KEEPING US AMUSED AND STUPID

We can sneer at Rush Limbaugh and his Club G'itmo, but this morning on The Takeaway, public radio's insipid new morning pseudo-news show, a significant amount of airtime was devoted to a segment called "The Songs That Torture Us" -- a response to the well-known list of songs blasted at detainees in U.S. military prisons, which Mother Jones recently published as a sidebar to some serious articles on torture. This means that for many minutes this morning, all us good liberals in the public radio audience were regaled by a discussion of torture that reduced the issue to "Which would be a more effective song to torture you -- 'Billy, Don't Be a Hero" or 'You Light Up My Life'?"

(Listen here.)

Judging from the e-mails to the show, it appears that more listeners happily played along than objected to the segment.

This is how I know that there will never, ever be any war-crimes tribunals in America.

And just in case you don't understand what I'm talking about...

...n a gripping Vanity Fair article, Donovan Webster searched for and found "the man in the hood" from the macabre Abu Ghraib photos. Haj Ali told Webster of being hooded, stripped, handcuffed to his cell and bombarded with a looped sample of David Gray's "Babylon." It was so loud, he said, "I thought my head would burst." Webster then cued up "Babylon" on his iPod and played it for Haj Ali to confirm the song. Ali ripped the earphones off his head, and started crying. "He didn't just well up with tears," Webster later told me. "He broke down sobbing." ...

In Afghanistan, Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old Afghan farmer, was forced to stay awake while in American custody by soldiers blasting music and shouting at him. Shah told the New York Times that after enduring the pain of music, "he grew so exhausted...that he vomited." In Guantánamo Bay, Eminem, Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine, Metallica (again) and Bruce Springsteen ("Born in the USA") have been played at mind-numbing volumes, sometimes for stretches of up to fourteen hours, at detainees....

In 1978 the European Court of Human Rights confronted a similar technique employed by Britain in the early 1970s against Irish detainees, although in the British rendition, it was loud noise instead of music that was wielded against detainees. This was one of the so-called Five Techniques...

Of Britain's Five Techniques, noise was considered the hardest to suffer. In his book Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, John Conroy describes the "absolute" and "unceasing" noise that the Irishmen who were first subjected to the Five Techniques endured. While the other four techniques were clearly terrifying, the noise was "an assault of such ferocity that many of the men now recall it as the worst part of the ordeal." ...

Ha ha ha! "Seasons in the Sun"! James Blunt! Ha ha ha!