Music as torture.
posted by Noah at 2:50 PM
There's a fascinating letter posted on WFMU's blog from a soldier that spent time in Iraq and used music (specifically the music of Happy Flowers) as part of interrogation:We are not allowed to harm a prisoner and I have absolutely no problem with that, but you have to be creative to get information. That's Psychological Warfare comes in. It doesn't work on the hardened terrorist, but it does work on the guy who knows who the terrorist is, or is involved but not in a major way.He goes on to describe a specific instance with a non-combatant:
After about an hour of Happy Flowers and being told that we don't want to take him, and that if he would tell us what he knows we will take him back home, he finally tells us who the triggerman is, where we can find him, where other bombs are hidden and ID's 3 corrupt policemen. All without having to threaten, imprison, or break any of our rules of conduct.
Read the entire letter and hear samples of Happy Flowers here.
1 Comments:
That's incredible!
Years ago we had these hubric windbag neighbours who threw pompous garden parties so they could abuse Zinfandel and shop talk over market equity amongst their social peers. Long story short, I picked up the Happy Flower's "Too Many Bunnies, Not Enough Mittens" album many years before on a whim and we decided to disrupt their latest function by shoving speakers into the windows and cranking "Mom, I gave the cat some acid" and "I saw my picture on a milk carton".
Within half-an-hour the wives were bickering with each other and the children beat each other with wiffle bats. True story, which I cannot condone in these, my more mature years.
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