Music As Torture: War Is Loud

Illustration by Jeffrey Decoster

[Writer's note: When I was researching this story on the U.S. military and intelligence agencies' use of music as an interrogation tool back in 2006, I spoke to A. John Radsan, who had been assistant general counsel at the CIA from 2002 to 2004. I was specifically interested in trying to nail down exactly who had authorized the use of music in this manner. I asked Radsan whether the CIA had authorized the use of music in interrogations. For obvious reasons, he could only discuss information that had been declassified and was in the public record. He pointed me to an obscure footnote in a memo issued by the Office of Legal Counsel in late 2004 that referred obliquely to the idea that there were other memos that were still classified that detailed exactly what interrogation methods could and couldn't be used by the CIA. "That footnote is as much confirmation as I could give you," he told me.

So when the Obama administration declassified this latest batch of "torture memos" on April 16, I expected a treasure trove of information on music's place in the CIA's interrogation program. In fact, there's no mentions of music at all. There is, however, a footnote in one of the memos, originally written in 2005, that notes that, "The CIA maintains 'detention conditions' at all of its detention facilities," that include exposure to "white noise/loud sounds (not to exceed 79 decibels)" during portions of the interrogation. But because the CIA didn't classify these as "interrogation techniques," this particular memo doesn't assess their lawfulness (though it does note that according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration there is "no risk of permanent hearing loss from continuous 24-hour-per-day exposure to noise of up to 82 decibels.") Notwithstanding the fact that it takes an Orwellian linguistic backflip to avoid characterizing noise blasted during interrogations (and perhaps, for 24 hours straight) as an "interrogation technique," I read this footnote to mean that the use of music is likely authorized in a different, still classified memo that judges the lawfulness of the CIA's "detention conditions." As Radsan told me back then, CIA officers had been burned in the past and it's unlikely they would simply be improvising, blasting an Eminem album at a detainee without first receiving written, legal authorization to do so. "If I were an interrogator," Radsan said, "I would make sure I had some guidance and approval before I did something like that."

What these new "torture memos" do make clear, though, is that Greg Hartley, the former SERE instructor and interrogation trainer whom I spoke to for the story, was exactly right when he surmised that the way all these new "enhanced interrogation" techniques ended up in the arsenals of American interrogators was through SERE, the Special Forces school that trains American military personal to resist interrogation by foreign governments. As he said back then, "a lot of what's happening, a lot of the stuff you see that has gone wrong" -- everything from loud music to stress positions to waterboarding -- "I think is someone trying to overlay SERE techniques to interrogation." This, as it turns out, is exactly what happened. (It's worth pointing out that with regards to the most controversial interrogation technique authorized in these memos -- waterboarding -- Hartley, who had both been on giving and receiving end of this tactic at SERE said, "That's a horrible thing -- I can't imagine they ever approved that.") He also said that SERE was never intended to be interrogation training. It was meant to mimic the brutal tactics of our enemies, which were known to produce false confessions. As he put it in what is probably my favorite quote in the story, "Just because someone gives you a good blowjob doesn't mean you're going to be able to give one too."]

In May 2003, Shafiq Rasul was led from his cell at the Camp Delta detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a small, drab interrogation booth. He sat down and a military police officer chained his leg irons to a metal ring in the center of the linoleum floor. Rasul had grown accustomed to this procedure since his arrival in Cuba nearly 18 months earlier. Every few weeks he'd be brought into the booth and questioned about people he knew, places he'd been, and what he and two friends, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal -- all English citizens in their 20s -- were doing in Afghanistan in late 2001. This time was different. An interrogator walked into the booth, pressed play on a nearby stereo, and walked out. Rasul immediately recognized the sound coming from the speakers: It was Eminem's "Kim." "It was weird because I'd heard it before," he says. "I've probably got the album at home somewhere. [They] just put Eminem on and left, and I thought, 'What the hell is going on here?'"

Rasul sat in the room with "Kim" on repeat. He wasn't particularly bothered ("It was just like playing music at home, but chained to the floor"), and after a few hours MPs returned him to his cell.

It wasn't long before he was back in the booth. This time, the room was pitch black except for the irregular flashes of a strobe light. Eminem had been replaced by loud, menacing heavy metal. The air-conditioning had been cranked way up, and Rasul was short-shackled -- his wrists fastened to his ankles, then shackled to the ring in the floor in what is known as a "stress position." He was left there for hours. "Being in that position is really stressful on your back," he says. "If you try to move, the chains start digging into your feet and wrists."

Rasul endured such "interrogation sessions" every day, sometimes twice a day, for nearly three weeks. Often, there was little or no interrogation taking place. After up to 12 hours in the booth with raging metal as his only companion, he'd just be marched back to his cell—now on the prison's isolation block.

Rasul, Ahmed, and Iqbal had been captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 by a Northern Alliance militia, and then transferred to U.S. custody. U.S. intelligence seemed to lose interest in Rasul after his first few months in Guantanamo. Even if they doubted his story -- that he and his friends had traveled to Pakistan for a wedding, then entered Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion to do humanitarian work -- he seemed to know next to nothing about Al Qaeda and was interrogated infrequently. But in 2003, U.S. agents found what they believed was a smoking gun: a videotape apparently showing the three men sitting in on an August 2000 meeting with Osama bin Laden and lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. The increasing harshness of Rasul's treatment directly corresponded to this discovery and soon began having its desired effect. "It just starts playing with you," he says. "Even if you were shouting, the music was too loud -- nobody would be able to hear you. You're there for hours and hours, and they're constantly playing the same music. All that builds up. You start hallucinating."

Rasul's interrogators showed him the video and pressed him to admit he was at the meeting. After he initially denied the charge, the weeks-long barrage of metal, extreme cold, and strobe lights did its job and Rasul confessed.

There was only one problem: In August 2000, Shafiq Rasul couldn't have been breaking bread with bin Laden because, as investigators would soon confirm, he was attending university and working at the electronics store Curry's back in England. In early 2004, Rasul, Ahmed, and Iqbal were released without charges.