The Black recesses of the military industrial complex are full of strange ideas and projects, but few are stranger than the programs in psychic warfare chronicled in The Men Who Stare At Goats. Taking as his starting point a General in Military Intelligence, Ronson follows the trail of the First Earth Battalion Operations Manual, a hippy-dippy plan to create an army of "Warrior Monks" and "Jedi Soldiers" with uncanny powers including invisibility, thought projection, and the ability to kill with a thought or touch. Like a bad penny, every time the Army runs into trouble (Vietnam, Iraq...) it goes towards mystical mind control as a solution. Former officers, martial arts gurus, and Coast to Coast AM conspiracy nuts are all part of the picture. A second, less amusing thread, follows the covert history of sonic torture, including subliminal messages and repetitive aggressive noises, as used at GITMO and Abu Ghraib. MK-Ultra enters the picture as the grandaddy of the whole project, with Sidney Gottlieb as the mastermind and Frank Olsen as the first victim, killed because he was going to talk.

I'm deeply conflicted about this book. Ronson believes that he's stumbled onto a big secret, but it's not clear what this secret is. It could be that America has a secret army of psychic spies, or that we have sophisticated psychological torture, or just that the Brass believes in this nonsense. Either way I feel like, 'real' secret programs are better secured or just common knowledge. But what really rubs me the wrong way is that Ronson makes the claim that these programs are deliberately depicted as absurd to hide the unsavory truths about torture and the like. If that's so, why participate in the charade by writing a book as weird and conspiratorial as The Men Who Stare At Goats?