He could anticipate physical pain, he said, and know that it would eventually end.
When I later sat across from him in the cell, he described how psyops methods were worse than this. The CIA rendered him to Morocco, where his torturers repeatedly took a razor blade to his penis throughout an 18-month ordeal. Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who is still held in Guantánamo Bay, knows a bit about such torture. But no sane person voluntarily plays a single tune at earsplitting volume, over and over, 24 hours a day, and expects to stay sane.ĭespite 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. 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. As for his music being torture, he laughed: "We've been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. "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. Unfortunately, some artists are not offended by their work being used to torture. One Iraqi prisoner said it was done at "an unidentified location called 'the disco'". 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. Torture is apparently OK if it is not too "heavy". Nonetheless, in the strange lexicon of 21st-century America, the US military calls this "torture lite". 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. 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. 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.
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. "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." "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.
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.