You know how whenever anyone brings up the topic of US sonic
weapons and music torture, someone always says, “What do they do, just turn on
WFMU? Hahahahaha.” No? Maybe you hang out with smarter people than I do. On the
other hand, WF...
You know how whenever anyone brings up the topic of US sonic
weapons and music torture, someone always says, “What do they do, just turn on
WFMU? Hahahahaha.” No? Maybe you hang out with smarter people than I do. On the
other hand, WFMU has always been a leader in the irritainment industry; some of
my favorite DJs, people I’ve been listening to for decades, do shows I’ve never been able to listen to all the way through.
So I got to wondering—what is on the
playlist when our government wants to break the will of its enemies? (“Enemies”
being defined in the broadest sense, of course, in that the term has included
US citizens minding their own business in their own homes.)
Manuel Noriega vs. Van
Halen: Noriega was Military Governor of Panama from 1984-89, when elections
were held with results he didn’t like. Also, he refused to help Oliver North
with the whole Nicaraguan Contra thing. (Noriega had been working with the CIA
since the 1950s.) Meanwhile, US troops stationed around the Panama Canal were conducting
a series of ludicrously named “operations,” and then a Marine Lieutenant got
killed, and then the US invaded, which was condemned as a flagrant violation of
international law by the UN. Noriega fled to the Vatican embassy in Panama City,
where US troops laid siege in Operation Nifty Package. (I am not kidding about
that name.) They stood around outside playing high-volume rock music,
specifically the Van Halen song “Panama.” A week later, Noriega surrendered.
David Koresh vs.
Tibetan Monks: Koresh was the leader of a fringe Christian group called the
Branch Dividians, who lived in a compound outside Waco, Texas. The group
supported itself by running a retail gun business, and its gun dealers-members
were always careful to have the proper paperwork to ensure everything was
legal. Because of unsubstantiated rumors of other illegal activities within the
compound (e.g., polygamy and statutory rape), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms composed a bogus complaint against the Davidian gun business and
obtained a search warrant for the compound. When agents went to serve the
warrant, on Sunday, February 28, 1993, things went very wrong: There was
shooting, people died, and the FBI took over and began a siege of the compound
that lasted until April 19. (For the whole story, see the film Waco: Rules of Engagement [http://www.waco93.com/]
or, you know, the Wikipedia article.) During the siege, the FBI tried to
“break” Koresh (whom they already considered to be crazy) by playing Tibetan
religious chants at night to keep him from sleeping. Various Tibetan groups
complained about this use of their sacred music.
The FBI also played Mitch Miller Christmas carols, an Andy
Williams album, and Nancy Sinatra.
Gitmo Detainees vs. Bruce
Springsteen: In spite of the United Nations and the European Court of
Human Rights having banned the use of loud music in interrogations, the US
claims it doesn’t cause any “long-term effects,” so they just keep doing it. At
Guantanamo Bay (which is in Cuba—how do we have a prison in another country where
we don’t even have diplomatic relations?), interrogators followed the protocols
of a CIA document that specified, for example, that music “as loud as a
jackhammer” could be played for up to two hours while a prisoner lay chained to
the floor, naked and defecating on himself. Interrogators believed that
“culturally offensive” music was especially effective, so from at least 2003 to
2008 the Gitmo playlist included songs by Metallica, AC/DC, Eminem, Christina
Aguilera, and—of course!—Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.”
Abu Ghraib, et al. vs.
Barney the Dinosaur: In addition to what went on/is going on at Gitmo, Amnesty
International and the International Red Cross have both documented ongoing
torture of prisoners in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. So has just about
everyone else: Starting in 2004, there was