Music as torture
Music as Torture
Although it seems to be both more widespread and older, the calculated use of music in “detainee interrogations” is less easy to trace than the use of sound as a weapon. Evidence from the current war is spotty, based on the debriefings of released detainees by international human rights organizations and reporters, on the accounts currently detained persons have given to their lawyers, or on urban legends that circulate on the internet, some of which are corroborated by the other two kinds of accounts. Still, it is absolutely clear that music plays an important role in tortures. As early as May 2003 the BBC reported that the US Army had used Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Barney the Purple Dinosaur’s “I Love You” in the interrogation of Iraqi detainees, playing the songs repeatedly at high volume to torture inside of shipping containers . Documents obtained by the ACLU include an email from an unidentified FBI agent, dated Dec. 5, 2003, that describes at least three incidents involving Guantanamo detainees being chained to the floor and subjected to “extreme heat, extreme cold, or extremely loud rap music”. . The June 12, 2005 issue of Time included a story based on the 84-page log of Mohammed al Qahtani’s interrogation there from November 2002 to January 2003 (Zagorin and Duffy 2005). Qahtani’s interrogations began at midnight; whenever he dozed he was awakened either by water poured over his head or the sound of Christina Aguilera’s music. In December 2005, Human Rights Watch posted brief first-person accounts of detainees released from a secret prison in Afghanistan, many of whom asserted that part of their experience included being held in a pitch-black space and forced to listen to music that they described, variously, as “unbearably loud”, “infidel”, or “Western”. The same posting included the account of Guantanamo prisoner Benyan Mohammed, an Ethiopian who had lived in Britain, and who had been tortured - he had to listen to music by Eminem (Slim Shady) and Dr Dre for twenty days before the music was replaced by “horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds.” A long New York Times story on March 19, 2006, described in detail “Camp Nama”, the headquarters of a multiple-agency interrogation unit at Baghdad International Airport; there, “high-value detainees”–those believed to have information directly pertinent to battlefield movements, terrorist ringleaders, or imminent terrorist attacks--were sent first to the so-called “Black Room”, a garage-sized, windowless space painted black where “rap music or rock’n’roll blared at deafening decibels over a loudspeaker” (Schmitt and Marshall 2006) . Read together, these reports suggest that the “deafening music” is usually delivered to a detainee who has been chained into a “stress position”, in a pitch-black space made uncomfortably hot or cold.
No-touch torture
It would be possible to assume from the evidence in the popular pressthat the use of music in “interrogation” is (as one of the sources forthe 2003 BBC story, claimed) “rather new”. I’m sorry to report that myreading suggests otherwise; nor is it the random, rogue behavior ofparticularly sadistic interrogators and MPs. Rather, it is onecomponent of a standard set of interrogation practices developed by theCIA over the second half of the 20th century–a standard set ofpractices that includes the hooding, stress positions, andsexual/cultural humiliation that the photos leaked from Abu Ghraibprison enabled us to see. Its advocates call this set of practices “notouch torture”.
of “no touch torture” to a research program funded by the OSS, the CIA, and the intelligence services of Canada and Britain in the years after WW2. Concerned by Soviet success at “brainwashing” captives and destroying their wills, these agencies supported research at Yale, Cornell, and McGill intended to learn how we might do the same. In the 1950s this contract research was concentrated in three areas: 1) the Canadian government funded research at McGill that explored the devastating impact of sensory deprivation and sensory manipulation–which would eventually include hooding; continuous noise (whether loud or not) and its opposite, soundproofing; temporal disorientation, and erratic provision of food and drink; 2) the CIA funded research at Cornell and Yale on the effects of self-inflicted pain–which would eventually include stress positions, and scenarios that provoked personal, sexual or cultural humiliation; and 3) the CIA funded research at Yale on the capacity of ordinary people to inflict lethal pain on others.
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