The Men Who Stare at Goats (14 page)

The last line of the article, written by the
Newsweek
editor, was: “It broke us too!”

I first learned about the Barney torture story on May 19, 2003, when it ran as a funny, “and finally …” type of item on NBC’s
Today
show:

ANN CURRY
(news anchor): U.S. forces in Iraq are using what some are calling a cruel and unusual tool to break the resistance of Iraqi POWs, and trust me, a lot of parents would agree! Some prisoners are being forced to listen to Barney the Purple Dinosaur sing the “I Love You” song for twenty-four straight hours… .

NBC cut to a clip from
Barney,
in which the purple dinosaur flopped around amid his gang of ever-smiling
stage-school kids. Everyone in the studio laughed. Ann Curry put on a funny “poor little prisoners” kind of voice to report the story.

ANN CURRY:
... according to
Newsweek
magazine. One U.S. operative told
Newsweek
that he listened to Barney for forty-five minutes straight and never wanted to go through
that
again!

STUDIO:
(laughter)

Ann Curry turned to Katie Couric, her cohost.

ANN CURRY:
Katie! Sing it with me!

KATIE COURIC
(laughing): No! I think after about an hour they’re probably spilling the beans, don’t you think? Let’s go outside to Al for the weather.

AL ROKER
(weatherman): And if Barney doesn’t get ’em, they switch to the Teletubbies, and that crushes ’em like a
bug …
!

It’s the First Earth Battalion! I thought.

I had no doubt that the notion of using music as a form of mental torture had been popularized and perfected within the military as a result of Jim Channon’s manual. Before Jim came along, military music was confined to the marching-band type of arena. It was all about pageantry and energizing the troops. In Vietnam, soldiers blasted themselves with Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” to put themselves in the
mood for battle. But it was Jim who came up with the idea of loudspeakers being used in the battlefield to broadcast “discordant sounds” such as “acid-rock music out of sync” to confuse the enemy, and the use of similar sounds in the interrogation arena.

Jim got these ideas in part, as far as I could tell, after he met Steven Halpern, the composer of ambient CDs such as
Music for Inner Peace,
in 1978. And so I called Jim right away.

“Jim!” I said. “Would you say that blasting Iraqi prisoners with the theme tune to
Barney
is a legacy of the First Earth Battalion?”

“I’m sorry?” said Jim.

“They’re rounding people up in Iraq, taking them to a shipping container, and blasting them repeatedly with children’s music while repeatedly flashing a bright light at them,” I said. “Is that one of your legacies?”

“Yes!” Jim said. He sounded thrilled. “I’m so pleased to hear that!”

“Why?” I asked.

“They’re obviously trying to lighten the environment,” he said, “and give these people some comfort, instead of beating them to death!” He sighed. “Children’s music! That will make the prisoners more ready to divulge where their forces are and shorten the war! Damn good!”

I think Jim was imagining something more like a day care center than a steel container at the back of a disused railway station.

“I guess if they play them
Barney
and
Sesame Street
once or twice,” I said, “that’s lightening and comforting, but if
they play it, say, fifty thousand times into a steel box in the desert heat, that’s more...uh...torturous?”

“I’m no psychologist,” said Jim, a little sharply.

He seemed to want to change the subject, as if he was in denial about the way in which his vision was being interpreted behind the railway station in al-Qā’ im. He reminded me of a grandparent who wouldn’t countenance the idea that his grandchildren would ever misbehave.

“But the use of music …” I said.

“That’s what the First Earth Battalion
did,”
said Jim. “It opened the military mind to how to use music.”

“So,” I said, “it’s all about getting people to talk in a ... in a what?”

“A psychospiritual dimension,” said Jim. “Besides the basic fear of being hit, we have a mental, spiritual, and psychic component. So why not use that? Why not go straight for the place where the
being
actually decides whether to say something or not?”

“So are you certain,” I asked Jim, “given what you know about how your First Earth Battalion has disseminated its way into the fabric of the military, that blasting Iraqis with
Barney
and
Sesame Street
is one of your legacies?”

Jim thought about this for a moment and then he said, “Yes.”

Christopher Cerf has been composing songs for
Sesame Street
for twenty-five years. His large Manhattan townhouse is full of
Sesame Street
memorabilia—photographs of Christopher with his arm around Big Bird, and so on.

“Well, it’s certainly not what I expected when I wrote them,” Christopher said. “I have to admit, my first reaction was, ‘Oh my gosh, is my music really that terrible?’”

I laughed.

“I once wrote a song for Bert and Ernie called ‘Put Down the Ducky,’” he said, “which might be useful for interrogating members of the Ba’ath Party.”

“That’s very good,” I said.

“This interview,” Christopher said, “has been brought to you by the letters
W, M
, and
D
.”

“That’s very good,” I said.

We both laughed.

I paused.

“And do you think that the Iraqi prisoners, as well as giving away vital information, are learning new letters and numbers?” I said.

“Well, wouldn’t that be an incredible double win?” said Christopher.

Christopher took me upstairs to his studio to play me one of his
Sesame Street
compositions, called “Ya! Ya! Das Is a Mountain!”

“The way we do
Sesame Street,”
he explained, “is that we have educational researchers who test whether these songs are working, whether the kids are learning. And one year they asked me to write a song to explain what a mountain is, and I wrote a silly yodeling song about what a mountain was.”

Christopher sang me a little of the song:

Oompah-pah!
Oompah-pah!
Ya! Ya! Das is a mountain!
Part of zee ground zat sticks way up high!

“Anyway,” he said, “forty percent of the kids had known what a mountain was
before
they heard the song, and
after
they heard the song, only about twenty-six percent knew what a mountain was. That’s all they needed. You don’t know what a mountain is now, right? It’s gone! 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.”

Just then, Christopher’s phone rang. It was a lawyer from his music publisher, BMI. I listened in to Christopher’s side of the conversation.

“Oh really?” he said. “I see … Well, theoretically they have to log that and I should be getting a few cents for every prisoner, right? Okay. Bye-bye.”

“What was that about?” I asked Christopher.

“Whether I’m owed some money for the performance royalties,” he explained. “Why not? It’s the American thing to do. If I can write songs that drive people crazy sooner and more effectively than others, why shouldn’t I profit from that?”

This was why, later that day, Christopher asked Danny Epstein—who has been the music supervisor of
Sesame Street
since the very first program was broadcast, in July 1969—to come to his house. It would be Danny’s responsibility to collect the royalties from the military if they proved negligent in filing a music-cue sheet.

For an hour or so, Danny and Christopher attempted to
calculate exactly how much money Christopher might be due if—as he estimated—his songs were being played on a continuous loop in a shipping container for up to three days at a time.

“That’s fourteen thousand times or more over three days,” said Christopher. “If it was radio play I’d get three or four cents every time that loop went through, right?”

“It would be a money machine,” concurred Danny.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” said Christopher. “We could be helping our country and cleaning up at the same time.”

“I don’t think there’s enough money in the pool to pay for that rate,” said Danny. “If I’m going to negotiate for ASCAP [American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers], I’d say it would come in the category of a theme or jingle rate, some kind of knockdown… .”

“Which is an appropriate term because there’s evidence that the prisoners are being knocked down as they listen to the music,” said Christopher.

We all laughed.

The conversation seemed to be shifting uneasily between satire and a genuine desire to make some money.

“And that’s just in one interrogation room,” said Danny. “If there’s a dozen rooms, you’re talking money. This is non-sponsored?”

“That’s a good question,” said Christopher. “It’s state sponsored, I think. Would I get more money if it is or it isn’t?”

“Now, would we have a special rate for Mossad?” said Danny.

We laughed.

“I think we ought to collect royalties,” said Christopher. “If I’d written the songs directly for the army, they would pay me, right?”

“No,” said Danny. “You’d be a work for hire. You’d be employed by them.”

“Well, I’m not a work for hire in
this
case,” said Christopher.

“I’m not so sure,” said Danny. “As a citizen, you have to work for hire, if the military needs you.”

“Well, they could have asked me to volunteer,” said Christopher.

He was more serious now. Danny took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“Wanting money for the use of your music in a time of crisis,” he said, after a moment, “seems a little shabby to me.”

And the two men collapsed in helpless laughter.

In the late autumn of 2003, after many faxes and e-mails had gone back and forth, and I had been security screened by various offices within the Pentagon and the American embassy, PsyOps consented to show me their CD collection.

Adam Piore, the
Newsweek
journalist, had said that the list of songs blasted at the prisoners had been chosen here at PsyOps headquarters. The collection was housed in a series of radio-production suites inside a low brick building in the middle of Fort Bragg, some five hundred yards up the road from where, it was rumored, Goat Lab was situated. I kept looking out windows in the hope of spotting dazed or hobbling goats, but there was none in evidence.

PsyOps began by showing me their sound-effects CDs.

“Primarily deception,” explained the sergeant who guided me during this portion of the day, “designed to make enemy forces think they’re hearing something that doesn’t exist.”

One sound-effect CD was labeled “Crazy Woman Says ‘My Husband’s Never Liked You.’”

“We purchased a job lot,” explained the sergeant.

We laughed.

“Many Horses Galloping By” read another, and we laughed again and said this would have been deployable three hundred years ago, but not now.

Then he played me an applicable one: “Tank Noises.” The radio suite filled with the rumblings of tanks. They seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. The sergeant explained that sometimes PsyOps hide behind a hill to the east of the enemy and blast their tank noises as the real tanks rumble in, more quietly, from the west.

Then he showed me their Arabic music CDs (“Our analysts and our specialists are familiar with what may be popular and culturally relevant, and we purchase that music in order to appeal to the population”), followed by their collection of Avril Lavigne and Norah Jones CDs.

“How might Avril Lavigne be deployed in hostile countries?” I asked.

There was a silence.

“In some parts of the world Western music is popular,” he replied. “We try to stay current.”

“Who chooses the playlist?” I asked.

“Our analysts,” he said, “in conjunction with our specialists.”

“Which countries?” I asked.

“I don’t want to go into that,” he said.

My tour of PsyOps was a well-rehearsed whirlwind—the same tour as a visiting dignitary or a congressman would get. A PsyOps soldier knows how to design a leaflet and burn a CD and operate a loudspeaker and take a photograph and snap into formation for the official tour.

They showed me their radio studios and their TV studios and their archive library, with shelves full of videos labeled “Guantanamo Bay,” and so on. I noticed a poster on a wall reminding the soldiers of PsyOps of their official functions: “Surrender appeals. Crowd control. Tactical deception. Harassment. Unconventional warfare. Foreign internal defense.”

They showed me their leaflet-printing presses, and their canisters. These are dropped from planes and are designed to split open in midair, and then tens of thousands of leaflets float down into enemy territory.

The Americans have always been better than the Iraqis at the leaflets. Early on in the first Gulf War, Iraqi PsyOps dropped a batch of their own leaflets on U.S. troops, designed to be psychologically devastating. They read, “Your wives are back at home having sex with Bart Simpson and Burt Reynolds.”

Then I was led into a PsyOps conference room where I was introduced to the specialists and the analysts. Some were in uniform. Others looked like friendly eggheads, bespectacled and in business suits.

The specialists showed me some of their leaflets that had floated down from PsyOps helicopters into Iraqi forces just
a month or two earlier. One read, “Nobody benefits from the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Any unit that chooses to use Weapons of Mass Destruction will face swift and severe retribution by coalition forces.”