The Men Who Stare at Goats (Book) - Jon Ronson

"Mind warfare is the great battlefield of the cold war, and we have to do whatever it takes to win this"
--- CIA Director Alan Dulles, in a speech given to his Princeton alumni group in 1953.

These days I read a lot of non-fiction. One huge benefit of having an internet-connected computer is that when I read of a bizarre character or story in a book, I can use the internet to check information and figure out how true claims made in the book are.

The process of checking out ancilliary sources slows reading down quite a bit. The process also disrupts the enjoyment of the narrative experience. On the other hand, it can give a lot of perspective on how much attention should be paid to a book's claims, and from the internet we can learn that Guy Savelli, who apparently has killed small animals with his mind, has a large internet presence, for example here: (http://www.worldkungfu.com/Master.html) and that Pete Brusso, described in chapter 8 'The Predator', is a real person and has videos on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/user/PeterBrusso).

While the earlier chapters in the book focus more on attempts to harness 'psychic' abilities for military use both during the cold war and during the 'war on terror', later chapters run into lamentably more familiar subjects, like the use of torture in Abu Ghraib and at the Guantanamo detention facility. However, the book's linkages of the recent tactics to previous trends in psyops were novel and hence quite fascinating.

A couple of choice quotes are illustrative:

"It is America's role to lead the world to Paradise"
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon

"People have been so brainwashed by fiction, so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy stuff, they think 'We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.' Actually we know nothing of this. There's no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is an immunizaction against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don't know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they're not cynical at all."
--- Eric Olson, whose father was allegedly murdered by the CIA due to his dissent against the experiments conducted in Project Artichoke

Oh yes, and Uri Geller makes an appearance.