Music as torture/Music as weapon

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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby Hammer of Los » Thu Dec 15, 2011 8:32 am

...

HMWCIAcontrolEVERYTHING wrote:CIA designed Sesame Street as counter-insurgency to contain urban dissent in 1969.


I don't know about you, but I'm being tortured by Hugh's posts recently.

Sesame Street!

My god, is nothing sacred?!


:angelwings:

...
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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby Spiro C. Thiery » Thu Dec 15, 2011 10:41 am

Hammer of Los wrote:...
HMWCIAcontrolEVERYTHING wrote:CIA designed Sesame Street as counter-insurgency to contain urban dissent in 1969.

I don't know about you, but I'm being tortured by Hugh's posts recently.
Sesame Street!
My god, is nothing sacred?!
:angelwings:
...
Just goes to show that even the spooks jump the shark now and then: I mean, Elmo? :shrug:
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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby Spiro C. Thiery » Thu Dec 15, 2011 10:42 am

A friend of mine once did survival training in the military, which included simulated POW treatment:
They confined him to a box and pumped in Dead Kennedys. It was supposed to rattle him real good. They got angry when he wouldn't stop dancing.
:snoopdance:
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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby vince » Thu Dec 15, 2011 10:49 am

Spiro C. Thiery wrote:A friend of mine once did survival training in the military, which included simulated POW treatment:
They confined him to a box and pumped in Dead Kennedys. It was supposed to rattle him real good. They got angry when he wouldn't stop dancing.
:snoopdance:

Hope they gave him a lyric sheet, too! :sarcasm
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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby Spiro C. Thiery » Thu Dec 15, 2011 11:57 am

vince wrote:
Spiro C. Thiery wrote:A friend of mine once did survival training in the military, which included simulated POW treatment:
They confined him to a box and pumped in Dead Kennedys. It was supposed to rattle him real good. They got angry when he wouldn't stop dancing.
:snoopdance:

Hope they gave him a lyric sheet, too! :sarcasm

If so, maybe as the text of his video taped "confession".
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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby vince » Thu Dec 15, 2011 12:54 pm

Aw, you're right! Jello's lyrics make any speech by an 'enemy combatant' sound like a friendly greeting!
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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby American Dream » Fri Dec 26, 2014 4:28 pm

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/cia-torture-music/

DJ CIA

by Belén Fernández


The Central Intelligence Agency tortured captives by playing everything from Marilyn Manson to songs from Sesame Street.

Image


Three months after the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras and the forcible exile of Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president sneaked back into the country and took up residence at the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa.

The Honduran military deployed around the perimeter of the compound and busied itself preventing the entrance of potential dual-use items such as ballpoint pens, peanuts, shoelaces, tamales, and the Bible. Nighttime activities included shining lights into the embassy and blasting rock music, army songs, and recordings of pig grunts.

When I asked Honduran General Romeo Vásquez — ringleader of the coup and a former pupil at the notorious School of the Americas — about the midnight noise-fests, he laughed and claimed that the only musical performances ever to take place in the vicinity of the embassy were guitar serenades in honor of soldiers’ birthdays.

In light of the Honduran army’s role as junior partner to a US military that has long viewed the country as its own personal launch pad, the mimicry of American tactics is not surprising. Even less so, perhaps, since they had already been showcased nearby.

Twenty-five years ago in Panama, the invading US military played Van Halen and other selections at top volume in an attempt to drive Panamanian leader (and former CIA asset) Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican embassy where he had taken refuge. It had to do with more than the songs, of course, but Noriega was out in ten days.

Although the incorporation of music into the imperial arsenal predated the war on terror, the musical torture of detainees from Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo has brought the arrangement to a new, more sinister level.

A 2010 Der Spiegel article offers a glimpse at business-as-usual in the United States-run dungeons of the post-9/11 era — with prisoners being tied up or placed in wooden boxes and blasted with the likes of Dr. Dre and the Bee Gees for hours or days at a time.

The torture playlist included a host of other artists and melodies as well, ranging from Marilyn Manson to Britney Spears to Metallica to “We Are the Champions” to compositions from Sesame Street.

Der Spiegel quotes former Guantánamo inmate Ruhal Ahmed on the general incredulousness among the public when confronted with the idea of music as torture. Considering the tunes involved, it’s not clear why the concept is so difficult to grasp.

According to Ahmed, this sort of psychological punishment is in fact worse than physical torture:

[W]hen I was beaten, I could use my imagination to forget the pain. But the music makes you completely disoriented. It takes over your brain. You lose control and start to hallucinate. You’re pushed to a threshold, and you realize that insanity is lurking on the other side. And once you cross that line, there’s no going back.

The same sentiment was echoed by Binyam Mohamed, who spent over six years in American custody. Andy Worthington — author of The Guantánamo Files — quotes Mohamed’s framing of the relative perks of physical suffering: “Imagine you are given a choice. Lose your sight or lose your mind.”

Mohamed, it bears mentioning, is no stranger to other forms of torture. While detained in Morocco, Worthington notes, “the CIA’s proxy torturers regularly cut his penis with a razorblade.”

The logic is pretty straightforward: if your mind is what you rely on to get you through this whole nasty experience, the realization that you’re on the verge of losing it — that your mind itself is the target — unleashes even more debilitating existential anxiety. Physical pain, while often excruciating, is at least measurable in terms of excruciation and thus more readily dealt with than the prospect of impending lunacy.

Of course, you can’t totally separate mental and bodily torture. There are undoubted mental repercussions from things like rectal hydration and having your penis sliced, just as there’s a physical element to being deafened by Marilyn Manson.

As for the purpose of all the pain, the Senate Intelligence Committee report recently confirmed that torture is a decidedly ineffective means of gathering intelligence. Case in point: Ahmed falsely confessed, to his musical torturers, to having met Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar and knowing of their plans. The reason for the lie? “I just said it to make them stop.”

Now that the CIA has vast quantities of non-intelligence on its hands, what next? If the organization was capable of self-reflection, there would be a lot of places where it could start. On the musical coercion front, it could ponder a 2008 clip from The New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross, who recounts his interaction with New York University musicologist Suzanne Cusick, a close follower of the phenomenon:

When I asked Cusick whether she considered these tactics [of torturous music-assisted interrogation] a new development in the evolution of music as a weapon of war, she answered that there are, in fact, some disturbing historical precedents, not least the forced musical rituals at Nazi concentration camps.


One wonders what the next era of music as an instrument of torture might bring. There’s already an established US tradition of adapting war on terror techniques and equipment for use against the domestic population, and it seems that protests over police killing black people might be a good place to implement some more.

Look out for the musical drones.
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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 25, 2016 12:57 pm

Peter Sachs Collopy
Media historian. Scholar of video, analog and digital, technopolitics, and technologies of consciousness. He/him.
Mar 31, 2014




Cybernetics of the LRAD

The LRAD, or Long Range Acoustic Device, is an extremely loud speaker—loud enough to damage hearing—that is marketed to militaries and police forces for both communication and “escalation of force.” It was first deployed in the United States at the Pittsburgh G20 protests in 2009 and will likely again project orders and siren sounds this weekend in Chicago during demonstrations prompted by NATO’s summit meeting. It also embodies a logic which has pervaded American thought since World War II, a logic which conflates communication and control.


https://youtu.be/TInNg6QbHXc

As Aaron Bady points out, the LRAD brings together violence and speech. “To ask the question of whether an LRAD is designed to hurt people or designed to communicate across long distances with people,” writes Bady, “is to mystify its central design function: It is a technology whose purpose is to FORCE you to listen and obey, and one which is less interested in the difference than you’d think.” The LRAD makes it impossible to think of policing—particularly the iconic “order to disperse” delivered to political demonstrators from Chicago in 1886 to Pittsburgh in 2009 (shown above)—as a process in which orders come first and force follows only in the case of disobedience. The medium through which orders are communicated is itself forceful; the LRAD is a weapon, which is why the LRAD Corporation sells it, according to their fact sheet, “only to qualified government agencies and commercial entities that are fully trained in the device’s operation.” Bady concludes, then, that the LRAD demonstrates policing is “simply about power. Communication is a means of making you obey,” and, from the perspective of the LRAD, nothing more.


Continues at: https://medium.com/@collopy/cybernetics ... cd88383d2/
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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Aug 10, 2017 5:17 pm

.
Related:

https://www.apnews.com/51828908c6c84d78a29e833d0aae10aa

(Taste of their own medicine, ay?)


WASHINGTON (AP) — The two-year-old U.S. diplomatic relationship with Cuba was roiled Wednesday by what U.S. officials say was a string of bizarre incidents that left a group of American diplomats in Havana with severe hearing loss attributed to a covert sonic device.

In the fall of 2016, a series of U.S. diplomats began suffering unexplained losses of hearing, according to officials with knowledge of the investigation into the case. Several of the diplomats were recent arrivals at the embassy, which reopened in 2015 as part of former President Barack Obama’s reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Some of the diplomats’ symptoms were so severe that they were forced to cancel their tours early and return to the United States, officials said. After months of investigation, U.S. officials concluded that the diplomats had been exposed to an advanced device that operated outside the range of audible sound and had been deployed either inside or outside their residences. It was not immediately clear if the device was a weapon used in a deliberate attack, or had some other purpose.

The U.S. officials weren’t authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the U.S. retaliated by expelling two Cuban diplomats from their embassy in Washington on May 23. She did not say how many U.S. diplomats were affected or confirm they had suffered hearing loss, saying only that they had “a variety of physical symptoms.”

The Cuban government said in a lengthy statement late Wednesday that “Cuba has never permitted, nor will permit, that Cuban territory be used for any action against accredited diplomatic officials or their families, with no exception.”

The statement from the Cuban Foreign Ministry said it had been informed of the incidents on Feb. 17 and had launched an “exhaustive, high-priority, urgent investigation at the behest of the highest level of the Cuban government.”

It said the decision to expel two Cuban diplomats was “unjustified and baseless.”

The ministry said it had created an expert committee to analyze the incidents and had reinforced security around the U.S. embassy and U.S. diplomatic residences.

“Cuba is universally considered a safe destination for visitors and foreign diplomats, including U.S. citizens,” the statement said.

U.S. officials told The Associated Press that about five diplomats, several with spouses, had been affected and that no children had been involved. The FBI and Diplomatic Security Service are investigating.

Cuba employs a state security apparatus that keeps many people under surveillance and U.S. diplomats are among the most closely monitored people on the island. Like virtually all foreign diplomats in Cuba, the victims of the incidents lived in housing owned and maintained by the Cuban government.

However, officials familiar with the probe said investigators were looking into the possibilities that the incidents were carried out by a third country such as Russia, possibly operating without the knowledge of Cuba’s formal chain of command.

Nauert said investigators did not yet have a definitive explanation for the incidents but stressed they take them “very seriously,” as shown by the Cuban diplomats’ expulsions.

“We requested their departure as a reciprocal measure since some U.S. personnel’s assignments in Havana had to be curtailed due to these incidents,” she said. “Under the Vienna Convention, Cuba has an obligation to take measures to protect diplomats.”

U.S. diplomats in Cuba said they suffered occasional harassment for years after the restoration of limited ties with the communist government in the 1970s, harassment reciprocated by U.S. agents against Cuban diplomats in Washington. The use of sonic devices to intentionally harm diplomats would be unprecedented.

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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby Jerky » Fri Aug 11, 2017 1:12 pm

vince » 15 Dec 2011 14:49 wrote:
Spiro C. Thiery wrote:A friend of mine once did survival training in the military, which included simulated POW treatment:
They confined him to a box and pumped in Dead Kennedys. It was supposed to rattle him real good. They got angry when he wouldn't stop dancing.
:snoopdance:

Hope they gave him a lyric sheet, too! :sarcasm


Think they were getting him ready for an upcoming Holiday in Cambodia? :-)

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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby Spiro C. Thiery » Fri Aug 11, 2017 3:15 pm

Jerky » Today, 19:12 wrote:
vince » 15 Dec 2011 14:49 wrote:
Spiro C. Thiery wrote:A friend of mine once did survival training in the military, which included simulated POW treatment: They confined him to a box and pumped in Dead Kennedys. It was supposed to rattle him real good. They got angry when he wouldn't stop dancing.
:snoopdance:

Hope they gave him a lyric sheet, too! :sarcasm
Think they were getting him ready for an upcoming Holiday in Cambodia? :-)
Jerky

Nah. This was a post Pol Pot incident.
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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby Burnt Hill » Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:45 pm

Belligerent Savant » Thu Aug 10, 2017 5:17 pm wrote:.
Related:

https://www.apnews.com/51828908c6c84d78a29e833d0aae10aa

(Taste of their own medicine, ay?)


WASHINGTON (AP) — The two-year-old U.S. diplomatic relationship with Cuba was roiled Wednesday by what U.S. officials say was a string of bizarre incidents that left a group of American diplomats in Havana with severe hearing loss attributed to a covert sonic device.

In the fall of 2016, a series of U.S. diplomats began suffering unexplained losses of hearing, according to officials with knowledge of the investigation into the case. Several of the diplomats were recent arrivals at the embassy, which reopened in 2015 as part of former President Barack Obama’s reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Some of the diplomats’ symptoms were so severe that they were forced to cancel their tours early and return to the United States, officials said. After months of investigation, U.S. officials concluded that the diplomats had been exposed to an advanced device that operated outside the range of audible sound and had been deployed either inside or outside their residences. It was not immediately clear if the device was a weapon used in a deliberate attack, or had some other purpose.

The U.S. officials weren’t authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the U.S. retaliated by expelling two Cuban diplomats from their embassy in Washington on May 23. She did not say how many U.S. diplomats were affected or confirm they had suffered hearing loss, saying only that they had “a variety of physical symptoms.”

The Cuban government said in a lengthy statement late Wednesday that “Cuba has never permitted, nor will permit, that Cuban territory be used for any action against accredited diplomatic officials or their families, with no exception.”

The statement from the Cuban Foreign Ministry said it had been informed of the incidents on Feb. 17 and had launched an “exhaustive, high-priority, urgent investigation at the behest of the highest level of the Cuban government.”

It said the decision to expel two Cuban diplomats was “unjustified and baseless.”

The ministry said it had created an expert committee to analyze the incidents and had reinforced security around the U.S. embassy and U.S. diplomatic residences.

“Cuba is universally considered a safe destination for visitors and foreign diplomats, including U.S. citizens,” the statement said.

U.S. officials told The Associated Press that about five diplomats, several with spouses, had been affected and that no children had been involved. The FBI and Diplomatic Security Service are investigating.

Cuba employs a state security apparatus that keeps many people under surveillance and U.S. diplomats are among the most closely monitored people on the island. Like virtually all foreign diplomats in Cuba, the victims of the incidents lived in housing owned and maintained by the Cuban government.

However, officials familiar with the probe said investigators were looking into the possibilities that the incidents were carried out by a third country such as Russia, possibly operating without the knowledge of Cuba’s formal chain of command.

Nauert said investigators did not yet have a definitive explanation for the incidents but stressed they take them “very seriously,” as shown by the Cuban diplomats’ expulsions.

“We requested their departure as a reciprocal measure since some U.S. personnel’s assignments in Havana had to be curtailed due to these incidents,” she said. “Under the Vienna Convention, Cuba has an obligation to take measures to protect diplomats.”

U.S. diplomats in Cuba said they suffered occasional harassment for years after the restoration of limited ties with the communist government in the 1970s, harassment reciprocated by U.S. agents against Cuban diplomats in Washington. The use of sonic devices to intentionally harm diplomats would be unprecedented.



http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2017/08/24/us-diplomats-return-from-cuba-with-brain-damage/

Diplomats Return from Cuba with Brain Damage
August 24, 2017 6:53 AM
Filed Under: brain damage, Cuba, diplomats, hearing loss

ST. LOUIS (KMOX) – Some diplomats in Cuba have returned to North America suffering brain damage after a series of attacks, possibly from a sonic device directed at their homes. One expert says it could have been sort of like a very damaging and powerful dog whistle, only aimed at humans.

“If they were able to utilize something at a short range and particularly noxious, it could do a lot of damage to people,” says Dr. Josh Sappington, a SLU Care otologist, specializing in the ear and hearing loss at SSM Health SLU Hospital.

“If they had repeated exposure to it, or sustained exposure to it, that’s not something that the brain and the ears will like for an extended period of time and they could suffer neurological damage,” he says.

In some cases, oral steroids can help with the hearing damage, but Sappington says the more serious brain and nerve damage cases are more concerning with much longer therapy needed.
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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Sep 16, 2017 7:46 am

The Cubans even offered to let the FBI come down to Havana to investigate. US-Cuban cooperation on law enforcement has increased some since the detente in 2015. Even so, the new access was extraordinary.


Castro denies Cuba had a hand in baffling ‘health attacks’ on US diplomats
By Associated Press September 15, 2017 | 11:29am | Updated
Modal Trigger Castro denies Cuba had a hand in baffling ‘health attacks’ on US diplomats
Raul Castro AP
HAVANA — Raul Castro seemed as rattled as the Americans.

The Cuban president sent for the top American official in the country to address grave concerns about a spate of US diplomats harmed in Havana. There was talk of futuristic “sonic attacks” and the subtle threat of repercussions by the United States, until recently Cuba’s sworn enemy.

The way Castro responded surprised Washington, several US officials familiar with the exchange told the Associated Press.

In a rare face-to-face conversation, Castro told Jeffrey DeLaurentis, the American Embassy chief, that he was equally befuddled, and concerned. Predictably, Castro denied any responsibility. But it wasn’t the indignant, how-dare-you-accuse-us response the US had come to expect from Cuba’s leaders.

SEE ALSO
Baffling 'acoustic attack' on US embassy workers in Cuba caused hearing loss
Baffling 'acoustic attack' on US embassy workers in Cuba caused hearing loss
The Cubans even offered to let the FBI come down to Havana to investigate. US-Cuban cooperation on law enforcement has increased some since the detente in 2015. Even so, the new access was extraordinary.

“Some countries don’t want any more FBI agents in their country than they have to — and that number could be zero,” said Leo Taddeo, a retired FBI supervisor who served abroad.

Cuba, Taddeo said, is normally in that group.

The list of confirmed American victims was much shorter on Feb. 17, when the US first complained to Cuba. Today, the number of “medically confirmed” cases stands at 21 — plus several Canadians. Some Americans have permanent hearing loss or mild brain injury, incidents that have frightened Havana’s tight-knit diplomatic community.

At least one other nation, France, has tested embassy staff for potential sonic-induced injuries.

But several US officials say there are real reasons to question whether Cuba perpetrated a clandestine campaign of aggression. The officials weren’t authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation and demanded anonymity.

When the US has accused Cuba of misbehavior in the past, like harassing diplomats or cracking down on local dissidents, Havana has often accused Washington of making it up. This time, although Castro denied involvement, his government didn’t dispute that something troubling may have gone down on Cuban soil.

Perhaps the picture was more complex? Investigators considered whether a rogue faction of Cuba’s security forces had acted, possibly in combination with another country like Russia or North Korea.

Modal Trigger
The United States Embassy in Havana, CubaGetty Images
For decades, Cuba and the US harassed each other’s diplomats. The Cubans might break into homes to rearrange furniture or leave feces unflushed in a toilet. The Americans might conduct obvious break-ins and traffic stops, puncture tires or break headlights.

Yet those pranks were primarily to pester, not to harm.

What US diplomats started reporting last November was altogether different.

SEE ALSO
US diplomats in Cuba suffered brain injuries in 'sonic attack'
US diplomats in Cuba suffered brain injuries in 'sonic attack'
Diplomats and their families were getting sick. Some described bizarre, unexplained sounds, including grinding and high-pitched ringing. Victims even recounted how they could walk in and out of what seemed like powerful beams of sound that hit only certain rooms or even only parts of rooms, the AP reported this week.

At the time, Washington and Havana were in frantic cooperation mode, working feverishly to lock in progress on everything from internet access to immigration rules before Barack Obama’s presidency ended. Donald Trump’s surprise election win on Nov. 8 meant the US would soon be led by a president who’d threatened to reverse the rapprochement.

As America awaited an unpredictable new administration, Cuba faced a pivotal moment, too.

Fidel Castro died on Nov. 25. The revolutionary had reigned for nearly a half-century before ceding power to his brother Raul in his ailing last years. It was no secret in Cuba that Fidel, along with some supporters in the government, were uneasy about Raul Castro’s opening with the US.

“There is a struggle going on for the soul of their revolution,” said Michael Parmly, who headed the US diplomatic post in Havana from 2005 to 2008. “It’s entirely possible there are rogue elements.”



When the first diplomats came forward with their inexplicable episodes and symptoms, the US didn’t connect the dots. It took weeks before embassy officials pieced together “clusters” of incidents and multiple victims with confirmed health damage.

SEE ALSO
More mysterious 'health attacks' target diplomats in Cuba
More mysterious 'health attacks' target diplomats in Cuba
By the time Obama left the White House on Jan. 20, talk of mysterious maladies had reached some officials in Washington. Word of sonic attacks hadn’t reached the top echelons of the White House or US State Department, three former US officials told the AP.

As Trump took office, a clearer picture started to emerge.

On Feb. 17, the US complained to Cuba’s embassy in Washington and its foreign ministry in Havana.

Soon came Castro, seeking out DeLaurentis directly.

The attacks halted for a time. But several US officials said it wasn’t clear why.

It wasn’t long before the incidents started again, as mysteriously as they’d stopped.

Modal Trigger
Reuters
Then the Canadians got hit.

Between March and May, several households were hit with symptoms including nausea, headaches and nosebleeds, said a Canadian official with knowledge of his country’s investigation.

Then those attacks, too, ended.

What culprit would want to attack both the US and its northern neighbor?

Cuba has no obvious grievances with Canada. The two countries have close ties. But perhaps Canadians were targeted to muddle the motive and throw investigators off the trail, another possibility US authorities haven’t eliminated.

SEE ALSO
Mystery of 'health attacks' on US diplomats in Cuba deepens
Mystery of 'health attacks' on US diplomats in Cuba deepens
The Canadians tested some of their staff in Havana and called others home temporarily, the Canadian official said.

Searching for its own answers, the US Embassy conducted medical tests on staffers. Many were sent to the University of Miami for further examination. The State Department consulted with doctors at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania. The US encouraged those institutions to keep what they knew private.

In Havana’s diplomatic circles, anxiety spread. The French Embassy tested employees after a staff member raised health concerns, according to a French diplomat familiar with the matter. False alarm: The tests turned up no signs of damage consistent with a sonic attack.

The FBI traveled to Havana and swept some of the rooms where attacks were reported — a list that included homes and at least one hotel: the Spanish-run Hotel Capri, where visiting US officials occasionally stay. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police flew down, too. Neither law enforcement agency found any sonic device, several officials told the AP.

By May 23, the US still had no answers. But something had to be done. The Trump administration expelled two Cuban diplomats from Washington to protest the communist government’s failure to protect the safety of American diplomats.

Neither country disclosed the expulsion at the time. Cuba didn’t retaliate.

The next month, Trump imposed some barriers to travel between the former Cold War foes. But there was no hint it was to punish Castro’s government for the attacks. Trump left much of Obama’s broader detente intact, including the two nations’ reopened embassies.

Modal Trigger
Reuters
The diplomats suffered in private, until Aug. 9.

News reports finally prompted the State Department to publicly acknowledge “incidents which have caused a variety of physical symptoms” and were still under investigation. The AP learned they included concentration problems and even trouble recalling common words.

Two weeks later, the US announced at least 16 Americans showed symptoms. At that point, the State Department said the incidents were “not ongoing.”

Still, the tally continued to rise — first to 19 victims, and then this week to 21.

In the meantime, the State Department had to withdraw its assurance the attacks had long ceased. There had been another incident, on Aug. 21.

“The reality is, we don’t know who or what has caused this,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Thursday. “And that’s why the investigation is under way.”
http://nypost.com/2017/09/15/castro-den ... diplomats/



U.S. lawmakers want retaliation for sonic attacks in Cuba
Patricia Zengerle, Marc Frank
4 MIN READ
WASHINGTON/HAVANA (Reuters) - Five Republican senators called on Friday for Washington to retaliate for an alleged sonic attack, inaudible to some human ears, on U.S. personnel in Cuba by expelling Cuban diplomats and possibly closing the U.S. embassy in Havana.

In August, the State Department said Americans linked to the U.S. embassy in the capital had experienced physical symptoms caused by such “incidents,” involving sound waves, starting as far back as late 2016. Five Canadians in Havana were also affected.

In some cases the victims heard nothing, while others sensed deafening sound, but all suffered symptoms such as nausea, dizziness and temporary hearing or memory loss.

The incidents have left a sense of unease among Havana’s diplomatic community, various diplomats said, and the Cuban Foreign Ministry has not provided any explanation to date.

A months-long investigation by Cuba, the United States and Canada into the mysterious affair, unprecedented in modern diplomatic history, has yet to come up with answers as to how the attacks took place, let alone who was behind them.

Cuba has denied involvement. The U.S. State Department has not blamed Havana for the attacks, but asked two Cuban diplomats to leave Washington in May. Canada does not intend to take diplomatic action “at this time,” an official said in August.

In a letter, the five Republicans - Senators Tom Cotton, Richard Burr, John Cornyn, Marco Rubio and James Lankford - urged Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to remind the Cuban government of its responsibility toward diplomats.

“Furthermore, we ask that you immediately declare all accredited Cuban diplomats in the United States persona non grata and, if Cuba does not take tangible action, close the U.S. Embassy in Havana,” they wrote.

All five are members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the congressional panels looking into the matter. Burr is its chairman and Cornyn is the number two Republican in the Senate.

President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans control majorities in both houses of the U.S. Congress.

The letter came as the United States was expected to issue new, tighter restrictions on Americans traveling to Cuba, as part of a partial rollback of the U.S.-Cuban detente by President Donald Trump. Rubio, a Cuban-American, was a key player in forging the new, more hostile policy towards the island.

The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter. The seaside U.S. embassy in Havana was still closed due to damage in the wake of Hurricane Irma, with staff working from the ambassador’s residence and from home.

A source close to the investigation underway on the island said the Cubans had been very cooperative, even offering to let the FBI in to investigate for example.

“As far as we have ever known, the U.S. officials here in Cuba have never suspected the Cubans as perpetrating these events,” the source said.

Foreign policy experts say it is hard to see what Cuba would have to gain from perpetrating attacks on diplomats. It has enjoyed good relations with Canada for many years and in 2014 started to normalize relations with its old Cold War enemy the United States.

Theories abound. One is that another country like Russia, Iran or North Korea might want to drive a wedge between Cuba and the west. Another is that there is an internal power struggle underway on the island.
https://in.reuters.com/article/usa-cuba ... BR04R?il=0
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby American Dream » Sun Jan 28, 2018 1:47 pm

When Music Is Violence

From trumpets at the walls of Jericho to pop songs as torture in the Iraq War, sound can make a powerful weapon.

By Alex Ross

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In December, 1989, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was expelled from power by American forces. To escape capture, he took refuge in the Papal Nunciatura in Panama City. When an American general arrived to confer with the papal nuncio, the U.S. Army blared music from loudspeakers to prevent journalists from eavesdropping. Members of a psychological-operations unit then decided that non-stop music might aggravate Noriega into surrendering. They made requests for songs on the local armed-forces radio station, and directed the din at Noriega’s window. The dictator was thought to prefer opera, and so hard rock dominated the playlist. The songs conveyed threatening, sometimes mocking messages: Alice Cooper’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.”

Although the media delighted in the spectacle, President George H. W. Bush and General Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took a dim view of it. Bush called the campaign “irritating and petty,” and Powell had it stopped. Noriega, who had received psy­ops training at Fort Bragg in the nineteen-sixties, is said to have slept soundly through the clamor. Nonetheless, military and law-enforcement officials became convinced that they had stumbled on a valuable tactic. “Since the Noriega incident, you’ve been seeing an increased use of loudspeakers,” a psyops spokesman declared. During the siege of the Branch Davidian compound, in Waco, Texas, in 1993, the F.B.I. blasted music and noise day and night.

When Palestinian militants occupied the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, in 2002, Israeli forces reportedly tried to eject them with heavy metal. And during the occupation of Iraq the C.I.A. added music to the torture regime known as “enhanced interrogation.” At Guantánamo, detainees were stripped to their underwear, shackled to chairs, and blinded by strobe lights as heavy metal, rap, and children’s tunes assaulted their ears. Music has accompanied acts of war since trumpets sounded at the walls of Jericho, but in recent decades it has been weaponized as never before—outfitted for the unreal landscape of modern battle.

The intersection of music and violence has inspired a spate of academic studies. On my desk is a bleak stack of books examining torture and harassment, the playlists of Iraq War soldiers and interrogators, musical tactics in American crime-prevention efforts, sonic cruelties inflicted in the Holocaust and other genocides, the musical preferences of Al Qaeda militants and neo-Nazi skinheads. There is also a new translation, by Matthew Amos and Fredrick Rönnbäck, of Pascal Quignard’s 1996 book, “The Hatred of Music” (Yale), which explores age-old associations between music and barbarity.

When music is applied to warlike ends, we tend to believe that it has been turned against its innocent nature. To quote the standard platitudes, it has charms to soothe a savage breast; it is the food of love; it brings us together and sets us free. We resist evidence suggesting that music can cloud reason, stir rage, cause pain, even kill. Footnoted treatises on the dark side of music are unlikely to sell as well as the cheery pop-science books that tout music’s ability to make us smarter, happier, and more productive. Yet they probably bring us closer to the true function of music in the evolution of human civilization.

A striking passage in J. Martin Daughtry’s “Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq” (Oxford) evokes the sound of the battlefield in the most recent Iraq war:
The growl of the Humvee engine. The thump-thump-thump of the approaching helicopter. The drone of the generator. Human voices shouting, crying, asking questions in a foreign tongue. “Allahu akbar!”: the call to prayer. “Down on the ground!”: the shouted command. The dadadadadada of automatic weapon fire. The shhhhhhhhhhhhh of the rocket in flight. The fffft of the bullet displacing air. The sharp k-k-k-k-r-boom of the mortar. The rolling BOOM of the I.E.D.


Daughtry underscores something crucial about the nature of sound and, by extension, of music: we listen not only with our ears but also with our body. We flinch against loud sounds before the conscious brain begins to try to understand them. It is therefore a mistake to place “music” and “violence” in separate categories; as Daugh­try writes, sound itself can be a form of violence. Detonating shells set off supersonic blast waves that slow down and become sound waves; such waves have been linked to traumatic brain injury, once known as shell shock. Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are often triggered by sonic signals; New York residents experienced this after September 11th, when a popped tire would make everyone jump.

Sound is all the more potent because it is inescapable: it saturates a space and can pass through walls. Quignard—a novelist and essayist of an oblique, aphoristic bent—writes:
All sound is the invisible in the form of a piercer of envelopes. Whether it be bodies, rooms, apartments, castles, fortified cities. Immaterial, it breaks all barriers. . . . Hearing is not like seeing. What is seen can be abolished by the eyelids, can be stopped by partitions or curtains, can be rendered immediately inaccessible by walls. What is heard knows neither eyelids, nor partitions, neither curtains, nor walls. . . . Sound rushes in. It violates.
The fact that ears have no lids—earplugs notwithstanding—explains why reactions to undesirable sounds can be extreme. We are confronting faceless intruders; we are being touched by invisible hands.


Continues at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016 ... s-violence
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Re: Music as torture/Music as weapon

Postby American Dream » Tue Mar 20, 2018 8:49 am

The Politics of Sound in a Prison

Lawrence Abu Hamdan attempts to reconstruct the psycho-physical conditions in which prisoners lived at Syria’s Saydnaya prison by using recorded testimonials.

LOS ANGELES — In the events that transpired during the Arab Spring of 2011, citizens of several Middle Eastern countries took to the streets to protest the oppressive regimes that their respective leaders forced generations of innocents to endure. One of these oppressors was Bashar Al-Assad, the President of Syria. Al-Assad took power in 2000, after running unopposed in the election. He has since faced head-on the effects of a revolutionary population. In 2011, he agreed to lift the country’s state of emergency — one of the protesters’ demands — ostensibly allowing peaceful protests and a supposedly broader spectrum for freedom of speech. For some, this came as a relief. For others, it was a way to bandage a single wound while detracting attention from others. Despite international powers calling for Al-Assad to step down and allow the democratic election of a new leader, he never acquiesced. To this day, he remains in power, and has condemned international efforts to fight against extremist groups, all the while keeping his citizens in a permanent state of fear.

Al-Assad’s regime provides the political context for Beirut-based artist and activist Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s current project at the Hammer Museum, centered on one of the region’s most dangerous prisons, Saydnaya, north of Damascus. In 2016, Amnesty International led a research project that documented the stories of those who survived imprisonment in Saydnaya. Saydnaya is notorious for three things: torture, silence, and remoteness. The prison is out of reach for any third-party organization; only those who have been released can provide insight into life there. Over 13,000 individuals have been executed within the prison walls between 2011 and 2017...

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...Political analysts have noted that 2011 was a pivotal year for Al-Assad’s regime. With the protests occurring across Syria, he became increasingly suspicious of disloyal behavior and radicalized his treatment of prisoners. According to detainees at Saydnaya, the noise level dropped significantly and torture was implemented much more aggressively. Perhaps the most jarring aspect of the exhibition is the juxtaposition of Othman’s broadcast testimony with the architectural renderings. With no documentation of the prison available to the outside world, it is extremely difficult for any outsider to comprehend what goes on inside. Abu Hamdan worked with a digital visualization tool used in architecture to map sound leakages in a structure. In this case, the sound is evidence of life, of activity. It functions as a form of spatial mapping: through the acoustic depths of the detainees’ memories, Abu Hamdan approximates the prison’s interior.

Yet his aim is not simply to produce architectural renderings of Saydnaya. Since sound within the prison is evidence of trauma, pain, and torture, the renderings function as trauma-architecture or pain-projections. Viewers are presented with aesthetically intricate renderings that, at first glance, appear to be straightforward architectural plans. Abu Hamdan effectively politicizes the spatial renderings. Whereas a curved wall might give some indication of how sound travels in a structure, it here refers to the sound of trauma across the prison. The memories that inform Abu Hamdan’s renderings are blurry not because of their distance in time, but because detainees have been systematically silenced by those in power. Mediated speech becomes the only remaining document of experiences that evade or perhaps refuse representation.


https://hyperallergic.com/432776/lawren ... seum-2018/
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