Too Much Rockin? in the Not-So-Free World?

[WSJ_law_blog]

Jess Bravin, the WSJ’s Supreme Court reporter and resident authority on all things related to law-and-Guantanamo, sent along the following dispatch a bit ago on the music industry’s latest collective concern: whether (and to what degree) rock music was used as an instrument of enhanced interrogation techniques down at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Might lawsuits follow? Stay tuned.



As part of “special interrogation operations” during the George W. Bush administration, U.S. intelligence officers blasted hours-long cycles of rock music, often under strobe lights, to “disorient [the prisoner] and establish fear of the unknown,” as a Defense Intelligence Agency memorandum explained.

Now, a coalition of musicians is asking the government if their music was employed in extreme interrogation programs that some label torture.

The group includes Tom Morello and Trent Reznor (pictured), who say songs by their bands Rage Against the Machine and Nine Inch Nails were used in interrogations.

“Guantanamo is known around the world as one of the places where human beings have been tortured – from water boarding, to stripping, hooding and forcing detainees into humiliating sexual acts - playing music for 72 hours in a row at volumes just below that to shatter the eardrums,” Morello said in a statement released by the group, the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo. “The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me.”

The National Security Archive, a research outfit at George Washington University, said it is filing Freedom of Information Act requests with the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies seeking more records regarding the use of music in interrogation.

Others joining the protest include Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Billy Bragg, and David Byrne, along with some musicians whose work seems perhaps too mellow to qualify for “enhanced” interrogation techniques, such as Roseanne Cash, Jackson Browne and Michelle Branch.