Psyche, Science, and Society

Yearsley: The defenseless ear; music as torture

The late 20th century was one in which US music dominated the world. As David Yearsley reminds us in CounterPunch, the early 21st century was one in which US music was a tool to crush the souls of helpless detainees in US concentration camps  as an implement of US torture:

Music Torture

By David Yearsley

The human ear is defenseless. Unable to keep sound out, it must take in all it hears.Selective hearing is common phrase, but meaningless.

History’s most infamous musical assault exploited the defenslessness of the ear: the massively distorted music blasted at the Branch Davidians in Waco in 1933 by the FBI wore down the compound dwellers over the seven week siege like a battleship pounding shoreline battlements. The final firestorm was prepared not only by sleep-preventing decibel levels but because of its horrifying aesthetic crimes, the most heinous being Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” Early proponents of world music, the G-men varied their play-list with sing-along Christmas carols in saccharine 1950s style arrangements, Tibetan chants and cavalry bugle blasts. Just how seriously perpetrators of sonic violence take their music can be judged by the care with which they assemble their repertoires of destruction and despair.

Cult leader David Koresh, himself a failed pop singer, had begun the high-decibel musical exchange in Waco by first bombarding them with recordings of his own happy-clappy pop. This siege-busting tactic ceased when the federal forces cut the compound’s power supply.

Waco was by no means the first instance of musical warfare. A few years before, the U. S. had tried to ferret out opera-lover Manuel Noriega from Panama City redoubt with a non-stop heavy metal bombardment: Madame Butterfly and La Traviata were no match for Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. The sonic assault was finally halted under pressure from the Vatican.

In Gauntanamo Bay and other prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq the British rights group Reprieve has claimed that interrogation techniques have involved the uses of extremely loud music by AC/DC, and Metallica as well as theme songs from children’s televison shows like Barney & Friends. These horrors were detailed by Andy Worthington in Counterpunch back in December of last year.

Unfettered by earplugs, anti-noise headphones or other defensive technologies the ear is helpless to protect itself. The eyes have lids, the ears don’t. In A Clockwork Orange when the anti-hero the violent sociopath and Beethovenian fanatic Alex is re-programmed to harmless passivity, his eyes must be propped open so he can be forced to witness acts of violence on the screen while being infused with a nausea-inducing drug. By contrast, the glorious sounds of Alex’s beloved 9th symphony of Ludwig Van accompany the images but enter unimpeded into his soul.

In the increasingly loud and intrusive modern world maybe the human earlobes will begin to evolve to become like eyelids that can be closed when things get unbearable out in the aural universe. But even this evolutionary advance wouldn’t have neutralized the sub-woofers of Waco.

One of the great advantages of using music as an implement of torture is that it leaves no physical mark. As Plato and many other writers have known, music works directly on the soul. There is nothing more uplifting nor potentially devastating.

Over the past few years New York University professor of music Suzanne Cusick has been lecturing far and wide on the United States’ use of music in interrogation and as a battlfield weapon. The soft-spoken, incisive Cusick came to Cornell in the spring of 2006 to deliver the year’s principle music lectured, named after Donald J. Grout. Grout was one of the great music historians of the 20th century, and a deeply conservative man who would have hated every word Cusick uttered that afternoon in a corner seminar tucked in an upper floor of Cornell’s music building looking out over the campus’s Arts Quad and to Cayuga Lake below. Her talk concerned itself neither with the kinds of music nor the art’s exalted purposes one usually discusses in the Ivory Tower.

The original title for Cusick’s lecture had promised a tedious internal investigation of the discipline of musicology: “Buying (Back) the Farm, or Thoughts the Cultural Work of American Musicologies.” But she changed her topic unannounced and delivered instead sixty minutes on “Music as Weapon / Music as Torture.” (For a version of the paper go to http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/cusick_eng.htm)

Much of Cusick’s talk let the chilling facts speak for themselves: “On November 18, 1998, now-defunct Synetics Corporation [was contracted] 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.’ In 1999, Maxwell Technologies patented a HyperSonic Sound System, another “highly directional device … designed to control hostile crowds or disable hostage takers”. 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.’”

She went on to describe the American Technology Corporation’s development beginning some ten years ago of the Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, a weapon “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)

Wielded by the 361st PsyOps company, the LRAD was deployed to “prepare the battlefield” in the siege of Falluja in November of 2004. The device was armed with Metallica’s “Hells’ Bells” and “Shoot to Thrill.”

As Cusick repeatedly pointed out, one of the great advantages of sonic weapons and torture is that they leave no mark on the victim. Gauntanamo captive Binyam Mohamed, who was returned to England in February after his long years of imprisonment and torture, claimed in an interview London’s Mail on Sunday how his sonic torture began already in a Kabul prison in 2002 where he was held for eighteen months in complete darkness before his transfer to Gauntanamo in 2004. His body can convey no direct physical of this horrendous abuse, probably in contrast to the other forms of torture he suffered as in the scalpel he claims was used to sliced his genitals.

In the Mail on Sunday interview Mohammed relates how “There were loudspeakers in the cell, pumping out a deafening volume, non-stop, 24 hours a day. They played the same CD for a month, The Eminem Show. When it was finished it went back to the beginning and started again. I couldn’t sleep. I had no idea whether it was day or night.’

As the Daily Mail is reporting today pressure from members of parliamentary and rights groups is mounting on British Foreign secretary David Milliband to hold a judicial inquiry into Mohamed’s claims that MI5 knew about the illegal torture. Indeed, U. S. crimes against international law threaten now to engulf their coalition partner on the other side of the Atlantic. In early February details of Mohamed’s torture were excised from the dossier submitted to England’s High Court after Miliband asserted that not doing so might be detrimental to shared U. S. and UK intelligence efforts and could “cause real and significant damage to the national security and international relations of the [UK].”

On February 22nd Prime Minister Gordon Brown insisted that there was no “cover-up” and two weeks ago Miliband and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith refused to answer questions on torture in front of the House of Commons’ Joint Committee on Human Rights.” Yesterday, Miliband issued a blanket denial, one which bodes ill the political future of the stonewalling foreign secretary: “We abhor torture and never order it or condone it.”

In the 1980s Miliband was a student at Corpus Christi College in Oxford. While there he was elected Junior Common Room President and as a result got a prime rooms which happened to be located next to those of my wife, Annette Richards, similarly given housing preference because she was the college’s organ scholar, discharging those duties though reading for a degree in English literature. In her rooms was a piano. Many were the nights when the studious Miliband would graciously request that she or her music-making guests stop playing because of the lateness of the hour. These were Anglican anthems or Buxtehude organ preludes not super-loud Eminem. It is now time for Miliband to face a different music.

**********

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint. His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu

March 14th, 2009

Levy: Why do Western leaders love us?

Gideon Levy writes of the especially favorable treatment given Israel by the leaders of the Western nations, which make public opinion in those countries irrelevant:

The world is always against us, period. But the world is not against us – to the contrary: The truth is that there is no other nation toward which the world is so forgiving, even today. Yes, today.

The whole article:

Has anyone in Israel asked why the Swedes hate us?

By Gideon Levy

Was it a coincidence? The day after Israel’s Davis Cup tennis match in Sweden, played in a practically empty arena this week, a brief item appeared on the Haaretz Web site: Historians have discovered that Sweden, former tennis superpower, aided the Nazi war machine by extending credit to German industrial plants.

Coincidence or not, neutral in 1941 or not, 68 years later, public opinion in Sweden is definitely not neutral: Thousands demonstrated there against Israel, which was forced to wield its racket like a leper, with no audience in attendance. Did anyone in Israel even ask why it was considered a pariah in Sweden? No one dared question whether the war in the Gaza Strip was worth the price we’re paying now, from Ankara to Malmo. It’s enough to recall that the Swedes were always against us. The fact that there were times when they were awash in love for Israel was erased from our consciousness.

The world is always against us, period. But the world is not against us – to the contrary: The truth is that there is no other nation toward which the world is so forgiving, even today. Yes, today. Granted, world public opinion is very critical, sometimes in a way that’s unique to Israel, but most governments (except Venezuela and Turkey, but including Egypt and Sweden) are far from being in sync with the public opinion in their countries. The official world continues to be sympathetic to Israel, regardless of its actions. The rise of Hamas, the increase in hatred for Islam in the West, the American hegemony – all this helps in strengthening the support, and we know how to make the very most of it.

What’s the difference between national tennis player Andy Ram and national tennis player Thomas Johansson? Johansson and his angry fans saw real pictures from Gaza; Ram and his complacent fans never did. Had Ram seen them, maybe he, too, would demonstrate. But he, like most Israelis, was spared this discomfort, thanks to the gung-ho Israeli press. Can we and Ram really criticize those who were horrified by the pictures from the war? Can we reproach those who dare to protest against the people responsible for those scenes? Are we demanding that the world remain silent once again?

The demonstrators in Stockholm waved banners against violence and racism. It may be okay to ask why they waved them only against us, as there are some other racist and violent places in the world, but it is not okay to question the right to do so in general. Was there really no violence in Gaza, and is there no racism in Israel? If we were Swedes, wouldn’t we protest against the pointless killing and destruction wrought by Israel?

But we needn’t get too worked up over the fury of public opinion in Sweden; its right-wing government is much less agitated, like all the other European governments. One need only recall the surreal scene at the height of the brutal assault on Gaza, when the heads of the European Union came to Israel and dined with the prime minister in a show of unilateral support for the side wreaking the killing and destruction. They didn’t give a thought to visiting Gaza, and uttered nary a word of criticism against Israel. That is official Europe.

Now, as a new government is about to be formed, there is concern that Israel will pay a price in the international arena for its composition. Not to worry: Everything will be just dandy. The world will accept Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s No. 1 statesman, Avigdor Lieberman as its No. 1 diplomat and Moshe Ya’alon as its No. 1 soldier. Lieberman’s belligerent statements and the Israel Defense Forces’ violent actions in the territories under former chief of staff Ya’alon will not present any obstacles. The world will accept them, too.

Furthermore, the growing concern that the new U.S. administration may be about to change the rules of the game vis-a-vis Israel could also prove to be unfounded: Barack Obama’s new America has already pledged to clean up after Israel, as usual. The $900 million the administration has pledged to contribute to rebuild Gaza – without a word of criticism about who caused the destruction there, as if it were a natural disaster and not the work of an unrestrained army, particularly in light of America’s current economic state – is a bad sign for anyone hoping for change. Israel wrecked Gaza with U.S. weapons, and America and Europe step in to fix things, not for the first time or for the last.

As the saying goes around here, what was is what will be: Israel will continue to destroy, and America will continue to mop up after it, without a word. A bad sign? Yes, for anyone who thinks that change will only come from the outside or, in other words, only from America.

Note how the upcoming Durban II conference on racism is also being thwarted, because of the fear that it will harshly criticize Israel. Does anyone know of any other country that can win such sweeping international backing? But we always complain: The whole world is against us. It’s good for shoring up national unity and for squeezing out more and more support in the world.

The bleak prophecies about a change in America’s attitude toward Israel are as old as the country itself. Whenever there’s a change of administration in the U.S., anxiety spikes. But from president to president, our strength only grows: When George W. Bush was elected, we were told to be wary of the Texan, a friend of the Arabs and of oil. And what did we get? Never was there a president more “sympathetic to Israel,” who gave it such a blank check for all its settlements, targeted assassinations and occupation activities. Obama is scary, too: He’s already talking with Iran and with the Taliban. Most likely, fears surrounding this will also prove to be overblown, once he gets around to dealing with Israel.

International interest in Israel is completely disproportionate. Last week, every taxi driver in Bursa, Turkey could recite by heart the names of Lieberman, Tzipi Livni, Netanyahu – and also Avi Mizrahi, the major general who had criticized their country. Every little flutter of coalition action in Israel immediately makes headlines; the world does not focus as much attention on the internal politics of any other country. Only Israel. Whether it’s good or bad for the Jews, it’s hard to put one’s finger on the roots of this phenomenon.

For decades now, the world has been buying the Zionist narrative almost in full. The occupation and settlements have been going on for more than 40 years with no serious impediment. Except for some international grumblings and resolutions no one has any serious intention of implementing, Israel continues to belong to the camp of the “good guys”; the Arabs are the “bad guys.” The new atmosphere in the West against Islam is reinforcing this trend and Israel is benefiting yet again. Criticism of the media in the West from Israel’s supporters is also quite excessive.

A Swedish journalist was recently laid off from her newspaper because she sided with the Palestinian position in the conflict. It’s hard to imagine her editors acting the same way if it were a Jewish reporter who had written in support of Israel.

When I was interviewed once by a reporter from the France 1 channel, a commercial channel, at the doorway of a house in Gaza – where the army had killed the only daughter of a paralyzed mother – and I said that it was these sorts of moments that made me feel ashamed to be an Israeli, my words were not broadcast. The reporter phoned me the next day and told me his editors had decided not to include the quote, for fear of viewer response. When I once published an article in the German paper Die Welt, which is part of the publishing group of Axel Springer, where all writers had to sign a pledge that they would never cast doubt on the State of Israel’s right to exist, the editor told me: “If this critical article about the occupation had been written by a German journalist, we would not have published it.”

Despite mounting criticism of Israel, Europe is still very cautious. With Europe’s Holocaust guilt, its anxiety in the face of Islam and its readiness to blindly follow the United States anywhere, Israel still enjoys preferential status in the world. Very preferential.

But perhaps this will not always be the case. Perhaps the worse our actions become, the harsher the criticism will be. Meanwhile, two pointless wars in two years were not enough to achieve this. Maybe the time will indeed come when the world will get fed up with this aggression and violence of ours, which endanger world peace, and will say at long last: No more occupation, no more wars perpetrated by Israel for which the world has to pay. Perhaps when Israel’s dream team of Netanyahu-Lieberman-Ya’alon faces the American dream team of Obama-Clinton, conservatives versus liberals, warmongers versus seekers of negotiation – something will happen then.

In the meantime, let us remember: Israel beat Sweden 3-2 in tennis and justice prevailed once again.

March 14th, 2009

Obama Justice Department plays with words, maintains “enemy combatant” policy

The Obama administration has taken yet another step in reiterating its support for the scaffolding of the Bush administrations “War on Terror” policies, while transforming those policies at the fringes. Yesterday they announced that they were ending the use of the term “enemy combatant,” but that they were continuing to assert their right to hold individuals, possibly forever [until the "War on Terror" ends, which means never] without trial and without the protections of prisoner of war status.

In addition to changing the term, the other notable change was in the supposed legal authority for the President’s powers. Rather than, as the Bush administration did, anchoring the claim in the President’s inherent “Commander in Chief powers, the Obama administration gives a nod to Congress and cites the post-911 Authorization for Use of Military Force that was rammed through Congress without any serious thought or debate. Of such material is “change” made.

The Associated Press quotes Retired Army Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, formerly a Guantanamo prosecutor:

“There’s absolutely no change in the definition,” Abraham said in a telephone interview. “To say this is a kinder more benevolent sense of justice is absolutely false. … I think the only thing they’ve done is try to separate themselves from the energy of the debate” by eliminating Bush’s phrasing.

The ACLU tries to see some potential in the new development: as Executive Director Anthony Romero stated:

It is deeply troubling that the Justice Department continues to use an overly broad interpretation of the laws of war that would permit military detention of individuals who were picked up far from an actual battlefield or who didn’t engage in hostilities against the United States. Once again, the Obama administration has taken a half-step in the right direction. The Justice Department’s filing leaves the door open to modifying the government’s position; it is critical that the administration promptly narrow the category for individuals who can be held in military detention so that the U.S. truly comports with the laws of war and rejects the unlawful detention power of the past eight years.

This reiteration of the Bush position comes in the wake of the Obama administration’s assertion that detainees did not have any enforceable right not to be tortured by the Bush administrations, as the illegality of torture is relative.

I am trying to remain optimistic about the potential of the Obama administration to change US policies on human rights, but I must say that every day makes such optimism more difficult. What horror with the Justice Department assert today?

Here is the entire AP take on this latest development, with quotes from CCR and other human rights groups:

Obama admin. to end use of term ‘enemy combatant’

By Nedra Pickler

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration said Friday that it is abandoning one of President George W. Bush’s key phrases in the war on terrorism: enemy combatant. But that won’t change much for the detainees at the U.S. naval base in Cuba — Obama still asserts the military’s authority to hold them. Human rights attorneys said they were disappointed that Obama didn’t take a new stance.

The Justice Department said in legal filings that it will no longer use the term “enemy combatants’ to justify holding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

“This is really a case of old wine in new bottles,” the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been fighting the detainees’ detention, said in a statement. “It is still unlawful to hold people indefinitely without charge. The men who have been held for more than seven years by our government must be charged or released.”

In another court filing Thursday criticized by human rights advocates, the Obama administration tried to protect top Bush administration military officials from lawsuits brought by prisoners who say they were tortured while being held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Obama administration’s position on use of the phrase “enemy combatants” came in response to a deadline by U.S. District Judge John Bates, who is overseeing lawsuits of detainees challenging their detention. Bates asked the administration to give its definition of whom the United States may hold as an “enemy combatant.”

The filing back’s Bush’s stance on the authority to hold detainees, even if they were not captured on the battlefield in the course of hostilities. In their lawsuits, detainees have argued that only those who directly participated in hostilities should be held.

“The argument should be rejected,” the Justice Department said in its filing. “Law-of-war principles do not limit the United States’ detention authority to this limited category of individuals. A contrary conclusion would improperly reward an enemy that violates the laws of war by operating as a loose network and camouflaging its forces as civilians.”

Attorney General Eric Holder also submitted a declaration to the court outlining President Barack Obama’s efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility within a year and determine where to place the 240 people held there. He said there could be “further refinements” to the administration’s position as that process goes on.

“Promptly determining the appropriate disposition of those detained at Guantanamo Bay is a high priority for the president,” Holder wrote.

Elisa Massimino, CEO and Executive Director of Human Rights First, urged the administration to use that opening. “We certainly hope it will use that opportunity to narrow the authority and make a clean break from the policies of the past,” she said.

There are some changes in legal principles in Obama’s stance. The Justice Department said authority to hold detainees comes from Congress and the international laws of war, not from the president’s own wartime power as Bush had argued.

The Justice Department says prisoners can only be detained if their support for al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces” was “substantial.” But it does not define the terms and says “circumstances justifying detention will vary from case to case.”

Retired Army Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a former Guantanamo official who has since become critical of the legal process, said it’s a change in nothing but semantics.

“There’s absolutely no change in the definition,” Abraham said in a telephone interview. “To say this is a kinder more benevolent sense of justice is absolutely false. … I think the only thing they’ve done is try to separate themselves from the energy of the debate” by eliminating Bush’s phrasing.

On the topic of former administration officials, the Justice Department argued in a filing with the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that holding military officials liable for their treatment of prisoners could cause them to make future decisions based on fear of litigation rather than appropriate military policy.

The suit before the appeals court was brought by four British citizens — Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal Al-Harith — who were sent back to Great Britain in 2004. The defendants in the case include former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and retired Gen. Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The men say they were beaten, shackled in painful stress positions and threatened by dogs during their time at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. They also say they were harassed while practicing their religion, including forced shaving of their beards, banning or interrupting their prayers, denying them copies of the Quran and prayer mats and throwing a copy of the Quran in a toilet.

They contend in their lawsuit that the treatment violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which provides that the “government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion.”

The appeals court ruled against them early last year, saying because the men were foreigners held outside the United States, they do not fall within the definition of a “person” protected by the act.

But later in the year, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees have some rights under the Constitution. So the Supreme Court instructed the appeals court to reconsider the lawsuit in light of their decision.

Eric Lewis, attorney for the four, said Friday that military officials should be subject to liability when they order torture.

“The upshot of the Justice Department’s position is that there is no right of detainees not to be tortured and that officials who order torture should be protected,” Lewis said.

Last month in another court filing, the Justice Department sided with the Bush White House by arguing that detainees at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.

March 14th, 2009

Tent cities across America

Now that it’s happening to “us,” formerly middle-class people, desperate poverty is again getting sympathetic attention. Here NBC News reports on tent cities spreading across the country:

Here is a another local news story:

1 comment March 14th, 2009

National π ["pi"] day

When I was a kid I learned π [that's "pi" the ration of the circumference of a circle to its diamaeter] to 15 digits. While today I can’t remember my wife’s cell phone number, I still remember those 15 digits [3.141592653589793]. So I’m thrilled to find out that today is “Pi day”.  Calculate.

And for those with better memories than me, here is π to one million digits. Let me know when you’ve memorized it. I’ll get you the next million.

March 14th, 2009