Waterboarding: A Tortured History:
The Washington debate over the simulated-drowning technique may be new, but the practice is not. It predates the Inquisition and has been used, off and on, around the world ever since.
Its use was first documented in the 14th century, according to Ed Peters, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. It was known variously as "water torture," the "water cure" or tormenta de toca — a phrase that refers to the thin piece of cloth placed over the victim's mouth.
At the time, using water to induce confessions was "a normal incident of law," Peters says, and people viewed it more or less as we view a cross-examination today. If anything, Peters says, the Inquisitors "were more careful about it" than others of their time.
"They were professionals," Peters says, noting that a doctor's presence was required during interrogations. Not that it made the experience any more pleasant for the victim, of course.
"The patient strangled and gasped and suffocated and, at intervals, the toca was withdrawn and he was adjured to tell the truth. The severity of the infliction was measured by the number of jars [of water] consumed, sometimes reaching to six or eight," writes Henry Charles Lea in A History of the Inquisition of Spain.
"The thing you could not do in torture was injure the body or cause death," Peters says. That was — and still is — what makes waterboarding such an attractive interrogation technique, he says: It causes great physical and mental suffering, yet leaves no marks on the body.
Waterboarding actually refers to two different interrogation techniques. One involves pumping water directly into the stomach. "This creates intense pain. It feels like your organs are on fire," says Darius Rejali, a professor at Reed College in Oregon and author of a new book, Torture and Democracy.
The other technique — the one more widely used today — involves choking the victim by filling their throat with a steady stream of water — a sort of "slow-motion drowning" that was perfected by Dutch traders in the 17th century. They used it against their British rivals in the East Indies.
A Turning Point
A turning point for waterboarding — in any form — came around 1800. As the Enlightenment swept across Europe, many countries banned the practice and people, in general, found it "morally repugnant," Peters says. Waterboarding moved underground, but did not disappear by any means. In fact, it has experienced something of a revival in the 20th century.
The interrogation method was used by the Japanese in World War II, by U.S. troops in the Philippines and by the French in Algeria. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rogue used waterboarding against its own people. The British used it against both Arabs and Jews in occupied Palestine in the 1930s. In the 1970s, it was widely used in Latin America, particularly under the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina (where it was known as "Asian torture.")
Details are hard to come by, since no government will openly acknowledge using the interrogation method. Over the years, the technique has been modified slightly. The Japanese, for instance, used teapots to hold the water, and cellophane is sometimes used instead of a cloth. But waterboarding has changed very little in the past 500 years. It still relies on the innate fear of drowning and suffocating to coerce confessions.
In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan's defeat in World War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.
Stephen Rickard, Washington director of the Open Society Institute, says that throughout the centuries, the justifications for using waterboarding have been remarkably consistent.
"Almost every time this comes along, people say, 'This is a new enemy, a new kind of war, and it requires new techniques,'" he says. "And there are always assurances that it is carefully regulated."
Sounds Like
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.
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'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."
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."
But how did the apparently innocuous Barney the Dinosaur music make it into a field dominated by hip-hop and death metal? 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."
"If the Iraqis aren't used to freedom, then I'm glad to be part of their exposure." (James Hetfield, Metallica)
Well there’s a brand new sport now
Across the USA
We got a real good game now
The guys are gonna play
Get the water running
Get on your knees and pray
We’re going Waterboarding
Waterboard USA
Chorus:
From the Oval Office
To Guantanamo Bay
Singalong rendition
With the CIA
And if you wanna play loud now
James Hetfield says OK
Gonna make you feel proud now
Waterboard USA
Cellophane or plastic
Or just a polythene bag
A faceful of water
We’re gonna force a gag
Oh Barney Loves You
Hang five, hang ten
‘til Metallica tell you
Turn the taps on again
Chorus:
From the Oval Office
To Guantanamo Bay
Singalong rendition
With the CIA
And if you wanna play loud now
James Hetfield says OK
Gonna make you feel proud now
Waterboard USA
It’s really out of sight
In your name
A bit of torture lite
In your name
We’re only doing what’s right
In your name
Have some fun tonight
In your name
Don't try to put up a fight
In your name
Turn your day into night
In your name
Get on your knees and pray
In your name
Waterboard USA
Desertification is too fast. It may not always be possible to find water, so I recommend the hosepipe. Dry. If you are brave enough to leave traces behind you, of course. I’ve never tried it personally, but we had a PD chief here called “Hosepipe someone” - better said, no one. And as for music, the energy bottleneck may come faster than you think.
