Music As Torture

I would say that loud sound in general can be torture. I suspect the reason music is used is that they already have recordings of music.

http://www.spin.com/writers/david-peisner/

November 30 2006
David Peisner

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What these new "torture memos" do make clear, though, is that Greg Hartley, the former SERE instructor and interrogation trainer whom I spoke to for the story, was exactly right when he surmised that the way all these new "enhanced interrogation" techniques ended up in the arsenals of American interrogators was through SERE, the Special Forces school that trains American military personal to resist interrogation by foreign governments. As he said back then, "a lot of what's happening, a lot of the stuff you see that has gone wrong" -- everything from loud music to stress positions to waterboarding -- "I think is someone trying to overlay SERE techniques to interrogation." This, as it turns out, is exactly what happened. (It's worth pointing out that with regards to the most controversial interrogation technique authorized in these memos -- waterboarding -- Hartley, who had both been on giving and receiving end of this tactic at SERE said, "That's a horrible thing -- I can't imagine they ever approved that.") He also said that SERE was never intended to be interrogation training. It was meant to mimic the brutal tactics of our enemies, which were known to produce false confessions.

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In May 2003, Shafiq Rasul was led from his cell at the Camp Delta detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a small, drab interrogation booth. He sat down and a military police officer chained his leg irons to a metal ring in the center of the linoleum floor. Rasul had grown accustomed to this procedure since his arrival in Cuba nearly 18 months earlier. Every few weeks he'd be brought into the booth and questioned about people he knew, places he'd been, and what he and two friends, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal -- all English citizens in their 20s -- were doing in Afghanistan in late 2001. This time was different. An interrogator walked into the booth, pressed play on a nearby stereo, and walked out. Rasul immediately recognized the sound coming from the speakers: It was Eminem's "Kim."

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It wasn't long before he was back in the booth. This time, the room was pitch black except for the irregular flashes of a strobe light. Eminem had been replaced by loud, menacing heavy metal. The air-conditioning had been cranked way up, and Rasul was short-shackled -- his wrists fastened to his ankles, then shackled to the ring in the floor in what is known as a "stress position." He was left there for hours. "Being in that position is really stressful on your back," he says. "If you try to move, the chains start digging into your feet and wrists."

Rasul endured such "interrogation sessions" every day, sometimes twice a day, for nearly three weeks. Often, there was little or no interrogation taking place. After up to 12 hours in the booth with raging metal as his only companion, he'd just be marched back to his cell-now on the prison's isolation block.

Rasul, Ahmed, and Iqbal had been captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 by a Northern Alliance militia, and then transferred to U.S. custody. U.S. intelligence seemed to lose interest in Rasul after his first few months in Guantanamo.

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But in 2003, U.S. agents found what they believed was a smoking gun: a videotape apparently showing the three men sitting in on an August 2000 meeting with Osama bin Laden and lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. The increasing harshness of Rasul's treatment directly corresponded to this discovery and soon began having its desired effect. "It just starts playing with you," he says. "Even if you were shouting, the music was too loud -- nobody would be able to hear you. You're there for hours and hours, and they're constantly playing the same music. All that builds up. You start hallucinating."

Rasul's interrogators showed him the video and pressed him to admit he was at the meeting. After he initially denied the charge, the weeks-long barrage of metal, extreme cold, and strobe lights did its job and Rasul confessed.

There was only one problem: In August 2000, Shafiq Rasul couldn't have been breaking bread with bin Laden because, as investigators would soon confirm, he was attending university and working at the electronics store Curry's back in England. In early 2004, Rasul, Ahmed, and Iqbal were released without charges.

Rasul's ordeal may seem bizarre and disturbing, but it's hardly unique. Over the last five years, loud music has quietly become a valued tool in the Bush administration's war on terror.

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The British blared white noise at Irish Republican Army suspects in the '70s but swore off the practice after the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 1977 that it was "degrading and inhuman." Israel's military employed loud music until 1999, when an Israeli Supreme Court judged that this exposure "causes the suspect suffering. It does not fall within the scope of...a fair and effective interrogation."

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Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist, retired brigadier general, and former commander of the Southeast Regional Army Medical Command, says this sort of musical bombardment can indeed cause permanent damage. "It's really traumatizing to the brain," he says. "It will lead to anxiety and the kind of symptoms you get with post-traumatic stress disorder."

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Tom makes an ethical distinction between blasting music for the purposes of interrogation and using it to disorient a recent capture. "If [the detainee] is accustomed to his surroundings and you force him to listen to Limp Bizkit, that's clearly an interrogation tactic," he says. "That would only be used in very rare situations, to annoy someone to the point where their only way out is you. To me, the only purpose of that is to drive somebody nuts, and that constitutes torture.

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"Do I think it's inhuman? If it's too loud, absolutely it's inhuman. It's physical torture.

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tags: noise pollution