by Jon Ronson
“No,” I said.
Pete rapidly rubbed the serrated edge of the Predator against a part of my temple, and, as I let out a bloodcurdling scream, he grabbed my fingers and squeezed them agonizingly against the smooth edge.
“STOP!” I yelled.
“Picture this scenario,” said Pete. “We’re in a bar in Baghdad and I want you to come with me. Are you coming now?”
“Stop hurting me all the time,” I said.
Pete stopped and looked at his Predator fondly.
“What’s cool about it,” he said, “is that if you found it on the ground no one would know what it was, yet it has such lethality.”
Pete paused. “Eyeballs,” he said.
“NO!” I said.
“You can take eyeballs right out,” said Pete, “with this bit.”
On the thirty-fourth floor of the Empire State Building, in New York City, Kenneth Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch, realized that he was in an awkward situation. Ever since the Barney story had broken, journalists had been calling him for his comment. It was an engagingly surreal joke, but there was also a comforting familiarity to it. It was the comedy of recognition. If Barney was involved, the torture didn’t sound that bad. In fact, an article in The Guardian, published on May 21, 2003, a newspaper that usually found little to be funny or upbeat about regarding the war in Iraq, said as much:
What the former Fedayeen and Republican Guard are going through now is nothing. So they’re being played the Barney song. At what time? Middle of the day? Meaningless. Only when you’ve been dragged from sleep before dawn, day after day for months on end, to enter Barney’s Day-Glo world … only then do you know the full horror of the psychological warfare that is life with a pre-school child.
It had become the funniest joke of the war. Within hours of Adam Piore’s Newsweek article appearing, the Internet was aflame with Barney torture-related wisecracks such as, “An endless loop of the theme song from Titanic by Celine Dion would be infinitely worse! They’d confess everything within ten minutes!”
And, from a different discussion group: “I think twelve hours of Celine Dion would be needed on the really tough ones!”
A third discussion group I saw had the following message posted on it: “Why didn’t they just go all out and play them some Celine Dion? Now that would be cruel and unusual punishment!”
And so on.
Celine Dion’s theme from Titanic was, in fact, being played in Iraq, albeit in a different context. One of PsyOps’ first jobs, once Baghdad had fallen, was to seize Saddam-controlled radio stations and broadcast a new message—that America was not the Great Satan. One way in which they hoped to achieve this was by playing “My Heart Will Go On,” over and over. How could a country that produced melodies such as this be all bad? This sounded to me a lot like Jim Channon’s vision of “sparkly eyes” and “baby lambs.”
Adam Piore himself had told me that he was finding the impact of his Barney story quite baffling.
“It has had a tremendous amount of attention,” he said. “When I was in Iraq my girlfriend called to tell me she’d seen it scroll across the CNN ticker. I didn’t believe her. I thought there must be some mistake. But then Fox News wanted to interview me. Then I heard it was on the Today show. Then I saw it in Stars & Stripes.”
“How did they report it?” I asked him.
“As humorous,” said Adam. “Always as humorous. It was sort of outrageous to be in this shit hole up on the border in an abandoned train station, totally uncomfortable, unable to take showers, sleeping on cots, and when we finally got cable a couple of days later, scrolling across the screen is this … Barney story.”
Kenneth Roth, of Human Rights Watch, could read the mood. He realized that if his responses to the journalists were overly austere, it would seem that he wasn’t getting it. He would sound like a sourpuss.
So he said to journalists, myself included, “I have small kids. I can understand being driven crazy by the Barney theme song! If I had to have ‘I Love You, You Love Me’ played at high decibel over and over for hours, I might be willing to confess to anything as well!”
And the journalists laughed, but he would quickly add, “And I wonder what else is going on in those shipping containers while the music is being played! Perhaps the prisoners are being kicked around. Perhaps they’re naked with a bag on their head. Perhaps they’re chained and hanging upside down… .”
But the journalists rarely, if ever, included those possibilities in their stories.
By the time I met Kenneth Roth he was clearly sick of talking about Barney.
“They have,” said Kenneth, “been very savvy in that respect.”
“Savvy?” I said.
He seemed to be implying that the Barney story had been deliberately disseminated just so all the human-rights violations being committed in postwar Iraq could be reduced to this one joke.
I put this to him and he shrugged. He didn’t know what was going on. That, he said, was the problem.
What I did know was that Sergeant Mark Hadsell, the PsyOps soldier who approached Adam Piore that night and said to him, “Go look out by where the prisoners are,” had been given nothing more than a light reprimand for his indiscretion. Was Kenneth Roth right? Had Barney been chosen to torture people in Iraq simply because the dinosaur provided that powerful thing: a funny story for the people back home?
There is a room in a police building on top of a hill in Los Angeles that houses an array of pepper sprays and stun guns and malodorants—tiny capsules of powdered “fecal matter, dead mammals, sulfur, and garlic,” which are “great at crowd dispersement” and “will gag a maggot.” The man who showed me these things was Commander Sid Heal of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. After the First Earth Battalion’s Colonel John Alexander, Sid is America’s leading advocate of nonlethal technologies.
Sid and Colonel Alexander—“my mentor” Sid called him—frequently get together at Sid’s house to test out various new electronic zappers on each other. If the two men are impressed, Sid introduces them into the L.A. law-enforcement arsenal. Then, like the now widespread Taser stun gun, the weapons sometimes spread throughout the entire U.S. police community. One day, somebody might calculate how many people are alive today, having not been shot dead by police officers, because of Sid Heal and Colonel Alexander.
Sid Heal had dedicated his life to researching new non-lethal technologies, so I assumed that he would know all about the Barney torture, but when I described to him what I knew—the flashing light, the repetitive music, the shipping container—he looked perplexed.
“I don’t know why they’re doing it,” I said.
“I don’t either,” he said.
There was a silence.
“Do you think they know why they’re doing it?” I asked.
“Oh yeah.” Sid smiled. “I don’t think anybody would go to those lengths to set up that elaborate a system without some ultimate scheme in mind. We don’t experiment on each other. Not in our culture.”
Sid fell silent. He thought about the Barney technique, and the accompanying flashing lights, and a startled look suddenly crossed his face.
“I suppose it could …” He paused and then said, “Nah.”
“What?” I said.
“It could be the Bucha Effect,” he said.
“The Bucha Effect?” I said.
Sid told me about the first time he heard about the Bucha Effect. It was in Somalia, he said, during the partially disastrous deployment of Colonel Alexander’s Sticky Foam. The nonlethal-technology experts who had accompanied the foam to Mogadishu were understandably down in the dumps that night, and the talk got around to what might be the holy grail of these exotic technologies. It was then that a Lieutenant Robert Ireland spoke of the Bucha Effect.
It all began in the 1950s, Sid told me, when helicopters started falling out of the sky, just crashing for no apparent reason, and the pilots who survived couldn’t explain it. They had ju
st been flying around as normal and then suddenly they felt nauseated and dizzy and debilitated and they lost control of their helicopters and they went down.
So a Dr. Bucha was called in to solve the mystery.
“What Dr. Bucha found,” said Sid, “was that the rotor blades were strobing the sunlight and when it reached the approximation of human brain-wave frequency it was interfering with the brain’s ability to send correct information to the rest of the body.”
As a result of Dr. Bucha’s findings, new safety measures were introduced, such as tinted glass and helmet visors and so on.
“Believe me,” said Sid Heal, “there are easier ways of doing sleep deprivation than going to all those great lengths. Barney music? Flashing lights? Sleep deprivation may be a part of it, but it’s got to have some deeper hidden effect. My guess is that this is the Bucha Effect. My guess is that they’re going for the amygdala.
“Picture this,” said Sid. “You’re walking down a dark hallway, and a figure jumps out in front of you, and you scream and jump back and all of a sudden you realize it’s your wife. That’s not two pieces of information,” he said. “It’s the same information being processed simultaneously by two different parts of the brain. The part where the judgment is takes three or four seconds. But the part that’s reactionary—the amygdala—just takes a split second.”
The quest for seizing that amygdala moment, those crushing seconds of unbearable, incapacitating shock, seizing those moments and not letting them go, dragging them out for as long as is operationally necessary, that, said Sid, is the aim of the Bucha Effect.
“It would be the ultimate nonlethal,” he said.
“So,” I said, “the Barney strobe-light musical torture inside a shipping container at the back of a railway station in al-Qā’im may in fact be the ultimate nonlethal?”
“I don’t know anyone that’s succeeded,” said Sid. “The problem is that the threshold between it being effective and permanently disabling is so narrow I …”
Then Sid fell silent, I think because he realized that if he completed his sentence it would take his mind to a place he didn’t want to go, a place where soldiers in Iraq didn’t actually care, like he cared, about that threshold.
“But they might have succeeded,” I said.
“They might have succeeded,” said Sid, wistfully. “Yeah.” Then he added, “But any sort of nonlethal weapon that would force compliance in interrogation wouldn’t be appealing to us at all, because the resulting evidence couldn’t be used in court.”
“But they don’t have those constraints inside a shipping container in al-Qā’im,” I said.
“No, they don’t,” said Sid.
“Huh,” I said.
“You know what you’ve stumbled into here?” said Sid.
“What?” I asked.
“The dark side,” he said.
I left Sid and returned to the United Kingdom to find that I had been sent seven photographs. They were taken by a Newsweek photographer, Patrick Andrada, in May 2003, and were captioned, “An escaped detainee is returned to a holding area in al-Qā’im, Iraq.” There is no sign of loudspeakers, but the photographs do show the interior of one of the shipping containers behind the disused railway station.
In the first of the photographs, two powerfully built American soldiers are pushing the detainee through a landscape of corrugated iron and barbed wire. He doesn’t look hard to push. He is as skinny as a rake. A rag covers his face. One of the soldiers has a handgun pressed to the back of his neck. His finger is on the trigger.
In all the other photographs, the detainee is inside the shipping container. He is barefoot, a thin plastic strap binds his ankles, and he’s crouched in the corner, up against the silver corrugated wall. The metal floor is covered with brown dust and pools of liquid. Right at the back of the shipping container, deep in the shadows, you can just make out the figure of another detainee, lying in a huddle on the floor, his face masked by a hood.
Now the rag only covers the first man’s eyes, so you can see his face, which is deeply lined, like an old man’s, but his wispy mustache reveals that he’s probably about seventeen. He’s wearing a torn white undershirt, covered with yellow and brown stains. There’s an open wound on one of his skinny arms, and above it someone has written a number with a black marker pen.
He might have done terrible things. I know nothing about him other than these seven fragments of his life. But I can say this. In the last photograph he is screaming so hard it almost looks as if he’s laughing.
9. THE DARK SIDE
“We don’t experiment on each other,” Sid Heal had said to me in Los Angeles in early April 2004. “Not in our culture.”
A week or two passed. And then the other photographs appeared. They were of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib jail on the outskirts of Baghdad. A twenty-one-year-old U.S. reservist named Private Lynndie England had been snapped dragging a naked man across the floor on a leash. In another photograph she stood grinning, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, while she pointed at the genitals of a row of naked, hooded men.
Lynndie England, with her pixie haircut and sweet young face, was the star of many of the photographs. It was she who knelt laughing behind a pile of naked prisoners. They had been forced to build themselves into some kind of human pyramid. Perhaps it was her underwear that was draped over the head of a naked Iraqi who was tied to a metal bed frame, his back arched excruciatingly.
It seemed as if a small group of military guards, with Lynndie England at their center, had used Abu Ghraib to fulfill their sexual fantasies, and that their downfall had been their desire to take trophy photographs.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flew to the jail. He told the assembled troops that the events shown in the pictures were the work of “a few who have betrayed our values and sullied the reputation of our country. It was a body blow to me. Those who committed crimes will be dealt with, and the American people will be proud of it, and the Iraqi people will be proud.”
The army hung a sign on the gate of the jail that read, AMERICA IS A FRIEND OF ALL THE IRAQI PEOPLE.
Lynndie England was arrested. By then she was back in the United States, five months pregnant, performing desk duties at Fort Bragg. It turned out that she came from a poor town in deepest West Virginia and she had lived for a time in a trailer. For some commentators, that explained everything.
DELIVERANCE COMES TO IRAQ ran one headline.
In the 1972 American film Deliverance, Bobby the overweight insurance salesman (Ned Beatty) is made to strip. He is then raped from behind by the bigger of the two hillbillies, all the while being forced to squeal like a pig. Maybe it’s time to rethink whether these characters were exaggerations. Ms. England definitely does hail from hillbilly country.
The pictures could hardly have been more repulsive, but they were especially so for the people of Iraq, who had long been force-fed Saddam’s view that America was, at its heart, uncontrollably depraved and imperialistic. Here were young Muslim men—captives—being humiliated and overwhelmed by what looked like grotesque U.S. sexual decadence. It struck me as an unhappy coincidence that young Lynndie England and her friends had created a tableau that was the epitome of what would most disgust and repel the Iraqi people, those people whose hearts and minds were the great prize for the coalition forces and also for the Islamic fundamentalists.
But then word got out through Lynndie England’s lawyers that her defense was that she had been acting under orders, softening the prisoners up for interrogation, and that the people giving the orders were none other than military intelligence, the unit once commanded by Major General Albert Stubblebine III.
It was sad to remember all that nose banging and cutlery bending, and to think of how General Stubblebine’s good intentions had come to this. His soldiers would never have resorted to such terrible acts. They would have instead performed breathtaking psychic feats coupled with remarkable acts of philanthropy.
I called
General Stubblebine.
“What was your first thought when you saw the photographs?” I asked him.
“My first thought,” he said, “was, ‘Oh shit!’”
“What was your second thought?”
“ ‘Thank God that’s not me at the bottom of that pyramid.’”
“What was your third thought?”
“My third thought,” said the general, “was ‘This was not started by some youngsters down in the trenches. This had to have been driven by the intelligence community.’ I told Rima. I said, ‘You watch. This was intelligence.’ Yep. Someone much higher in intelligence deliberately designed this, advocated it, directed it, trained people to do it. No doubt about it. And whoever that is, he’s in deep hiding right now.”
“Military intelligence?” I asked. “Your old people?”
“It’s a possibility,” he said. “My guess is no.”
“Who then?”
“The Agency,” he said.
“The Agency?”
“The Agency,” he confirmed.
“In conjunction with PsyOps?” I asked.
“I’m sure they had a hand in it,” said the general. “Sure. No doubt about it.”
There was a silence.
“You know,” said General Stubblebine, “if they’d just stuck to Jim Channon’s ideas, they wouldn’t have needed all that crap.”
“By Jim Channon’s ideas, do you mean the loud music?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said the general.
“So the idea of blasting prisoners with loud music,” I said, “definitely originated with the First Earth Battalion?”
“Definitely,” said the general. “No question. So did the frequencies.”
“The frequencies?” I asked.
“Yeah, the frequencies,” he said.
“What do the frequencies do?” I asked.