"Guantánamo Serenade"

The US military has a long and colorful history of being involved with fruitcake ideas put forward and administered by fruitcakes. Every now and then, as with the Jon Ronson book, a journalist trots them out as is the case here with John Alexander.

Alexander was a military man who directed secret projects on using the paranormal and other exrescences from the world of pseudo-science as weapons. A couple decades ago the news of this began leaking and eventually picked up such a head of steam that he was largely discredited, except in those crannies of the military where there are still fruitcakes in residence.

Alexander wrote books and articles, all very serious and hysterical because they were so, on ridiculous subjects like using telepathy as a weapon (Famous paper, of which I have a copy: "Beam Me Up Spock, the New Mental Battlefield" from back in 1980), "The Warrior's Edge" -- a book of total gobble about how it was possible to fracture metal and or kill goats by telepathically shouting blows at them. He headed a military project to harness clairvoyants to do reconnaisance on enemy territory. The latter was called remote viewing and it shows up frequently in the pseudo-science channels of cable TV.

He was deep into Uri Geller and had "spoon-bending parties" for his officer colleagues.

He was into every bit of old trash Ronson outlines in his article, including tinkering with sound for psycho manipulative purposes, most of which has already been published in the American press in various places. It continually crops up, a stupid idea that some magic mixture of sound -- loud or soft -- can coerce enemies into doing various things. The Army used it on Noriega when he was holed up in a building during the invasion of Panama to no obvious effect.

All of it total crap, but believed by various parties in the US military, just as people doggedly believe in alien abductions.

These fellows are more cautious about publicly going on about it unless they've sized up a journalist as a stenographer wowed by the material. They go about their business of coming up with weird schemes and then deny them when confronted by the more skeptical.

But in the absence of close oversight, the military attempts to apply everything, no matter how crazy or odd, in the war on terror, just as it did the Soviet enemy during the Cold War. For example, the Air Force published some insane paper by a colleague of Alexander's a few weeks ago on teleportation and the usual claims from the paranormal fringer. And that's the origin of this stuff.

At least using whores to harass the prisoners is more grounded in the real world.