After briefly tracing the development of acoustic weapons in the late 20th century, and their deployment at the second battle of Falluja in November, , I summarize what can be known about the theory and practice of using music to torture detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo.
Controlling Sound: Musical Torture from the Shoah to Guantánamo—The Appendix
Finally, I sketch some questions for further research and analysis. After the war ended, the Allies spent all day and all night flying over our heads, breaking the sound barrier. Just like Panama when they blasted Noriega, holed up in the Vatican Embassy with music. For fifteen days, Bush deafened the poor ambassador and Noriega with hard rock. Our torture went on for months-- 20 or 30 times, day or night Perhaps it was a policy.
Not bodies in pain. It is not my intention here to engage the moral, ethical and political debates around torture, interesting as they are. It is a taxonomy peppered with questions and speculations about the ways that these uses of music interact with more familiar aspects of recent musical culture in the United States. As far as I know, none of these have been deployed in the current wars.
Davison and Lewer The sounds just keep reverberating off the walls. Abel made clear that although the tactic of bombarding the enemy with sound was made at the command level, the choice of music was left to soldiers in the field: These guys have their own mini-disc players, with their own music, plus hundreds of downloaded sounds. 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 the interrogation of detainees in the war on terror. The prisoner becomes psychologically powerless before the authority of interrogators, both dependent and unable to resist. The common premise is that sound can damage human beings, usually without killing us, in a wide variety of ways. What differentiates the uses of sound or music on the battlefield and the uses of sound or music in the interrogation room is the claimed site of the damage.
I find two especially intriguing. First, both blur the distinction between sound and music. How, I wonder, might one interpret the resulting state-imposed hierarchy of sound over music? The practices and ideologies of classical music listening suggest that such music-induced ecstasy is produced by intense attention to the relationships among the sounds themselves. How might our own musical behaviors—as scholars and teachers especially—interact with these distinctions?
Most blog responses consist of the posted news story, followed by a handful of desultory comments. Some, however, consist of conversations that last from an hour or two at lunchtime or in early evening to several days. These longer conversations take one of two turns. Blogging communities who accept without question the idea that music is being used to torture detainees move quickly to political discussions of torture tout court , as it has been defined by recent US policy and law, and by recent international law. Generally, these conversations never return to music.
But perhaps we could make some lemonade of this. Turn Guantanmo into a year-round Pride Parade. Everything these people eat, sleep on, what have you will have been touched by homosexuals. Every time they take a shower they are being watched by homosexuals. Reinstitute periodic strip searches. Anyone who has talked with a professional dominatrix knows that there are a great deal of people in this country who are willing to pay to be rather brutally tortured.
Music torture: How heavy metal broke Manuel Noriega
Overwhelmingly, the conversations open with an exchange like this one, from Dec 19 I go nuts after three minutes! New interviews with survivors, held there in , talk about the use of songs, popular hits of the time: In the book A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and the subsequent film based upon it, a rebellious teenager is subjected to brutal experimental brain-washing techniques that cause him to feel physical pain if he has similar violent thoughts to those that sent him to jail in the first place; as an accidental side-effect, he has the same response if he hears Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Later, a man tortures him by locking him in a room where the symphony is played loudly.
In Back to the Future , Marty used music made by Van Halen to scare his dad, George McFly, awake, implying that since that kind of music did not exist in that time, it would scare him. In Apocalypse Now , a helicopter squadron plays classical music, Richard Wagner 's Ride of the Valkyries , over loudspeakers on-board their helicopters while attacking a Viet Cong village, as a form of psychological warfare.
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In Woody Allen 's early film Bananas , a prisoner is tortured by being tied up in a room while operetta, featuring an annoying coluratora soprano, is played over and over on a cheap record-player. In an episode of the U. In the TV series Homeland , Grindcore is used to keep a prisoner awake. In the series 'Lost', drum and bass music is used to keep an islander's boyfriend awake and indoctrinated and tortured. Public awareness of the use of this technique is widespread enough that it can be used in satirical attacks on popular culture:.
In the TV series American Horror Story , in the second season titled Asylum , the song " Dominique " is played constantly for the asylum patients in the episode " Welcome to Briarcliff ". In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy film a captured British intelligence officer under interrogation in a Soviet prison is subjected to disturbing sounds being repeatedly played through a pair of headphones. The Guardian reported that the US military may owe royalty payments to the artists whose works were played to the captives.
On 9 December the Associated Press reported that various musicians were coordinating their objections to the use of their music as a technique for softening up captives through an initiative called Zero dB. Zero dB aims to stop torture music by encouraging widespread condemnation of the practice and by calling on governments and the UN to uphold and enforce the Convention Against Torture and other relevant treaties.
The initiative is backed by the Musicians Union which is calling on British musicians to voice their outrage against the use of music to torture. Musicians and the wider public are making their own silent protests against music torture which are being shown on Zero dB. A series of silent protests and actions are planned through Participating musicians will include minutes of silence in their concerts to draw their audience's attention to the USA's use of deafening music against captives.
On December 13, , Benton issued an apology on the band's MySpace page about his comment on musical torture, stating his comment had been "taken out of context". From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Archived from the original on A Question of Torture.
11 Popular Songs the CIA Used to Torture Prisoners in the War on Terror
From the Cold War to the War on Terror. Henry Holt and Co. Bardach , Jac Chebatoris May 19, United States Department of Defense. Archived from the original PDF on Federal Bureau of Investigation.