Musicians and US Torture : "Guantánamo Greatest Hits”

international | arts and media | other press Sunday July 06, 2008 17:15 by **

Singer David Gray has spoken out and condemned US interrogators for playing loud music which includes one of his own tracks as a form of "torture". "Only the novelty aspect of this story gets it noticed... Guantanamo greatest hits," he said.

"What we're talking about here is people in a darkened room, physically inhibited by handcuffs, bags over their heads and music blaring at them." That is nothing but torture." "It doesn't matter what the music is - it could be Tchaikovsky's finest or it could be Barney the Dinosaur." "It really doesn't matter, it's going to drive you completely nuts."

He said such torture formed part of a US "retaliation to a few terrorist acts". "No-one wants to even think about it or discuss the fact that we've gone above and beyond all legal process and we're torturing people," he added. The singer-songwriter told BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight. :-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7488498.stm

Gray's song "Babylon2 - from his White Ladder album - was Gray's breakthrough single, reaching number five in the UK in 2000. The use of "Babylon" first came to light when The Guardian revealed that “after Haj Ali, the hooded man in the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, told of being stripped, handcuffed and forced to listen to a looped sample of Babylon, at a volume so high he feared that his head would burst.”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo

The roots of music in both US torture and psychological warfare can be traced back to the Vietnam war. White noise was used to disorientate prisoners whilst soldiers were encouraged to listen to their favourite tracks to distance themselves from their work. In other words they didn't notice they were dropping napalm on jungles where children lived.

But the detention of Manuel Noriega, the military dictator of Panama from 1983 to 1989, saw the US army use rock music in a startling way. Noriega escaped the US marines sent into the state to arrest him and was found to be hiding in the Vatican's embassy or "See". Under the Vienna convention it would have been an act of war had they entered the compound to take him out. Nobody really expected Uncle Sam to launch a crusade against the Roman Catholic Church over a cocaine drug lord who had fallen out of favour with them.

They therefore set up a perimeter around the building and played continuous noise from a low flying helicopter, which included he song "Panama" by Van Halen was played repeatedly, as was "I Fought The Law" by "The Clash" and "The Howard Stern Show". The Vatican complained to President G.H. Bush (the first one) and the psychological warfare stopped. Before the US soldiers moved on from "The Clash" and resorted to something else comparable to the evil reading of bad poetry as favoured by the officious Vogans from "Hitch-hikers guide to the Galaxy". (c/f http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon_poetry )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Noriega

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7488498.stm
You can listen to a podcast from the BBC on music in torture here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7489485.stm
http://www.nowpublic.com/health/david-gray-warns-tortur...anamo