Channon traveled to 150 "human potential" centers across America—Esalen, est, Werner Erhard, the Whole Earth Catalog crowd. He returned with a 130-page report titled The First Earth Battalion Operational Manual . It was part Sun Tzu, part Star Trek , and part Mother Earth News .
Ronson found that the man responsible for designing interrogation tactics at Guantanamo, a psychologist named Colonel Larry James, had openly studied Channon’s early work. The idea that you could "stare" a goat into submission became the idea that you could break a prisoner's will using "stress positions," sleep deprivation, and sensory overload. The Men Who Stare At Goats
Because The Men Who Stare at Goats is a mirror held up to American power. It reveals a military establishment so desperate for an edge that it will believe anything: spoon bending, astral travel, and lethal glares. It reveals the thin line between "out-of-the-box thinking" and profound self-deception. Channon traveled to 150 "human potential" centers across
For weeks, nothing happened. The goat just chewed cud. Then, one day, the goat collapsed. The monitors showed a massive spike in stress, followed by a sudden flatline. The soldier stared; the goat fell. Ronson found that the man responsible for designing
In a University of California briefing in 1995, a former military intelligence officer presented Channon’s goat-staring manual to a new generation. By 2002, at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, these "soft kill" techniques were being used on prisoners.
The infamous goat-staring experiment took place at Fort Bragg. The protocol was rudimentary: A soldier would sit in a room staring at a monitor. A goat was in another building, wired with a bio-feedback machine. The soldier’s job was to "stop the goat's heart."
When asked why he kept it up, Stubblebine told Ronson: "Because I knew it was possible. The atoms are mostly empty space. I just had to convince my atoms to slip through the gaps in their atoms."