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Ronson, Jon “The Men Who Stare at Goats”. Picador, London. 2005. Pbk, 278pp. “Bibliography” ISBN 0-330-37548-2 RRP £7.99

I expect by now may people will already have read, or at least heard of, this book. Generally it has been well-received and I can see why.

It's a journalistic account of Ronson's investigation into U.S. psychic spies, non-lethal weapons, New Age soldiery, mind control and new forms of torture. The format is fairly basic, Ronson gets a lead and goes of to interview the person and then follows up the lead/s they provide. This makes for an accessible read, not without its humour, and along the way I expect most people will encounter the odd snippet of information that will be new to them.

However, this format also renders the text into “entertainment” more than research. There's no index and the bibliography is perfunctory and nowhere near comprehensive on the subjects touched upon. Also the format means that research already published is not properly integrated into the text so readers may get the impression that what Ronson is discovering is all new stuff. It isn't, much of it has been knocking around for 20 years or more. What has changed though is the context.

Prior to 2001, the main context for these types of research had been the Cold War, the rationale being to ensure that the Soviets did not have any nasty surprises in store for the US in the fields of espionage, intelligence, unconventional warfare, interrogation and so on. There was only sporadic use of any techniques that were made operational.

After 2001, we entered into the never-ending “War on Terror”, where the the US government has openly “taken the gloves off” and is using whatever means necessary to gain the upper hand against those it regards as waging a war against the United States of America and her allies. A consequence of this is that aspects of the non-lethal weapons program, psychological warfare, torture and other unconventional military techniques have been operationalised on a large scale, in particular in prisons such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, resulting in the scandals at the latter prison in Iraq where various forms of humiliating and degrading practices have been used on prisoners on the pretext of trying to obtain intelligence (but which have looked more like deliberately offensive psy-ops programs.) Furthermore acoustic warfare, whether it be of the “silent” type or the sonic bombardment type or simple repetition has also been used.

Ronson also covers the case of Frank Olsen, a CIA scientist who appears to have been involved in sinister mind control experiments in the early 1950's in Europe, and who it is alleged was suicided out of a New York hotel window several days after having his drink spiked with LSD and then threatening to make public what the CIA was up to. One name links both this case and much later experimentation – the late, unlamented Buddhist - Sidney Gottlieb.

As for the title of the book, well it refers to a unit at Fort Bragg, home to US Army's Special Forces and Psychological Warfare centre, which tried to develop psychic projection / martial arts techniques to enable soldiers to kill at a distance without the use of weapons, only their minds. Only they experimented on goats rather than humans. Results appear to have been inconclusive.

That's the book in a nutshell. It's an entertaining read, will only detain you for an evening or two, and then you'll probably dismiss much of it as far-fetched, or at least mostly harmless. Which will, of course, suit the people who continue to deploy the techniques described therein (and plenty of others besides). This would have been a much better book if it had incorporated earlier research to give the story more context, but that would have displaced the author from the foreground of the text and made it a more serious piece of work.

Overall it will serve as an introduction to the subject area for those totally unfamiliar with it, but by failing to provide an index and comprehensive bibliography, he (or his publisher) hasn't made it any easier for anyone seriously researching this area.

6/10

Richard Alexander