Hello darkness my old friend, thinks the prisoner who hears the bolt on his cell door unlock.
It’s time to be tortured again, and it’s going to be beyond horrible.
But this prisoner doesn’t have any cuts or bruises on his body.
In fact, after the torture, he’s going to look just fine.
Still, what for the country detaining him is “Standard Operating Procedure” is hell
on Earth for him.
One thing for sure is he really hates the Rage Against the Machine song, “Killing
in the Name Of.”
This song was one hit on the CIA’s torture playlist.
Other songs on that playlist were Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Barney the Purple
Dinosaur’s “I Love You”.
They were all part of what’s called no-touch torture, along with things such as sleep deprivation.
Maybe now you’re thinking, but I love those songs.
You like nothing more than to do a very bad rendition of Killing in the Name Of at your
local karaoke spot.
That might be true, but if you play that song at an extremely loud volume over and over
again it will become tortuous at some point.
It’s exactly what the US did to suspected terrorists at some of its human rights-violating
detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was no big secret, either.
Sergeant Mark Hadsell of the U.S. Psychological Operations Company was quite open about how
he and others used loud music to torture prisoners.
This was done to break the will of prisoners that wouldn’t talk, if indeed they had anything
to say.
Many innocent people ended up hating Metallica.
It was explained that the reason heavy metal was often chosen was not just because it’s
generally damn noisy, but also because it might offend the prisoner’s cultural and
religious beliefs.
Basically, they were exposed to sounds that made them think, “What on earth is that
awful racket.”
The CIA also used TV programs, such as Sesame Street…You heard that right, Big Bird and
The Count after years of entertaining kids evolved into weapons of torture deemed by
activists to be a violation of human rights.
Hadsell explained some more about how it works.
He said, “These people haven't heard heavy metal.
They can't take it.
If you play it for 24 hours, your brain and body functions start to slide, your train
of thought slows down and your will is broken.
That's when we come in and talk to them."
It still seems a bit weird, but apparently, it works, even the kids’ TV stuff.
This is what one US operative told Newsweek, “In training, they forced me to listen to
the Barney ‘I Love You’ song for 45 minutes.
I never want to go through that again.”
Compared to other kinds of torture, the US has said that even though it drives people
up the wall and breaks their will, it doesn’t have any long-term devastating psychological
effects.
Still, that’s probably best answered by the prisoners.
One of those prisoners told Amnesty International that he was kept awake with loud songs for
a period of 4 days.
Even though the very mention of Barney will always elicit a laugh, can you imagine that
short song being repeated at an extreme volume for 4 whole days?
He was innocent, too.
Amnesty said, “It is a very difficult line to draw between what constitutes discomfort
and what constitutes torture.”
People have actually undertaken studies on music as torture.
It’s sometimes called futility music because it’s supposed to tell the victim that any
kind of resistance to the music is totally futile.
It is going to play and play until you break.
Just imagine it right now, you trapped in your bathroom, with a speaker on the wall
blaring out some strange song you hate not for an hour, but for days.
Torture music goes back long before the hell holes in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib came about.
Many years before the US sent alleged terrorists around the bend with Eminem’s “Real Slim
Shady” and the Meow Mix theme song, they dabbled in Van Halen.
When the US invaded Panama in 1989 its leader Manuel Noriega hid in an embassy.
Operatives wanted to get him out without causing too much damage.
Outside the embassy, they blasted Van Halen’s song “Panama” and for days on end and
also played The Howard Stern Show, among other sounds most of us are familiar with.
Noriega lasted a month and then handed himself in.
You have to ask if it was the music that did it.
According to The Guardian, it was.
The newspaper wrote that Noriega couldn’t handle the “the sanity-destroying power
of mallrat music.”
The article explains that General “Mad Max” Thurman ordered the embassy to be surrounded
by loudspeakers.
There was nowhere to hide.
Since it was December and we expect US troops were in a good mood, the first songs played
were all Christmas tunes.
Things took a darker turn when “Deck The Halls” was replaced with Billy Idol’s
“Flesh for Fantasy” and “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses.
After Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” kicked in, Noriega was on his last legs, but it was
the mall music that broke his will.
It doesn’t always work, though.
The people holed up at Waco during that tragic siege were assaulted by torture music from
the FBI.
They didn’t get much classic hard rock, though, and instead were pelted with bugle
calls and Tibetan chants.
They also got some soft rock from Barry Manilow, which admittedly, could be deemed a breach
of human rights.
Cult leader David Koresh hit right back, plugging in some speakers and playing music back at
the FBI.
He also got his band together and played some tunes.
According to one of the hostage rescue team workers, “He had his little band in there
and, all of a sudden, he starts playing and we were 200-plus yards away and we had to
yell at each other to hear.
It was . . . and it went on for several hours.”
It might not have worked that time, but according to a document written by the FBI, it usually
does.
That document said, “It would take 4 days to break someone doing an interrogation, 16
hours with lights and music on and 4 hours off.”
The off part is important, too, because you want to give the person a sense of relief,
only for the dreaded music to start up again.
With this mind, we think there was a missed opportunity in not using Simon and Garfunkel’s
“Sound of Silence.”
Imagine when the victim or victims hear the words again, “Hello darkness my old friend,
I’ve come to talk with you again.”
We shouldn’t make fun, though, seeing as the music in Iraq also often came with other
nasty punishments.
Amnesty said former prisoners told them that methods, “include prolonged sleep deprivation;
beatings; prolonged restraint in painful positions, sometimes combined with exposure to loud music;
prolonged hooding; and exposure to bright lights.”
You can only imagine what it is now like for those former victims when they hear one of
the songs that were played on a loop.
The question is, can this trigger a kind of panic attack related to post-traumatic stress
disorder?
If you’ve read the book, “A Clockwork Orange”, you’ll know that the bad boy
at the center of the book named Alex is tortured with sounds and images.
His ordeal makes him later unable to listen to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony without going
a bit crazy.
Later on, he gets locked in a room with that song playing.
Talk about “ultra-violence”.
Back in the 1960s and 70s, the Greek military junta used music torture against activists.
Years later some of those activists told the European Court of Human Rights it was played,
“continuously in high volume, or employed in the form of forced singing, music served
as another way through which subjectivity was targeted and traumatized.”
Just how common it is we can’t say, but it’s likely still used around the world
today.
In fact, bands such as Britain’s Massive Attack have teamed up with Rage Against the
Machine in trying to stop the military using songs as torture.
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Metallica’s James Hetfield have also criticized music
torture.
The latter said this in an interview, “It’s the relentlessness of the music.
It’s completely relentless.
If I listened to a death metal band for 12 hours in a row, I’d go insane, too.
I’d tell you anything you wanted to know.”
We don’t think he was kidding.
As for the guy that created the Barney and Friends tunes, Bob Singleton, he said he was
surprised that music he’d made for children ended up breaking the wills of men kept in
cages.
His exact words were, “A song that was designed to make little children feel safe and loved
was somehow going to threaten the mental state of adults and drive them to the emotional
breaking point?”
Ok, but just how bad is it?
If you want to know that you really have to ask someone who’s been tortured with children’s
songs and heavy metal.
Thankfully one former detainee at Guantanamo named Ruhal Ahmed spoke out.
What he said might surprise you.
He said he could handle being beaten up because with the physical stuff he knew what was coming
and how long it would last.
It hurt, but it didn’t break him.
He said you can prepare yourself for that, but you can’t when it comes to stuff like
music torture.
Here are some of his own words: “Later on, from the end of 2003, they introduced
the music and it became even worse.
Before that, you could try and focus on something else.
It makes you feel like you're going mad, it's very scary.
After a while you don't hear the lyrics, you only hear heavy banging.”
Another guy named Binyam Mohamed who was detained in Pakistan said he got both the physical
stuff and the mental stuff.
They hung him up for hours by his arms, which was very painful.
He stayed like this in the dark for a long time while they played songs by Dr. Dre and
Eminem.
You can only imagine what this would be like if it was mixed with the torture of total
silence.
It usually comes under the term of “White Torture”.
In this will-breaking program, victims will usually be locked in a room that is soundproof,
so much so the silence starts to drive them mad.
It’s made worse by the fact that the cell is all bright white, every bit of it.
In some cases, all the prisoner might get to eat is white rice.
Their whole world is white and guards are careful not to make a noise by wearing padded
shoes.
Even all the surfaces are really smooth.
By doing all of this a prisoner has his senses taken away besides what he can sense from
his own body.
Human rights activists have said that some people are kept like this for so long that
they start to hallucinate and even suffer bouts of psychosis.
One former prisoner explained exactly what it was like to Amnesty International.
His name is Amir Fakhravar and this is what Amnesty said he told them:
“His cells had no windows, and the walls and his clothes were white.
His meals consisted of white rice on white plates.
To use the toilet, he had to put a white piece of paper under the door.
He was forbidden to speak, and the guards reportedly wore shoes that muffled sound.”
Another prisoner said that you never fully leave the white room after you are released.
He said since he got out he hasn’t been able to sleep without medication.
He said the sound of a closing door makes him panic.
The US stands accused of doing something similar.
Basically, in the days of enhanced interrogation at Guantánamo, a prisoner might have his
hearing disabled by earmuffs.
They then blindfold him so it is pitch black and they also put large gloves over his hands
and feet so he couldn’t feel anything.
The prisoners were held in cages where they would eventually lose all sense of time.
These people had no idea what was coming next, maybe a kick in the groin, or perhaps even
getting dragged out of that cage and taken to a cell where for days on end they’d have
to listen to Count von Count doing what he does best.
It would be funny, if it wasn’t.
Still, according to the US military, what some former prisoners have called “The Disco”
is actually “torture-light.”
One of those prisoners didn’t think so, once saying that given two choices of either
losing your sight or losing your mind you would always choose sight.
For him being in the dark was much better than being made mad with music.
But we’ll finish this on a lighter note.
For the most part, the British public was against the invasion of Iraq and many people
protested about the so-called torture light.
Guess what happened when President Bush visited the UK and he got near the crowds?
You guessed it, the Barney the Purple Dinosaur theme tune was blasted out.
It should also be said, the British military is no stranger to torture.
Now you need to watch the full version of, “White Room Torture - Worst Punishments
in the History of Mankind.”
Or, have a look at, “What Are RED ROOMS of Dark Web (Are They Real?!)”