[Terror] Maybe Comedy Central Will Pick This Up
Three years in the making, Jon Ronson’s Crazy Rulers of the World explores the apparent madness at the heart of US military intelligence.
The three-part series begins with The Men Who Stare at Goats, which charts the history of a secret US Army unit founded in 1979 - the First Earth Battalion.
In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. What's more, they're back and fighting the War on Terror.
"People are basically nutty," says a CIA psychologist at the start of this extraordinary series.....Take Maj Gen Albert Stubblebine III, once chief of army intelligence, now retired. He cheerfully admits to Ronson that he spent a good deal of time in the 1980s attempting to walk through his office wall, because he thought it would be a useful skill for a general to have, and, after all, the wall and he were both made of atoms that were mostly air. He kept banging his nose, but he kept trying. It's just one jaw-dropping delusion among many.
In programme two, Jon Ronson reveals how the New Age movement of the 1980s has influenced interrogation at Guantanamo Bay and in post-war Iraq.
Begins Sunday 7 November at 8pm on UK TV Channel 4.
The three-part series begins with The Men Who Stare at Goats, which charts the history of a secret US Army unit founded in 1979 - the First Earth Battalion.
In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. What's more, they're back and fighting the War on Terror.
"People are basically nutty," says a CIA psychologist at the start of this extraordinary series.....Take Maj Gen Albert Stubblebine III, once chief of army intelligence, now retired. He cheerfully admits to Ronson that he spent a good deal of time in the 1980s attempting to walk through his office wall, because he thought it would be a useful skill for a general to have, and, after all, the wall and he were both made of atoms that were mostly air. He kept banging his nose, but he kept trying. It's just one jaw-dropping delusion among many.
In programme two, Jon Ronson reveals how the New Age movement of the 1980s has influenced interrogation at Guantanamo Bay and in post-war Iraq.
Begins Sunday 7 November at 8pm on UK TV Channel 4.
posted by Chris Hodge at 9:24 AM
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