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I learn from this evening's SDPB broadcast of PRI's "The World" that the U.S. military has been blaring David Gray's "Babylon" into Guantanamo prisoners' cells over and over as part of our "interrogation" techniques. Hey—I love that song! How dare the Pentagon turn one of my favorite songs into an instrument of torture? (Um, how dare America be torturing anyone in the first place?)
David Gray is displeased, too, and understandably so. Suppose you created something good and decent, and someone took it and used it to harm others. Music is about fun, beauty, love, all that good stuff. Gray tells the BBC that his disgust isn't just about his own music being used for such evil purposes; torture is torture, whether you do it with Tchaikovsky or Barney the Dinosaur.
No comfort for the folks being tortured and detained without due process, but maybe Gray and other artists on the Guantanamo soundtrack can sue. Canadian intellectual property lawyer Howard Knopf notes that performance of music in a public place entitles the composer to royalties.
Let's leave artists out of our torture techniques. Or better yet, how about just not torture?
South Dakota Department of Propaganda offers some toons
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Thanks to southdakotatruth.com for the toons!
2 hours ago
Barney the Dinosaur... now THAT's real torture! LOL
ReplyDeleteHasn't anyone seen "A Clockwork Orange"? If you are going to use music to torture/brainwash, you have to use music that is open content.
ReplyDeletep.s. Cory, check out http://www.pickensplan.org/ if you have not already.
Playing music is considered torture when our troops and other Americans have been taken captive and beheaded with no trial, no rights, no second chance. They simply had their heads cut off with a machette while they were still alive. Many of these killings were filmed to be used as propoganda.
ReplyDeleteWhen a radical Muslim group is trying to eliminate us and our way of life, I don't see the problem with music torture, waterboarding or whatever else it takes to get information to stop them.
I agree. Interrogation is so unpleasant, it often psychologically scars its victims. Victims being people picked up on a field of battle who were trying to kill our military while out of uniform....doesn't that mean we get to hang them as spies?
ReplyDeleteAnon, Phae: Maybe you should listen to what General David Petraeus told his troops in Iraq:
ReplyDelete"'This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we—not our enemies—occupy the moral high ground,' Army Gen. David H. Petraeus wrote in an open letter dated May 10 and posted on a military Web site.
"He rejected the argument that torture is sometimes needed to quickly obtain crucial information. 'Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.'"
—Thomas E. Ricks, "Gen. Petraeus Warns Against Using Torture," Washington Post, 2007.05.11.
If you want to help win the War on Terror, Anon and Phae, you'll knock off the macho B.S. and focus on doing/advocating what's moral, legal, and effective. Torture isn't on that list.
Sorry, but I agree more with anon and Phaedrus. IMO we are occupying the high ground. We aren't beheading people and showing it as propaganda. The people in Guantanamo, other than being away from their "loving" families and their ability to kill us and maybe being subjected to music that isn't their particular forte, are not being tortured.
ReplyDeleteIf they don't want to take a chance on getting locked up in Guantanamo or someplace else, then don't try to kill us. Simple!
It seems to me that Gen Petraeus is being taken somewhat out of context in the article. At least as it pertains to the guidelines used in Guantanamo. There needs to be a definite line drawn between simply inflicting stress and inflicting true torture.
ReplyDeleteMy definition of torture is to create suffering for the sake of suffering. Suffering caused for information is not torture, its interrogation. As an American and as a moral person we must always forbid the former. The latter should be restrained but cannot be summarily rejected. Where are the lines for what is right and wrong in interrogation? Somewhere between pointed questions in a police department and pointed sticks in body parts. If we flail around acting as if EVERYTHING unpleasant is the equivalent of torture, we get nowhere.
ReplyDeleteHow about this for the 1st rule:
1. No self-incrimination or damaging information found during an interrogation that goes beyond just normal questioning can ever be used in court.
Phaedrus's moral code: it's o.k. to inflict suffering, as long as you do it to get something you want.
ReplyDeleteAnd that assumes torture effectively gets you what you want. Forget morality, stick with pragmatism: General Petraeus (and other experts) say torture doesn't work.
Phaedrus:
ReplyDeleteAre we picking up soldiers out on the battlefield in Iraq (or insurgents, is there a difference?)? While opposed to your idea, I can at least understand one might think that the stick can be used to get what one wants.
We are fighting a guerrilla style war in Iraq which cannot be won by shear might. If you have a discontent populace, problems will keep arising which cannot be stopped by force (minus going all genocidal on their ass).
In Iraq, we must win the population's minds. If we do not, they will keep aiding and hiding the insurgents. Torturing anyone will only enrage a population.
The far more elegant solution would be to pay off the religious leaders to start preaching about peace every day. The suggestible and excitable part of the population (which is causing our problems now) will chill out and pot will quit boiling.
It's always cheaper to buy someone than to beat them into submission. Anyone else for a McMansion?
I am not talking about Iraq. Gen Petraeus was. He is dealing with actual maiming and murder going on in prisons by Iraqis on each other and a population ready to believe nightmare stories spread about the Americans. He also sees the crap the soldiers are putting up with, for whom it would be very hard not to take it out on enemies that they know might have just murdered their friends, and the consequences to the earning of trust from the normal folk dire if they do.
ReplyDeleteThis is very different from sleep deprivation and psychologically wearing down a prisoner of war, who has information that could save hundreds of lives. Who may not have committed a crimes at all. A captured German or American in WWII who had critical information would be interrogated and it would probably not be pleasant even though there would be no due process of law as there was no crime to convict them of.
So yes CAH, I believe it moral to at times inflict suffering. Or do you think a criminal living out the course of their life in maximum security prison is something other than suffering? How about Child Protective Services permanently taking somebodies children away? Inflicting suffering is unavoidable in maintaining a civil society. So why is it rejected without a thought now when applied to prisoners of war?
I did not say I thought it okay to do anything at all in the name of getting what we want. But the current talk about torture goes nowhere and doesn't define torture meaningfully at all. My prior post was just me offering up one rule to try to draw a meaningful line. I was hoping for people to refine it and add more, not dismiss it.
Tony: who uses the term insurgents anymore? And you can't pay off people fighting over power. Muqtada doesn't want money, he wants to be central in a new Iraqi Hawza that would govern Iraq according to his particular brand of Shia (which is to say one that worships his ego) On the Sunni side of that same coin is the 'Association of Muslim Scholars' who also would never stop encouraging murder if we paid them. There is also no amount of money that would make Iran's agents stop meddling (see the new magnetic IUD that have appeared now).
ReplyDeleteYou are about 3 years out of date. It isn't about us anymore. We have as much of the Iraqi heart as we are likely to get, and we would just come home if they were just attacking us and everything would be fine if we were not there. It isn't trust for the U.S. that is needed. It is trust of the new government. Once they have both the strength to maintain security and the faith of the people that the government is there to work for them and not just the interests of any given group. Then we won't be needed. The government crackdown (without the typical old preferential exceptions) against all of the militias was a great sign as was the cleanup of Mosul and Sadr City that this is happening.
General Petraeus was telling his soldiers in Iraq to look at army law and history, which both speak clearly against the morality and effectiveness of torture. I think General Petraeus draws the clearest, most meaningful line in this whole discussion. Too bad Phaedrus dismisses it.
ReplyDelete...He was also talking about torture, not our officially sanctioned interrogation methods. which are NOT torture. So I am not dismissing the general's words at all, CAH is just abusing his words.
ReplyDelete