Listen, They're Playing my Song

Musicians Don’t Want Tunes Used for Torture

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - Blaring from a speaker behind a metal grate in his tiny cell in Iraq, the blistering rock from Nine Inch Nails hit Prisoner No. 200343 like a sonic bludgeon.

The auditory assault went on for days, then weeks, then months at the U.S. military detention center in Iraq. Twenty hours a day. AC/DC. Queen. Pantera. The prisoner, military contractor Donald Vance of Chicago, told The Associated Press he was soon suicidal.

The tactic has been common in the U.S. war on terror, with forces systematically using loud music on hundreds of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the U.S. military commander in Iraq, authorized it on Sept. 14, 2003, "to create fear, disorient ... and prolong capture shock."

Now the detainees aren't the only ones complaining. Musicians are banding together to demand the U.S. military stop using their songs as weapons.
[...]
According to an FBI memo, one interrogator at Guantanamo Bay bragged he needed only four days to "break" someone by alternating 16 hours of music and lights with four hours of silence and darkness.
[...]
Vance, in a telephone interview from Chicago, said the tactic can make innocent men go mad. According to a lawsuit he has filed, his jailers said he was being held because his employer was suspected of selling weapons to terrorists and insurgents. The U.S. military confirms Vance was jailed but won't elaborate because of the lawsuit.

There might be a temptation to make jokes about being subjected to loud music being a form of torture, but it isn't funny, and it is torture.

And there might be a temptation in some folks less evolved to OK torture for them foreign brownish folks, but as noted above, our government also tortures white, christain, veteran, FBI informant, Americans.

More here:

Former U.S. Detainee in Iraq Recalls Torment

and here:

A different kind of hell for one American in Iraq FBI informant imprisoned and treated like an insurgent for 97 days

When Bush said "we don't torture"? He lied.

And his enablers continue to lie over and over.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak