[Marxism] 2 views of the US military

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Militant, July 7, 2003
BY PATRICK O?NEILL

U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has announced that a former head of 
Special Operations forces will serve as the new chief of the U.S. army. The 
appointment of retired Gen. Peter Shoomaker follows the promotion of the 
special forces to a key role in the military conquests of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Rumsfeld has been among the most outspoken champions of the enhanced role 
of the Green Berets, Delta Force, and Navy Seals in the U.S. military.

These moves are further signs that a revolution is under way in the 
organization of the U.S. military. They reflect the U.S. rulers? push for 
more mobile, less ponderous armed forces ready to move rapidly to areas of 
battle as U.S. imperialism needs.

full: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6723/672350.html

===

NY Times, April 7, 2005
True Tales Odd Enough to Stop a Farm Animal's Heart
By JANET MASLIN

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS
By Jon Ronson
259 pages. Simon & Schuster. $24.

At the start of the twisted treasure hunt that is "The Men Who Stare at 
Goats," the journalist Jon Ronson appears to be looking for furtive, 
paranoid quacks who play mind games. He seems to have hit the mother lode.

Take the goats of the title: Mr. Ronson cites a hundred of them. He says 
that they have been hidden at a Goat Lab at Fort Bragg in North Carolina 
and de-bleated for security reasons.

They have been used in top-secret experiments by psychic spies whose 
existence is not officially acknowledged by the United States Army. 
Military psychics are so well hidden that they aren't covered by the Army's 
coffee budget. It makes them cranky to have to bring their own coffee to work.

"The damn psychic spies should be keeping their damn mouths shut, instead 
of chitchatting all over town about what they did." So says retired Maj. 
Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III, the first of the many characters redolent 
of "Dr. Strangelove" who are found in this jaw-dropper of a - hard to 
believe, but, yes - nonfiction story.

Some of these experts contend that a goat's heart can be stopped by the 
intense gaze of a certain kind of supersoldier. "Goat didn't have a 
chance," one of these tough guys tells Mr. Ronson. Such fighters sometimes 
refer to themselves as Jedi Warriors, because the thinking about their 
occult superpowers dates back to early "Star Wars" days. It was then that 
the post-Vietnam military, demoralized and fiscally hamstrung, was ready to 
try anything in the way of intangible new weaponry.

Mr. Ronson sets his book up beautifully. It moves with wry, precise agility 
from crackpot to crackpot in its search for the essence of this early New 
Age creativity. Much of it can be traced to the 1977 fact-finding mission 
of Lt. Col. Jim Channon, now also retired but given credit for an 
influential legacy.

It was Colonel Channon's 125-page "First Earth Battalion Operations Manual" 
that suggested a whole new approach to combat and a whole new type of 
military uniform. According to Colonel Channon's plan, soldiers' uniforms 
should include pouches for ginseng regulators, divining tools and 
loudspeakers that would emit "indigenous music and words of peace." The 
author's explorations also take him to one soldier of fortune who died 
after "acting too big for his boots regarding his superhuman powers," and 
to a New Age company alleged to be dealing in both healing bars (costing 
$7,600 and resembling blocks of soap) and group sex ("Don't tell your 
husband because he wouldn't understand the energy work").

Then there are the double agents supposedly operating within the flying 
saucer set. "The U.F.O. community?" the author asks one source. "Why would 
government spies want to infiltrate that?"

"Oh, Jon," the source tells him, delivering the kind of swift punch line 
that makes this book so entertaining. "Don't be naïve."

At this point, "The Men Who Stare at Goats" still concentrates on quirks, 
making it a smarter, nuttier version of "The Tipping Point" or "Blink." But 
then it moves into a different realm. While Colonel Channon was asserting 
that the military should be "unafraid to appear harebrained and half-baked 
in their pursuit of a new kind of weapon," a parallel and less theoretical 
set of experiments was unfolding. And Mr. Ronson addresses the more 
sinister aspect of out-of-the-box military thinking.

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" turns into a book that connects dots. It sees 
a common thread in the use of screamingly bad music to assault Gen. Manuel 
Antonio Noriega in Panama and the use of similar tactics in the destruction 
of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex. In these accounts, Mr. Ronson 
writes as much about schemes that were only contemplated as about the ones 
that actually made the cut.

For instance, he describes the effort to deploy a Moscow scientist who had 
previously sent subliminal messages to Red Army troops ("Do not get drunk 
before battle") in the Branch Davidian standoff. This scientist didn't work 
out because he was unwilling to transmit words spoken by Charlton Heston as 
a bogus voice of God.

Mr. Ronson, a filmmaker and journalist whose earlier book, "Them: 
Adventures With Extremists," was also outstandingly artful and chilling, 
eventually follows his trail of bread crumbs to the realms that really 
matter. He finds a prologue in MK-ULTRA, the real C.I.A. "Manchurian 
Candidate" research of the 1950's, which involved the disastrous use of LSD 
as a potential truth serum. He follows this line of thinking through and 
beyond the fruitcake innovations of the 1970's, concluding that Colonel 
Channon's theories "could be used to shatter people rather than heal them."

"Those are the ideas that live on in the War on Terror," he adds.

Inevitably, this account extends to the tactics of American guards at the 
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. And somehow Mr. Ronson is able to keep his book 
both light and nightmarish. (Asked if there was a single good thing to be 
said about the prison, one former guard says it was an address to which 
Amazon.com delivered.)

Absurdity is never far away. Discussing the weird tricks played on 
prisoners in both Iraq and Cuba, he finds the English journalist Martin 
Bashir interviewing one former captive. Mr. Bashir asks whether the 
prisoner saw his now-notorious Michael Jackson documentary. "Jamal replied, 
'I've, uh, been in Guantánamo Bay for two years.' "

Mr. Ronson, who lives in London and exclaims the occasional "bloody hell" 
at these discoveries, remains terrifically adept at capturing the horror of 
these developments without losing track of their lunacy. About propaganda 
dropped from airplanes: "The Americans have always been better than the 
Iraqis at the leaflets." Early in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, he says, Iraqi 
psychological warfare meant telling American soldiers: "Your wives are back 
at home having sex with Bart Simpson and Burt Reynolds."


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org 


_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism