Torture Music

[annie aronburg]

Gray's warning on 'torture' music

Singer David Gray has warned that US interrogators playing loud music as a form of "torture" - including his own song Babylon - was no laughing matter.

"Only the novelty aspect of this story gets it noticed... Guantanamo greatest hits," he said.

"What we're talking about here is people in a darkened room, physically inhibited by handcuffs, bags over their heads and music blaring at them."

His track Babylon is reportedly a favourite of US interrogators in Iraq.

Repeatedly playing loud music to suspected terrorist detainees is also a standard interrogation technique in Guantanamo and other US bases.

"That is torture," the singer-songwriter told BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight.

"That is nothing but torture.

"It doesn't matter what the music is - it could be Tchaikovsky's finest or it could be Barney the Dinosaur.


"It really doesn't matter, it's going to drive you completely nuts."

He said such torture formed part of a US "retaliation to a few terrorist acts".

"No-one wants to even think about it or discuss the fact that we've gone above and beyond all legal process and we're torturing people," he added.

Babylon - from his White Ladder album - was Gray's breakthrough single, reaching number five in the UK in 2000.

White Ladder reached number one in the UK and number 35 in the US.

Interesting commentary here.

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/07/doe ... vernm.html

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2 ... royalties/

[annie aronburg]

Music as torture / Music as weapon by Suzanne G. Cusick

Abstract
One of the most startling aspects of musical culture in the post-Cold War United States is the systematic use of music as a weapon of war. First coming to mainstream attention in 1989, when US troops blared loud music in an effort to induce Panamanian president Manuel Norriega’s surrender, the use of “acoustic bombardment” has become standard practice on the battlefields of Iraq, and specifically musical bombardment has joined sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation as among the non-lethal means by which prisoners from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo may be coerced to yield their secrets without violating US law.

The very idea that music could be an instrument of torture confronts us with a novel—and disturbing—perspective on contemporary musicality in the United States. What is it that we in the United States might know about ourselves by contemplating this perspective? What does our government’s use of music in the “war on terror” tell us (and our antagonists) about ourselves?

This paper is a first attempt to understand the military and cultural logics on which the contemporary use of music as a weapon in torture and war is based. After briefly tracing the development of acoustic weapons in the late 20th century, and their deployment at the second battle of Falluja in November, 2004, I summarize what can be known about the theory and practice of using music to torture detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. I contemplate some aspects of late 20th-century musical culture in the civilian US that resonate with the US security community’s conception of music as a weapon, and survey the way musical torture is discussed in the virtual world known as the blogosphere. Finally, I sketch some questions for further research and analysis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_torture

[url=http://www.newstatesman.com/200611060029]Torture by Music
by Clive Stafford Smith
Published 06 November 2006[/url]

What do the tunes of Eminem, Aerosmith, Tupac Shakur and Meat Loaf have in common?
Answer: they have all been used to torture people

Vice-President Dick Cheney said just recently that the US should use water-boarding (holding a prisoner's head under water to simulate drowning) to elicit information from terror suspects.

"Would you agree that a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" asked his conservative radio interviewer on 24 October.

"It's a no-brainer for me," said Cheney.

Embarrassingly, the Bush administration had just assured Congress that water-boarding was illegal and would never be used. A new US army field manual, published in September, banned it as "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment".

This is not the only realm in which the White House needs a consistent message. Another "enhanced interrogation technique" that it finds attractive is "torture by music". Many people detained in the war on terror describe having music blasted at them 24 hours a day at great volume. They have even identified the songs. If you ask what the tunes of Aerosmith, Eminem, Don McLean, Bruce Springsteen, Tupac Shakur and Meat Loaf have in common with the theme tunes of the American children's television show Barney, there is only one answer: all have been used to torture people.

The torturers' taste in tunes is questionable. Springsteen's "Born in the USA", for example, has been a favourite in the secret prisons, repeating the mistake made by the Reagan campaign in 1984, when the Republicans thought the chorus - "Born in the USA!" - would make a loyal campaign chant. Yet the message of the song is harshly critical of American policy, condemning the war in Vietnam and describing a veteran's efforts to find work.

Other lyrics used by today's torturers seem equally inappropriate. In "White America", Eminem raps that he plans to "piss on the lawns of the White House" and "spit liquor in the faces of this democracy of hypocrisy". It is difficult to see how President Bush could approve of this, let alone the verse where Eminem expresses his intention to have sex with the vice-president's wife.

Playing "I Love You", a theme tune for the purple television dinosaur Barney, to terrorists is equally perplexing, particularly given the closing stanza: "I love you,/You love me./We're a happy family./ With a great big hug/And a kiss from me to you,/Won't you say you love me, too?" Thus far, Bush has eschewed the cuddly approach in the war on terror.

As the architect of enhanced interrogation techniques, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence, needs to take a firmer grip. I do not pretend to be an expert in musical abuse, but surely he should encourage the American Gulag's disc jockeys to select more country and western numbers? Take Toby Keith, for example, and his song about "a middle-aged, Middle Eastern camel-herdin' man . . . [in a] two-bedroom cave here in north Afghanistan". The administration would be much better off blasting out how we should "flip a couple fingers to the Taliban!". This kind of torture would be on-message and much more effective: I, for one, would confess to anything after enduring the first verse.

Torture victims cannot sue, but artists can. And some of these sensitive musicians may be offended that their music is being used to abuse. And because the torturers did not get permission to spin particular discs, they are liable for royalties.

This means that one day Rumsfeld will end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit. I'd love to ask the questions at his deposition: how many times was each song played, and why was a particular tune selected in the first place? But perhaps we can pre-empt litigation. Desert Island Discs is an obvious alternative; Kirsty Young should invite Rumsfeld on the programme. Presumably, his chosen book would not be the Geneva Conventions, though it might be his "luxury item". Then he could tell us all which eight songs he would choose to hear, over and over - at high volume.


Clive Stafford Smith is the legal director of Reprieve, a UK charity fighting for the lives of people facing the death penalty and other human-rights abuses. He represents several prisoners in Guantanamo, many of whom have been tortured by music. He writes this column monthly. Contact Reprieve at PO Box 52742, London EC4P 4WS. Tel: 020 7353 4640. www.reprieve.org.uk

[annie aronburg]

[url=http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/bayoumi]Disco Inferno
By Moustafa Bayoumi
This article appeared in the December 26, 2005 edition of The Nation.[/url]

Yasir al-Qutaji is a 30-year-old lawyer from Mosul, Iraq. In March 2004, while exploring allegations that US troops were torturing Iraqis, Qutaji was arrested by American forces. News accounts describe how he was then subjected to the same kinds of punishment he was investigating. He was hooded, stripped naked and doused with cold water. He was beaten by American soldiers who wore gloves so as not to leave permanent marks. And he was left in a room soldiers blithely called The Disco, a place where Western music rang out so loud that his interrogators were, in Qutaji's words, forced to "talk to me via a loudspeaker that was placed next to my ears."
Qutaji is hardly the only Iraqi to speak of loud music being blared at him, and the technique echoes far beyond Mosul. In Qaim, near the Syrian border, Newsweek found American soldiers blasting Metallica's "Enter Sandman" at detainees in a shipping crate while flashing lights in their eyes. Near Falluja, three Iraqi journalists working for Reuters were seized by the 82nd Airborne. They charged that "deafening music" was played directly into their ears while soldiers ordered them to dance. And back in Mosul, Haitham al-Mallah described being hooded, handcuffed and delivered to a location where soldiers boomed "extremely loud (and dirty) music" at him. Mallah said the site was "an unknown place which they call 'the disco.'"

Disco isn't dead. It has gone to war.

And it's everywhere: Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, anywhere touched by the "war on terror." In Afghanistan, Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old Afghan farmer, was forced to stay awake while in American custody by soldiers blasting music and shouting at him. Shah told the New York Times that after enduring the pain of music, "he grew so exhausted...that he vomited." In Guantánamo Bay, Eminem, Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine, Metallica (again) and Bruce Springsteen ("Born in the USA") have been played at mind-numbing volumes, sometimes for stretches of up to fourteen hours, at detainees. And at Abu Ghraib, Saddam Salah al-Rawi, a 29-year-old Iraqi, told a similar story. For no reason, over a period of four months, he was hooded, beaten, stripped, urinated on and lashed to his cell door by his hands and feet. He also talked about music becoming a weapon. "There was a stereo inside the cell," he said, "with a sound so loud I couldn't sleep. I stayed like that for twenty-three hours."

Whatever the playlist--usually heavy metal or hip-hop but sometimes, bizarrely, Barney the Dinosaur's "I Love You" or selections from Sesame Street--the music is pumped at detainees with such brutality to unravel them without laying so much as a feather on their bodies. The mind is another story, and blasting loud music at captives has become part of what has now entered our lexicon as "torture lite." Torture lite is a calculated combination of psychological and physical means of coercion that stop short of causing death and pose little risk that telltale physical marks will be left behind, but that nonetheless can cause extreme psychological trauma. It's designed to deprive the victim of sleep and to cause massive sensory overstimulation, and it has been shown in different situations to be psychologically unbearable.

Clearly, torture music is an assault on human rights. But more broadly, what does it mean when music gets enrolled in schools of torture and culture is sent jackbooted into war? With torture music, our culture is no longer primarily a means of individual expression or an avenue to social criticism. Instead, it is an actual weapon, one that represents and projects American military might. Cultural differences are exploited, and multiculturalism becomes a strategy for domination. Torture music is the crudest kind of cultural imperialism, grimly ironic in a war that is putatively about spreading "universal" American values.

Yet the first reaction torture music inspired among Americans was not indignation but amusement. Finally, dangerous terrorists--like everyone else--will be tortured by Britney Spears's music! Most commentators saw it this way, particularly after Time reported that Christina Aguilera's music was droned at Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged twentieth 9/11 hijacker, at Guantánamo. The Chicago Tribune's website compiled readers' favorite "interro-tunes" (the winner was Captain and Tennille's "Muskrat Love.") The New York Sun called it "mood music for jolting your jihadi," and a Missouri paper wrote cheekily that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had "approved four of seven stronger coercive tunes but said that forcing the prisoner to view photos of Aguilera's Maxim magazine photo shoot--in which she poses in a pool with only an inner-tube to cover her ferret-like figure--would fall outside Geneva Convention standards."

Thus, torture lite slides right into mainstream American acceptance. It's a frat-house prank taken one baby-step further--as essentially harmless, and American, as an apple pie in the face. It's seen as a justified means of exacting revenge on or extracting information from a terrorist--never mind that detainees in the "war on terror" are mostly Muslims who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Without music, life would be an error," writes Nietzsche, but for Muslim detainees, it's the other way around. Mind-numbing American music is blasted at them with such ferocity that they will believe their lives are a mistake.

four more pages after this one

[barracuda]

The Torture Playlist