hahahaha

[Spitfire15]

[uncleHowie]

when i see it, ill shit bricks?!?!?!

[MOOGLE?]

so apparently i was the fifth black person to ever walk into this shop..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

those toplights are a bitch to replace in winter time cause the plastic gets all warped and shit in the summer

[Crocodile Tears]

[Tavaruawon]

[__ __ __ __]

[Pfffffffffft]

lol

[MOOGLE?]

Torture songs spur a protest most vocal

Musicians call for release of records on Guantanamo detainee treatment

 

NOT-SO-JOYFUL NOISE: Former detainees say sensory assaults included repeat playings of various artists, such as the Bee Gees, whose original members were brothers Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb (not pictured). At left, their sibling, Andy, also a recording artist. (By Associated Press)

 

Former detainees say sensory assaults included repeat playings of the various artists, such as Christina Aguilera.

 

 

: Former detainees say sensory assaults included repeat playings of various songs, such as "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Former detainees say sensory assaults included repeat playings of various songs, such as "The Star-Spangled Banner." (Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)

 

 

 

 

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, October 22, 2009

 

Was the theme to "Sesame Street" really played to torture prisoners held at Guantanamo and other detention camps? What about Don McLean's "American Pie"? Or the Meow Mix

 

A high-profile coalition of artists -- including the members of Pearl Jam, R.E.M. and the Roots -- demanded Thursday that the government release the names of all the songs that were blasted since 2002 at prisoners for hours, even days, on end, to try to coerce cooperation or as a method of punishment.

 

Dozens of musicians endorsed a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the National Security Archive, a Washington-based independent research institute, seeking the declassification of all records related to the use of music in interrogation practices. The artists also launched a formal protest of the use of music in conjunction with torture.

 

"I think every musician should be involved," said Rosanne Cash in a telephone interview Wednesday. "It seems so obvious. Music should never be used as torture." The singer-songwriter (and daughter of Johnny Cash) said she reacted with "absolute disgust" when she heard of the practice. "It's beyond the pale. It's hard to even think about."

 

Other musicians, including Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Tom Morello, formerly of the band Rage Against the Machine, also expressed outrage.

 

"The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me," Morello said in a statement. "We need to end torture and close Guantanamo now."

 

The musicians' announcement was coordinated with the recent call by veterans and retired Army generals to shut Guantanamo. It is part of a renewed effort to pressure President Obama to keep his promise to close the prison in Cuba in his first year in office. Television and radio spots focused on the issue also launched this week by the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo, led by Tom Andrews, a former congressman from Maine.

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A White House spokesman said music is no longer used as an instrument of torture, part of a shift in policy on interrogations that Obama made on his second full day in office.

 

The president also formed an interagency group, called High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, to examine the techniques used during questioning, but a White House spokesman said this week that the new group has yet to be fully constituted.

 

"The president banned the use of 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' and issued an executive order that established that interrogations must be consistent with the techniques in the Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions," a White House official said.

 

"Sound at a certain level creates sensory overload and breaks down subjectivity and can [bring about] a regression to infantile behavior," said Suzanne G. Cusick, a music professor at New York University who has studied, lectured about and written extensively on the use of music as torture in the current wars. "Its effectiveness depends on the constancy of the sound, not the qualities of the music."

 

Played at a certain volume, she said, "it simply prevents people from thinking."

 

 

Human rights activists hope that the musicians' actions will bring attention to the practice and ensure that it won't be used again.

 

 

"In light of the patterns of widespread use of music as torture over the last seven years, difficulties in accessing these current detainees and the failure of the U.S. to explicitly rule out the use of loud music, the musicians' FOIA request is crucial for learning about the United States' past, present and even future use of music as a torture technique," said Jayne Huckerby, research director at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the NYU School of Law.

 

The prolonged use of loud music to control or coerce prisoners, Huckerby points out, is a violation of the U.N. Convention Against Torture and constitutes both torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The United States is a party to the convention.

 

According to Huckerby, the use of loud music was "pretty much a widespread tool of the U.S. government and a standard condition of CIA prisons." Huckerby's organization represents Mohammed al-Asad and Mohamed Bashmilah, former prisoners who were released in 2005. Both men say they were forced to listen to excruciatingly loud music continuously for days and weeks.

 

Cusick, the NYU music professor, has interviewed a number of former detainees about their experiences and says the music they most often described hearing was heavy metal, rap and country. Specific songs mentioned include Queen's "We Are the Champions" and "March of the Pigs" by industrial rockers Nine Inch Nails.

 

Another former prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, told Human Rights Watch that he had been forced to listen to the rapper Eminem's song "The Real Slim Shady" for 20 days.

 

 

Joining in the call for the release of information were dozens of musicians, including David Byrne, Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and T-Bone Burnett.

 

For now, the artists are trying to find out what songs were played. They say they will explore legal options once the songs are known. It is unclear what, if any, recourse they may have.

[count chocula]

[MOOGLE?]

Welcome to 'the disco'

 

For US interrogators seeking to disorientate and break Iraqi prisoners it's 'torture lite' - rock music played at excruciating volumes. But while the song choices may sometimes verge on the unintentionally funny, this appropriation of music by the military is anything but a joke

 

 

 

According to US military authorities, it was God himself who first wrote the strategy of "torture by music" into the field manual - by turning the amplifier up to 11 on the enemy. "Joshua's army used horns to strike fear into the hearts of the people of Jericho," retired US Air Force Lt-Col Dan Kuehl told the St Petersburg Times. "His men might not have been able to break down literal walls with their trumpets, but the noise eroded the enemy's courage." Kuehl, who teaches psychological operations (or psyops) at Fort McNair's National Defense University in Washington DC, added, "Maybe those psychological walls were what really crumbled."

 

It is not clear whether God would approve of the current US playlist: the number one slot is taken by the death metal band Deicide, whose track Fuck Your God is played at prisoners in Iraq. That said, the proponents of torture by music doubtless think they have come a long way since the early 1990s, when the FBI blasted loud music at the Branch Davidians during the Waco siege in Texas. The repertoire then included Sing-Along With Mitch Miller Christmas carols, an Andy Williams album and These Boots Are Made for Walking by Nancy Sinatra.

 

However unpleasant it may be to have such tunes blasted at your compound, bringing the music into an enclosed interrogation cell was a quantum leap in psyops. Nonetheless, in the strange lexicon of 21st-century America, the US military calls this "torture lite". Torture is apparently OK if it is not too "heavy". Metallica's Enter Sandman has been played at cacophonous levels for hours on end in Guantánamo Bay and at a detention centre on the Iraqi-Syrian border. One Iraqi prisoner said it was done at "an unidentified location called 'the disco'".

 

Unfortunately, some artists are not offended by their work being used to torture. "If the Iraqis aren't used to freedom, then I'm glad to be part of their exposure," James Hetfield, co-founder of Metallica, has said. As for his music being torture, he laughed: "We've been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?" Such posturing may go with the territory for an artist of the Metallica genre, so there is no need to speculate about whether Hetfield is being naive or wilfully ignorant. But no sane person voluntarily plays a single tune at earsplitting volume, over and over, 24 hours a day, and expects to stay sane.

 

Despite this, to date, the Pentagon's semanticists have achieved their purpose, and many people think that torture by music is little more than a rather irritating enforced encounter with someone else's iPod. Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who is still held in Guantánamo Bay, knows a bit about such torture. The CIA rendered him to Morocco, where his torturers repeatedly took a razor blade to his penis throughout an 18-month ordeal.

 

When I later sat across from him in the cell, he described how psyops methods were worse than this. He could anticipate physical pain, he said, and know that it would eventually end. But the experience of slipping into madness as a result of torture by music was something quite different.

 

"Imagine you are given a choice," he said. "Lose your sight or lose your mind." While having your eyes gouged out would be horrendous, there is little doubt which you would choose. Mohamed remains in Guantánamo. The US military will decide, probably within two

weeks, whether to go forward with a military commission, based on "evidence" that was tortured out of him.

 

To those who have the misfortune to study torture, all this is old hat. Members of the IRA interned in Northern Ireland in the 1970s recall the use of loud noise, piped into their cells, as the worst aspect of their ordeal. One Guantánamo interrogator blithely estimated that it would take about four days to "break" someone, if the interrogation sessions were interspersed with strobe lights and loud music. "Break" is another euphemism that is bandied about among torturers, as if "breaking" a person was some kind of psychological truth serum. Of course, the "results" you get from a "broken" prisoner have little to do with truth.

 

Beyond pure barbarism, there are various reasons why music torture fails in its ambition. As ever in this "war on terror", there is a disconnect between the purported goal of the US forces ("actionable intelligence") and the methods used to achieve it. An order comes down from on high, from a Bush bureaucrat who has a bright idea, and it is left to soldiers in the field to use their imagination. How some bored soldiers came up with David Gray's song Babylon, played at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq, defies analysis. Sometimes, people simply misunderstand lyrics: in 1984, Ronald Reagan tried to co-opt Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA as a patriotic anthem to get himself re-elected, despite the song being about government betrayal of Vietnam veterans.

 

Sometimes the selections used are wryly appropriate for prisoners being held without trial for years on end: Queen's We are the Champions ("I've paid my dues/Time after time/I've done my sentence/But committed no crime") was a torturer's favourite at Camp Cropper in Iraq. Other songs unwittingly give voice to what could well be the prisoners' inner thoughts: Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name Of ("Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses ... /Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!") was used

at Guantánamo.

 

Inevitably, when poorly trained interrogators are encouraged to let their imaginations soar, they veer towards their own idiosyncratic perversions. One budding Emcee artfully mixed the sound of crying babies (which humans

seem hardwired to abhor) with a television commercial for Meow Mix cat food.

 

Ultimately, though, the most overused torture song is I Love You by Barney the Purple Dinosaur. On the face of it, the lyrics may seem deeply inappropriate: "I love you, you love me - we're a happy family./With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you,/Won't you say you love me too?", but anyone whose child watches the television programme will know how grating

it is. In the torture trade, this is called "futility music", designed to convince the prisoner of the futility of maintaining his position.

 

It is time that those musicians who oppose the use of music to torture fellow human beings made some noise - and they are beginning to. This year's Meltdown festival at London's South Bank, which Massive Attack are curating, has highlighted the issue of torture by music. Projections showing the horror of renditions and secret prisons will be used on their world tour.

 

When President Bush visited the UK at the weekend, we greeted him by playing the Barney the Purple Dinosaur theme tune. What next? Perhaps the release of a special compilation: we could call it Now That's What I Call Torture, President Bush's selection of eight songs he would take to a desert island, and blast it at him for all eternity.

 

'It's an issue that no one in the industry wants to deal with'

 

There is a clear reluctance within the record industry to discuss the use of music as torture. The Guardian attempted to contact artists whose songs have reportedly been used by the US military in detainment camps - a diverse group that includes metal bands Metallica, AC/DC, Drowning

Pool and Deicide, hip-hop superstar Eminem, Bruce Springsteen, British singer-songwriter David Gray and the makers of children's TV favourite Barney the Dinosaur. In most cases, inquiries were met with a polite but firm "no comment" from management and PR representatives, or calls were simply not returned.

 

"It's an issue that no one wants to deal with," says David Gray, one of the few artists willing to speak about the subject. "It's shocking that there isn't more of an outcry. I'd gladly sign up to a petition that says don't use my music, but it seems to be missing the point a bit."

 

Gray's music became associated with the torture debate 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.

 

"The moral niceties of whether they're using my song or not are totally irrelevant," says Gray. "We are thinking below the level of the people we're supposed to oppose, and it goes against our entire history and everything we claim to represent. It's disgusting, really. Anything that draws attention to the scale of the horror and how low we've sunk is a good thing."

 

The singer wonders whether governments who use music as a torture technique without asking permission from the artists involved could face legal action. "In order to play something publicly, you have to have legal permission and you have to apply for that.

 

I wonder if the US government bothered, but I very much doubt it. Perhaps you could sue, but let's face it, they're outside the law on the whole thing anyway."

 

However, Gray's anger is far from a universal reaction. Steve Asheim, drummer for the death-metal band Deicide, questions whether music really counts as torture. "Look at it this way," he says. "These guys are not a bunch

of high school kids. They are warriors, and they're trained to resist torture. They're expecting to be burned with torches and beaten and have their bones broken. If I was a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay and they blasted a load of music at me, I'd be like, 'Is this all you got? Come on.' I certainly don't believe in torturing people, but I don't believe that playing loud music is torture either."

 

Deicide's Fuck Your God is said to be a favourite for military interrogators, and the song topped the infamous "torture playlist" compiled by the American investigative magazine Mother Jones. It is worth noting that the lyrics are in fact anti-Christian, just as Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA and Eminem's White America, also claimed as torture tracks, contain anti-establishment messages. But, as Asheim points out, "Most people who listen

to this kind of music don't give a shit about a political message. They just wanna rock."

 

Was the song specifically chosen for its sonic and cultural impact on detainees? Asheim doesn't think so. "I don't believe there's a room where they discuss what songs they can play to annoy the prisoners.

 

I think they just show up at work with whatever they're listening to at the time. There's no shortage of metal-heads in the army, that's for sure. These guys who are going into battle, they're not listening to Elton John beforehand."

 

Asheim's theory raises the question of how the apparently innocuous Barney the Dinosaur music made it into a field dominated by hip-hop and death metal. Barney's producers, HIT Entertainment, declined to comment for this article. However, the creator of Barney's song I Love You, Bob Singleton, admits he "just laughed" when he heard it was being used by interrogators.

 

"It seemed so ludicrous that something totally innocuous for children could threaten the mental state of an adult," he says. "I would rate the annoyance factor to be about equal with hearing my neighbour's leaf blower. It can set my teeth on edge, but it won't break me down and make me confess to crimes against humanity. Will Barney songs break your psyche? I think that idea turns music into something like voodoo, which it certainly isn't. If that were true, then the inverse would be true. Playing hymns to someone strapped to a chair wouldn't make them a Christian."

 

Singleton, a classically trained composer, wrote and produced for the TV series Barney and Friends between 1990 and 2000. He says that the morality of what is done with his music once it is out of his hands is beyond his control.

 

"I would find it unfortunate that one of my works for kids was used as the underscore for a stripper, for example. I would prefer that my music for Barney is put to its best use with children, but beyond that there's not much I can do. Plus, we're not talking about dynamite or nuclear devices here. Music is just music. It's supposed to touch your mind, your body, and your emotions to varying degrees; but it doesn't fundamentally change people. I think that gives it much more credit than it deserves."

Paul Arendt

[MOOGLE?]

Music (or sound) as a weapon

 

“Acoustic weapons” have been in development by Department of Defense contractors since at least the 1997 creation of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Task Force, accounting for 1/3 of the Task Force’s budget in 1998-99. {1} Thus, they are not peculiar to 21st-century wars, or to the current administration. The earliest contract I know to have been let for such a weapon was on November 18, 1998, authorizing now-defunct Synetics Corporation to produce a tightly focused beam of infrasound–that is, vibration waves slower than 100 vps–meant to produce effects that range from “disabling or lethal”. {2} In 1999, Maxwell Technologies patented a HyperSonic Sound System, another “highly directional device ... designed to control hostile crowds or disable hostage takers”. {3} The same year Primex Physics International patented both the “Acoustic Blaster”, which produced “repetitive impulse waveforms” of 165dB, directable at a distance of 50 feet, for “antipersonnel applications”, and the Sequential Arc Discharge Acoustic Generator, which produces “high intensity impulsive sound waves by purely electrical means” {4} .

 

As far as I know, none of these have been deployed in the current wars. They have been supplanted in the non-lethal weapons arms race by a system the American Technology Corporation developed after 2000 –the Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD.{5} Capable of projecting a “strip of sound” (15 to 30 inches wide) at an average of 120 dB (maxing at 151 dB) that will be intelligible for 500 to 1,000 meters (depending on which model you buy), the LRAD is designed to hail ships, issue battlefield or crowd-control commands, or direct an “attention-getting and highly irritating deterrent tone for behavior modification”. (http://www.atcsd.com) As of March, 2006, 350 LRAD systems had been sold–to the US Navy, the Coast Guard, various commercial shippers for marine interdiction; to the US Army and Marines for use by PsyOps units, and at checkpoints and internment facilities; to the police departments of Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Santa Ana, and Broward County, Florida. According to the US Army’s 361st PsyOps company, LRAD’s are used

 

for clearing streets and rooftops during cordon and search, for disseminating information, and for drawing out enemy snipers who are subsequently destroyed by our own snipers (Davison and Lewer 2006).

 

It can also be set to “fire” short bursts of “intense acoustic energy” into crowds, to incapacitate people by causing spatial disorientation. Similar weapons deployed by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon produce the effect of “being hit by a wall of air that is painful on the ears, sometimes causing nosebleeds and leaving you shaking inside”.(Davison and Lewer 2006).

 

Capable of directing “music through the use of an integrated and hardened MP3 player”, and of accepting “external audio devices, like a CD or MP3 player”, LRADs have been deployed with combat units since the fall of 2003. According to an ATC spokesman, they were used in Iraq in 2004 “to play both high output music and deterrent tones, evidently to great effect as a PsyOps tool, causing the insurgents to react in ways that greatly increased their vulnerability”. {6} Most likely, LRADs were the means by which the 361st PsyOps company “prepared the battlefield” for the November 2004 siege of Fallujah by bombarding the city with music–supposedly, with Metallica’s “Hells’ Bells” and “Shoot to Thrill” among other things (DeGregory 2004). PsyOps spokesman Ben Abel explained to reporter Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, “These harassment missions work especially well in urban settings like Fallujah. The sounds just keep reverberating off the walls.” Abel added “it’s not the music so much as the sound. It’s like throwing a smoke bomb. The aim is to disorient and confuse the enemy to gain a tactical advantage” (DeGregory 2004). Abel made clear that although the tactic of bombarding the enemy with sound was made at the command level, the choice of music was left to soldiers in the field: “...our guys have been getting really creative in finding sounds they think would make the enemy upset...These guys have their own mini-disc players, with their own music, plus hundreds of downloaded sounds. It’s kind of personal preference how they choose the songs. We’ve got very young guys making these decisions” (DeGregory 2004). On the battlefield, then, the use of music as a weapon is perceived to be incidental to the use of sound’s ability to affect a person’s spatial orientation, sense of balance, and physical coordination. It is because music is incidental that the choice of repertoire is delegated to individual PsyOps soldiers’ creativity.

Music as torture.

 

Although it seems to be both more widespread and older, the calculated use of music in “detainee interrogations” is less easy to trace than the use of sound as a weapon. Evidence from the current war is spotty, based on the debriefings of released detainees by international human rights organizations and reporters, on the accounts currently detained persons have given to their lawyers, or on urban legends that circulate on the internet, some of which are corroborated by the other two kinds of accounts. Still, it is absolutely clear that music plays an important role in the interrogation of detainees in the war on terror. As early as May 2003 the BBC reported that the US Army had used Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Barney the Purple Dinosaur’s “I Love You” in the interrogation of Iraqi detainees, playing the songs repeatedly at high volume inside of shipping containers.{7} Documents obtained by the ACLU include an email from an unidentified FBI agent, dated Dec. 5, 2003, that describes at least three incidents involving Guantanamo detainees being chained to the floor and subjected to “extreme heat, extreme cold, or extremely loud rap music”.{8} . The June 12, 2005 issue of Time included a story based on the 84-page log of Mohammed al Qahtani’s interrogation there from November 2002 to January 2003 (Zagorin and Duffy 2005){9} . Qahtani’s interrogations began at midnight; whenever he dozed he was awakened either by water poured over his head or the sound of Christina Aguilera’s music. In December 2005, Human Rights Watch posted brief first-person accounts of detainees released from a secret prison in Afghanistan, many of whom asserted that part of their experience included being held in a pitch-black space and forced to listen to music that they described, variously, as “unbearably loud”, “infidel”, or “Western”. The same posting included the account of Guantanamo prisoner Benyan Mohammed, an Ethiopian who had lived in Britain, and who had been forced to listen to music by Eminem (Slim Shady) and Dr Dre for twenty days before the music was replaced by “horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds.” {10} A long New York Times story on March 19, 2006, described in detail “Camp Nama”, the headquarters of a multiple-agency interrogation unit at Baghdad International Airport; there, “high-value detainees”–those believed to have information directly pertinent to battlefield movements, terrorist ringleaders, or imminent terrorist attacks--were sent first to the so-called “Black Room”, a garage-sized, windowless space painted black where “rap music or rock’n’roll blared at deafening decibels over a loudspeaker” (Schmitt and Marshall 2006) {11} . Read together, these reports suggest that the “deafening music” is usually delivered to a detainee who has been chained into a “stress position”, in a pitch-black space made uncomfortably hot or cold.

“No-touch torture”

 

It would be possible to assume from the evidence in the popular press that the use of music in “interrogation” is (as one of the sources for the 2003 BBC story, claimed) “rather new”. I’m sorry to report that my reading suggests otherwise; nor is it the random, rogue behavior of particularly sadistic (or musical, or creative) interrogators and MPs. Rather, it is one component of a standard set of interrogation practices developed by the CIA (in cooperation with English and Canadian intelligence agencies) over the second half of the 20th century–a standard set of practices that includes the hooding, stress positions, and sexual/cultural humiliation that the photos leaked from Abu Ghraib prison enabled us to see. Its advocates call this set of practices “no touch torture”.{12}

 

In his 2006 book A Question of Torture, historian Alfred W McCoy traces the origin of “no touch torture” to a research program funded by the OSS, the CIA, and the intelligence services of Canada and Britain in the years after World War II. Concerned by Soviet success at “brainwashing” captives and destroying their wills, these agencies supported research at Yale, Cornell, and McGill intended to learn how we might do the same. {13} In the 1950s this contract research was concentrated in three areas: 1) the Canadian government funded research at McGill that explored the devastating impact of sensory deprivation and sensory manipulation–which would eventually include hooding; continuous noise (whether loud or not) and its opposite, soundproofing; temporal disorientation, and erratic provision of food and drink; 2) the CIA funded research at Cornell and Yale on the effects of self-inflicted pain–which would eventually include stress positions, and scenarios that provoked personal, sexual or cultural humiliation; and 3) the CIA funded research at Yale on the capacity of ordinary people to inflict lethal pain on others.

 

The reports of these experiments reveal a universalizing naivete and cultural bias that seems laughable now. Yet their results are the core premises of what the European Human Rights Commission described in 1976 as a “modern system of torture” (McCoy 2006: 57). This modern system aims to combine “sensory disorientation”–isolation, standing, extremes of heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence–with self-inflicted pain, both physical and psychological, so as to cause a prisoner’s very “identity to disintegrate”. {14} Whether that disintegration takes the form of induced regression (to infantile behavior) or induced schizophrenia, “the effect is much like that which occurs if he is beaten, starved or deprived of sleep” {15} . The prisoner becomes psychologically powerless before the authority of interrogators, both dependent and unable to resist. Moreover, the experimental data showed this “modern system of torture” to be much more efficient than beatings or starvation, producing psychological disintegration in a matter of days, rather than weeks or months. And, as one CIA researcher noted, it was hard to document, for with the exception of the standing (which can cause grotesque swelling/bruising of the feet and legs) these “techniques” leave no visible marks on the fleshy surfaces of a human body.

 

Institutionalized in 1963 in the CIA’s Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook, the techniques of “no-touch torture” were used–indeed, consciously tested again and again--by the CIA’s counter-insurgency forces in Vietnam into the 1970s, by the English in Northern Ireland, and by police units from Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala, the Phillipines, Iran, Argentina and Chile who were trained at the US Office of Public Safety (1962-74), the US Army Intelligence Center in Fort Huachuca, AZ, or the US Army School of the Americas (based in Panama until 1976, and now based at Fort Benning, Georgia). {16} Although the CIA’s interrogation techniques are not mentioned in either the 1992 or September 2006 editions of the US Army’s Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collection (HUMINT), the principal textbook for training at Fort Huachuca, they seem to be part of Army interrogators’ and PsyOps units’ training there. (The music most often mentioned in accounts of this training is the song “I love you” associated with Barney the purple dinosaur.) In the field manuals, the elements of “no touch torture” are understood to be subsumed under the heading of “additional psychological strategies” by which interrogators are encouraged to implement any of the eighteen declassified “approaches” to an informant–approaches with headings like “fear up” and “ego down”. {17} If one reads the press and human rights organization accounts of “no touch torture” carefully, these incidents can all be traced not to uniformed servicemen, but to occasions when multiple-agency teams –that is, teams that include CIA operatives, and Behavioral Science Consultants--administer the interrogations. In part because CIA operatives are specifically exempt from the provisions of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, in part because the elements of “no touch torture” are part of what one might call the military’s oral tradition, all the elements of “no-touch torture” except waterboarding and extremes of hot and cold remain permissible under the recently-signed Military Commissions Act of 2006–permissible, and, to protect against international prosecution as violations of the UN Convention on Torture, retroactively pardoned. {18}

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

thats some sinister type ish right there

[TheoHuxtable..]

[famecrazy]

[TripleSuplex]