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Post by beatlies on Dec 21, 2005 23:59:50 GMT -5
Music Allegedly Used As U.S. Torture Device
The group claims that music by Eminem and Dr. Dre were used as instruments of torture.
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KABUL, Afghanistan — A human rights group is alleging the United States operated a secret prison near Afghanistan's capital as recently as last year.
The group claims that music by Eminem and Dr. Dre were used as instruments of torture.
New York-based Human Rights Watch has issued a report saying the United States operated a secret prison in Afghanistan and tortured detainees. The report quoted an Ethiopian-born detainee as saying he was kept in a pitch-black prison and forced to listen to Eminem and Dr. Dre’s rap music for 20 days before the music was replaced by "horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds."
The report said detainees at the facility — known as "Dark Prison" — were deprived of sleep, chained to walls and forced to listen to loud music in total darkness for days.
The group said its report is based on the accounts of several detainees at the U.S. prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. Human Rights Watch hasn't been allowed to speak with the detainees directly, but said it obtained the detainees' accounts from their lawyers.
The group said the allegations are credible enough to warrant an official investigation.
American officials say the United States doesn't engage in torture. CIA officials have no commented on the allegations.
[ftp]www.theindychannel.com/news/5577000/detail.html[/ftp]
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Post by Shadow on Dec 22, 2005 4:08:37 GMT -5
Tongue firmly in cheek: Now this is a violation of The Geneva Conventions!  Ok, Seriously now... I seem to recall them using Metallica's 'Sandman', among others, in Iraq to "break" prisoners to get information from them. |
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Post by eyesbleed on Dec 22, 2005 7:40:52 GMT -5
Bring on the pain!
But 24 hours of hair-metal ballads? I'd certainly rather spill the beans than endure that level of torture!!
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Post by JoJo on Dec 22, 2005 12:07:10 GMT -5
A great article from The Nation here. A part of it follows, but if you read the article in its entirety, it becomes clear: This isn't a joke, or something to take lightly. 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.
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Post by Shadow on Dec 22, 2005 14:07:16 GMT -5
 I'm sorry... But this really is in the realms of cruel and unusual treatment.If I had to listen to that drek at the levels most people that like *bump* their cars to I'd probably throw up myself! I hate to say this but it makes me wonder who is using terror tactics now. What next? That joker from American Idol, William Hung (?), as a threat against prisoners?!? The RIAA must be pleased that their trash is being put to a "good" *sneer* use now..
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