provably helped kids unlearn something they already knew.
“So I figure if I have the power to suck information out of people’s brains by writing these songs, maybe that’s something that could be useful to the CIA for brainwashing techniques,” Cerf told Ronson.
I find it profoundly disconcerting that a man tasked with writing music to help educate children on a popular PBS show could also be interested in helping the CIA brainwash people.
Ronson’s book suggests that some of the torture methods used in the recent wars were more similar to the infamous Nazi experiments that tested human limits than any intelligence-gathering exercise, the standard excuse for this war crime.
Both the CIA and the military have sought to control minds — from within and from without — for years.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the CIA conducted numerous mind-control experiments designed in some cases to break down people’s defenses so they would tell the truth when captured and designed in other cases to produce operational amnesia so that the truth could never be extracted if the agent was captured. (One wonders if the fact that these goals were mutually exclusive seemed to bother anyone.)
The CIA experimented with drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, flashing lights, sleep deprivation, and other torturous techniques, sometimes in “terminal” experiments.
CIA scientists tried to completely control people’s behavior. They discussed fragmenting minds through trauma and then rebuilding the fragmented parts into multiple personalities that could be separately programmed, so that personality A would not know what personality B was doing even though both personalities shared the same body.
Mind Over Matter
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, studies proliferated showing that the mind was not something simply to be broken and/or reprogrammed, but could be used, by specially talented people, to influence the world in a physical way.
The best-selling 1973 book Supernature, by Lyall Watson, described, among many other examples, a Soviet experiment in which a woman was captured on film using nothing but the power of her mind to separate a yolk from an egg after it had been broken into a saline solution in a container six feet in front of her.
In America, at the Stanford Research Institute, scientists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff used films of such Soviet experiments, along with other data, to convince the CIA to invest in their studies of psychic research. The program evolved into both remote influencing and remote viewing experiments.
The program showed conclusively that some people really do seem to have an ability to learn things they have no direct way of knowing. But since the results were never 100 percent accurate nor 100 percent reproducible on demand, the program was eventually phased out, only to resurface later from time to time under the auspices of agencies that included, among others, the Army, the CIA, the Air Force, and NASA.
One of these programs was exposed rather dramatically in 1995 on national television when Ed Dames, a remote viewer from these programs, discussed his work. One of the remote viewers speculated to Ronson that perhaps the program was exposed to publicize its “cancellation” while deeper, blacker operations continued.
Most people react to the thought of man being able to use psychic power (whether for good or evil) in one of two unfortunate ways: they either discount it entirely, or believe it uncritically. The truth, it appears, is likely somewhere between those extremes.
Whatever the truth, this “technology” of remote viewing and remote influencing, such as it is, has moved into the private sector. Most of the people involved in these programs have started their own private enterprises, selling their psychic services and offering training programs, at a price, of course.
It’s ironic that, at the same time this film has come to the fore, Dan Brown’s latest novel also takes on the topic of the power of thought. One of his characters describes how thoughts may actually have discernible, if beyond miniscule, mass, and that if enough people share the same thought, that thought attains somewhat of a critical mass, enabling it to exert a kind of gravity over other thoughts.
When you couple that with the research that shows most people appear to have at least some psychic ability, whether they realize it or not, perhaps we all have the power to pull this country out of its “means justify the ends” mindset regarding torture and to move our national mindset onto a path that enables us to more gracefully cohabitate this planet with others.
Now that’s a thought worth contemplating, with whatever power we have. Then perhaps we could, like Clooney’s character in the “The Men Who Stare At Goats,” experience a much needed redemption from our past.
Lisa Pease is a historian and writer who specializes in the mysteries of the John F. Kennedy era. She is also a movie buff.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Lisa Pease on Voting Laws
Dear Voting Activists,
I wanted to bring a couple of important items to your attention—one good, and one horrific.
First, Holt’s bill is better than ever, in the latest version. Clear language expressly forbids the use of DRE (direct recording electronic) voting machines. Paperless machines have to be replaced by 2010, if the bill passes, and machines that currently produce a paper record have to be replaced by 2014. But again, that’s assuming the bill PASSES in time. You can read the latest version of the Holt bill via the link at the end of this message.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that, separately, there’s a very concerted effort afoot to enable Internet voting in this country. Internet voting presents a completely insecure system that has no paper trail and no way to be audited by hand.
Just as the disabled community was the excuse for bringing us unauditable DRE machines, Internet voting is being put forward as a way of helping the troops.
So our efforts have reached a crossroads. If we fail to see Holt’s bill through the door this time around, we won’t get another chance. Internet voting will be ushered in, and our power to ‘vote out’ the people who don’t want to help us will be seriously compromised, if not gone altogether. That’s an unthinkable option, for me, and I hope for all of you as well. Please understand the push for Internet voting is a very serious effort with a real chance of succeeding if we do not act promptly.
The only bill already written, vetted, familiar to the membership, and ready to be passed is Holt’s bill. It doesn’t have a number yet, and won’t until it’s introduced.
And that’s where you come in.
Rep. Holt wants to get as many co-sponsors as possible before the bill is introduced.
Will you please call your Congressperson in the next few days and find out where they stand re Holt’s latest bill? If they are already a co-sponsor, thank them mightily for their political will and courage. If they are not yet a co-sponsor, please encourage them, with all the passion you feel about this issue, to support this last firewall against truly unaccountable, unauditable voting.
Time is of the essence. If we want this bill to be in effect for the 2010 election, we’d need to get this bill on the House floor for a vote by the end of July.
Here are some key points you can mention:
Holt’s bill will require mandatory voter-marked paper records and a mandatory audit of those records, while still providing for accessible options for the disabled.
Holt’s bill has already been vetted by the House Administration committee and is essentially ready to go, with very few changes from the last session, but with the key change of banning DREs by requiring that the paper ballot must be marked by the voter before it is counted.
By requiring both machine and hand counts (via manual audits), we dramatically reduce the possibility of a rigged vote. It’s easier to rig a fully hand-counted vote or a fully machine-counted vote than it is to rig a vote that is counted by two entirely separate systems.
Holt’s bill will implicitly ban Internet voting before it gets off the ground because it requires a paper record marked by the voter, something which would be impossible to do using the Internet alone.
I don’t want to sound alarmist. But truly, we are at the end of the line. Each time the bill fails to come to a vote, the DRE and Internet voting vendors (one and the same) grow bolder. We need to completely cut them off at this pass before Internet voting becomes a reality. If that happens, our only recourse will be in the streets. And that’s a battle I hope none of us have to fight, because that one will be much more costly to all of us.
Although some states have been moving to paper-based elections, seven states still have fully paperless, unauditable elections. Many other states have numerous counties still using paperless voting systems. How many more jurisdictions will succumb to aggressive efforts to implement Internet voting? Many people still don’t get it. Most people are decent enough and innocent enough to believe Internet voting would be both convenient and safe. After all, they bank online, right? That’s why the burden falls on those few of us who really do understand the dangers to do all we can while we still have a chance to make a difference.
While I’m thrilled Obama is our president, the fact that he got elected made a lot of activists complacent, feeling that our vote really isn’t at risk. But it is, and more than ever before.
Please. Call your Representative and Senators this week and ask if they are supporting Rush Holt’s bill banning paperless voting. (Ask your Senator to support Sen. Bill Nelson’s clone of Holt’s bill when it is introduced.) Talk to their staff and make the strongest case you can. Ask for an answer. Try not to just pass a comment along. Get your Congressperson on the record regarding their support, or opposition, to this bill.
If you don’t know who your Representative is, you can find out at www.house.gov/writerep. By entering your address and ZIP, you can find out who represents you in Washington.
Please share this message with your friends who are politically aware. We all need to help push this one over the top. No legislation passes without a groundswell of grassroots activity behind it. The other side is working overtime to stop this legislation. It’s up to us to counter their efforts.
Thank you, as always, for being such a good patriot and supporting an honest, accountable vote. I’m grateful for all you continue to do.
Lisa Pease
Author and activist
Resources
The latest version of Holt’s bill:
http://voteraction.org/files/HOLT_VOTERCONFIDENCE_FINAL4-14-09xml%20(2).pdf
Voter Action’s strong endorsement of Holt’s bill:
http://www.voteraction.org/news-article/2009/voter-action-statement-support-holt-voter-confidence-and-increased-accessibility-a
List of Internet voting bills being proposed:
http://voteraction.org/news-article/2009/track-internet-voting-legislation-your-state
One of the arguments has been that Internet voting would increase participation. That’s the opposite of what happened in Hawaii with their recent Internet voting experiment. Voting participation dropped 83%:
http://www.kitv.com/news/19573770/detail.html
List of various systems used by various states (seven have fully paperless systems, with key congressional and senate seats being determined):
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/
If you get pushback re allowing the military to vote, point them to Holt’s separate bill providing express mail services for soldiers to mail paper ballots back, at taxpayer expense. The text of this short bill is here:
http://voteraction.org/news-article/2009/track-internet-voting-legislation-your-state
I wanted to bring a couple of important items to your attention—one good, and one horrific.
First, Holt’s bill is better than ever, in the latest version. Clear language expressly forbids the use of DRE (direct recording electronic) voting machines. Paperless machines have to be replaced by 2010, if the bill passes, and machines that currently produce a paper record have to be replaced by 2014. But again, that’s assuming the bill PASSES in time. You can read the latest version of the Holt bill via the link at the end of this message.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that, separately, there’s a very concerted effort afoot to enable Internet voting in this country. Internet voting presents a completely insecure system that has no paper trail and no way to be audited by hand.
Just as the disabled community was the excuse for bringing us unauditable DRE machines, Internet voting is being put forward as a way of helping the troops.
So our efforts have reached a crossroads. If we fail to see Holt’s bill through the door this time around, we won’t get another chance. Internet voting will be ushered in, and our power to ‘vote out’ the people who don’t want to help us will be seriously compromised, if not gone altogether. That’s an unthinkable option, for me, and I hope for all of you as well. Please understand the push for Internet voting is a very serious effort with a real chance of succeeding if we do not act promptly.
The only bill already written, vetted, familiar to the membership, and ready to be passed is Holt’s bill. It doesn’t have a number yet, and won’t until it’s introduced.
And that’s where you come in.
Rep. Holt wants to get as many co-sponsors as possible before the bill is introduced.
Will you please call your Congressperson in the next few days and find out where they stand re Holt’s latest bill? If they are already a co-sponsor, thank them mightily for their political will and courage. If they are not yet a co-sponsor, please encourage them, with all the passion you feel about this issue, to support this last firewall against truly unaccountable, unauditable voting.
Time is of the essence. If we want this bill to be in effect for the 2010 election, we’d need to get this bill on the House floor for a vote by the end of July.
Here are some key points you can mention:
Holt’s bill will require mandatory voter-marked paper records and a mandatory audit of those records, while still providing for accessible options for the disabled.
Holt’s bill has already been vetted by the House Administration committee and is essentially ready to go, with very few changes from the last session, but with the key change of banning DREs by requiring that the paper ballot must be marked by the voter before it is counted.
By requiring both machine and hand counts (via manual audits), we dramatically reduce the possibility of a rigged vote. It’s easier to rig a fully hand-counted vote or a fully machine-counted vote than it is to rig a vote that is counted by two entirely separate systems.
Holt’s bill will implicitly ban Internet voting before it gets off the ground because it requires a paper record marked by the voter, something which would be impossible to do using the Internet alone.
I don’t want to sound alarmist. But truly, we are at the end of the line. Each time the bill fails to come to a vote, the DRE and Internet voting vendors (one and the same) grow bolder. We need to completely cut them off at this pass before Internet voting becomes a reality. If that happens, our only recourse will be in the streets. And that’s a battle I hope none of us have to fight, because that one will be much more costly to all of us.
Although some states have been moving to paper-based elections, seven states still have fully paperless, unauditable elections. Many other states have numerous counties still using paperless voting systems. How many more jurisdictions will succumb to aggressive efforts to implement Internet voting? Many people still don’t get it. Most people are decent enough and innocent enough to believe Internet voting would be both convenient and safe. After all, they bank online, right? That’s why the burden falls on those few of us who really do understand the dangers to do all we can while we still have a chance to make a difference.
While I’m thrilled Obama is our president, the fact that he got elected made a lot of activists complacent, feeling that our vote really isn’t at risk. But it is, and more than ever before.
Please. Call your Representative and Senators this week and ask if they are supporting Rush Holt’s bill banning paperless voting. (Ask your Senator to support Sen. Bill Nelson’s clone of Holt’s bill when it is introduced.) Talk to their staff and make the strongest case you can. Ask for an answer. Try not to just pass a comment along. Get your Congressperson on the record regarding their support, or opposition, to this bill.
If you don’t know who your Representative is, you can find out at www.house.gov/writerep. By entering your address and ZIP, you can find out who represents you in Washington.
Please share this message with your friends who are politically aware. We all need to help push this one over the top. No legislation passes without a groundswell of grassroots activity behind it. The other side is working overtime to stop this legislation. It’s up to us to counter their efforts.
Thank you, as always, for being such a good patriot and supporting an honest, accountable vote. I’m grateful for all you continue to do.
Lisa Pease
Author and activist
Resources
The latest version of Holt’s bill:
http://voteraction.org/files/HOLT_VOTERCONFIDENCE_FINAL4-14-09xml%20(2).pdf
Voter Action’s strong endorsement of Holt’s bill:
http://www.voteraction.org/news-article/2009/voter-action-statement-support-holt-voter-confidence-and-increased-accessibility-a
List of Internet voting bills being proposed:
http://voteraction.org/news-article/2009/track-internet-voting-legislation-your-state
One of the arguments has been that Internet voting would increase participation. That’s the opposite of what happened in Hawaii with their recent Internet voting experiment. Voting participation dropped 83%:
http://www.kitv.com/news/19573770/detail.html
List of various systems used by various states (seven have fully paperless systems, with key congressional and senate seats being determined):
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/
If you get pushback re allowing the military to vote, point them to Holt’s separate bill providing express mail services for soldiers to mail paper ballots back, at taxpayer expense. The text of this short bill is here:
http://voteraction.org/news-article/2009/track-internet-voting-legislation-your-state
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