Anarchoblogs

The more you dig into the history of the CIA’s covert programs, the more it resembles not so much a fast-paced who-dunnit as a low-rent why-ever-did-they-do-it. Only it wasn’t low rent. A hefty wad of tax-payer money subsidized such expensive follies as Project Acoustic Kitty, in which the agency’s whizzes tried to turn man’s [...]

From Mondoweiss: “He [Balawi's brother] described Mr. Balawi as a “very good brother” and a “brilliant doctor,” saying that the family knew nothing of Mr. Balawi’s writings under a pseudonym on jihadi Web sites. He said, however, that his brother had been “changed” by last year’s three-week-long Israeli offensive in Gaza, which killed about 1,300 Palestinians…. …I [...]

Douglas Valentine contributes this piece to The Mind Body Politic: Disrupting the Accommodation: Why? “Why?” The grieving family members ask. “Why did the terrorists kill our loved ones?” The hardnosed colleagues of the four fallen CIA officers comfort the wives and children (and one husband). They shake off their sorrow, huddle together by the graves, and vow [...]

This Wired article by John Borland from August 2007 references a handy tool - the wikipedia scanner - for anyone interested in finding out what sorts of edits are being made at wikipedia. The author argues that while most edits, even from interested parties, seem relatively minor and informational, it´s also true that corporations like [...]

Douglas Valentine, author of several masterful books on national security and the CIA, talks to Susan Mazur about Tim Weiner´s new book on the CIA (”Legacy of Ashes”), the nexus of finance and espionage, and the propaganda campaign that lets Americans think the CIA is a force for good. Here´s a snippet: “Most of what Weiner writes [...]

Marjorie Cohn: “Bush’s rationale for attacking Afghanistan was spurious. Iranians could have made the same argument to attack the United States after they overthrew the vicious Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and the U.S. gave him safe haven. If the new Iranian government had demanded that the U.S. turn over the Shah and we refused, would [...]

Short Cuts
Adam Shatz

Imagine you’re confined to a dark, windowless space, and a piece of music you find especially disagreeable is piped into the room at a volume so piercing it seems to be throbbing inside you. You might call this excruciating. Now imagine the music on a round-the-clock loop, with no indication of when or whether it will stop, and no escape. You might call this torture.

That’s how Binyam Mohamed spent his time in the secret CIA-run prison outside Kabul, where he was forced to listen to Eminem and Dr Dre, without pause, for 20 days. He’s just one of possibly thousands of detainees in the ‘war on terror’ who have been subjected to protracted, lacerating barrages of heavy metal, gangsta rap, disco (the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’) and numbingly repetitive children’s tunes (Barney the Purple Dinosaur’s ‘I Love You’) – what American military interrogators call ‘futility music’.

There’s some debate as to whether this practice is a form of torture (as the UN Committee against Torture decided in a 1997 ruling against Israel’s practice of keeping Palestinian prisoners awake for days with loud music) or of ‘inhuman and degrading’ treatment (as the European Court of Human Rights decided in the case of the RUC’s use of white noise against IRA prisoners in the 1970s). In both cases it’s forbidden under international law. In the last year or so a movement to ban this practice has attracted the support of a number of artists whose work has been on the interrogation playlist, including David Gray, Massive Attack and Rage against the Machine. Reprieve, the group that provides legal representation for detainees at Guantánamo, has joined with a group of musicians to form Zero dB, an initiative whose goal is ‘to end the suffering caused by music torture’.

It isn’t hard to see why loud music appeals to interrogators. But it’s no less aggressive, or invasive, for leaving no visible marks. As anyone who’s gone to a rock concert or rave knows, its power lies in the fact that it seems inescapable, at once outside and inside the listener’s body: ‘what better medium than music to bring into being . . . the experience of the West’s (the infidel’s) ubiquitous, irresistible power?’ Suzanne Cusick asks in ‘Music as Torture/ Music as Weapon’, in the Transcultural Music Review. As she sees it, the use of music in interrogation began with the psychological experiments on the effects of continuous noise exposure conducted just after the Second World War by US, British and Canadian intelligence at Yale, Cornell and McGill. What the researchers discovered was that by inducing feelings of helplessness sonic disturbances could break down prisoners more effectively than beatings, starvation or sleep deprivation.

Cusick calls them ‘acoustic weapons’, and one way or another they’ve been in use for a long time. The Greeks and Romans used brass and percussion to send messages, and to rattle their opponents’ nerves; Joshua’s trumpets probably helped to wear down Jericho’s Canaanite defenders. In Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (Indiana, £16.99), Jonathan Pieslak argues that music has played an increasing role in psy ops ever since the 1989 US invasion of Panama, when Manuel Noriega, an opera connoisseur, was driven from the Vatican Embassy, where he had taken refuge, under a deafening barrage of Led Zeppelin and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas (‘nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide’). Just before the siege of Fallujah in 2004, Pieslak writes, hard rock ‘was played so relentlessly. . . that the Marines renamed the city “LalaFallujah”’; Iraqi mullahs attempted to resist the sonic blitz by blasting Koranic chants on their own loudspeakers. What made it possible for the 361st Psy Ops company to bombard Fallujah with AC/DC’s ‘Shoot to Thrill’ was the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), designed by the American Technology Company and sold to the US army and marines, the coast guard and a number of US police departments. Attached to an MP3 player, the LRAD can project a ‘strip of sound’ that can be heard – and can’t be ignored – for 500 to 1,000 metres.

Why is the American military using music this way? After all, it could as easily use white noise, or ‘sonic booms’, Israel’s weapon of choice whenever it has wanted to frighten Lebanon without going to war. Moustafa Bayoumi, in an article in the Nation in 2005, suggested that music is used to project ‘American culture as an offensive weapon’. But if the use of American music is a blunt assertion of imperial power, why are metal and gangsta rap the genres favoured by interrogators at Gitmo? One reason, Pieslak suggests, is that metal is uniquely harsh, with its ‘multiple, high-frequency harmonics in the guitar distortion’, and vocals that alternate between ‘pitched screaming’ and ‘guttural, unpitched yelling’. ‘If I listened to a death metal band for 12 hours in a row, I’d go insane, too,’ James Hetfield of Metallica says. ‘I’d tell you anything you’d want to know.’ (One interrogator told Pieslak that he tried Michael Jackson on Iraqi detainees, but ‘it doesn’t do anything for them.’)

One can imagine other dissonant forms of music – serial music, or free jazz – being equally effective. But not many military interrogators listen to Schoenberg or Stockhausen – or, for that matter, to Cecil Taylor or Albert Ayler. The use of metal and rap, it turns out, mainly reflects the soldiers’ taste. As Pieslak shows, it’s the music many of them listen to when they’re ‘getting crunked’ – pumped up for combat missions. Songs like Slayer’s ‘Angel of Death’ put them ‘in the mood’ to fight because their pounding, syncopated rhythms sound very like a volley of bullets being fired from an automatic gun, but the same songs are also deployed in interrogation, and in combat, to terrify people and break them down. It all depends on where you’re listening, and who controls the loudspeakers.

So this week we learned that Vice President Dick Cheney created a CIA hit squad taking orders directly from his office — a little factoid which he happened to keep secret throughout the remainder of the Bush Administration. From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The CIA withheld information from the U.S. Congress about a secret counterterrorism program on orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, a senator said on Sunday as Democrats called for an investigation. … The still-secret program, which The New York Times said never became operational, began after the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001.

The Wall Street Journal said the secret initiative terminated by Panetta was an effort to carry out a 2001 authorization by then Republican President George W. Bush to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives.

—Reuters (2009-07-12): Cheney hid CIA program from Congress: senator

Let’s get some reactions from arch-liberal power-brokers Patrick Leahy and Diane Feinstein:

Feinstein and Democrat Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, insisted no one should go outside the law.

Asked about Cheney’s alleged involvement, Leahy told the CBS program Face the Nation: I’d like to know if it’s true or not. I mean, nobody in this country is above the law … You can’t have somebody say, well, if you’re vice president, you don’t have to obey the law.

Feinstein said Congress should have been told.

This is a big problem, because the law is very clear. And I understand the need of the day, which was when America was in shock after September 11, she said on Fox. But … I think you weaken your case when you go outside of the law.

—Reuters (2009-07-12): Cheney hid CIA program from Congress: senator

Oh, well. It was wrong because it wasn’t The Law.

So, just so we’re clear, if Cheney and Bush had gotten Congress to change the federal laws so that it would be perfectly legal for the Vice President of the United States to create unaccountable secret international death squads that take orders from, and report only to the highest levels of, Executive power, would that have somehow made it alright?

Really?

See also:

• GT 2006-01-05: An Open Question for Constitutionalist Liberals
• GT 2008-09-17: The statist We don’t.
• GT 2007-09-06: Marching orders

• Checking out the competition.

  

  Via Wendy McElroy (2009-04-29): The Farce is strong with this one. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: write your own caption in the comments.

• Mutual Aid. bfp, flip flopping joy (2009-05-26): Help bring single mamis to the Allied Media Conference. So dig deep into your pockets and spread the word. We need these mamis here, and as such, we need your help. SPREAD THE WORD. Demand people buy the CD’s. Refuse to free people’s pet rocks until they have donated.

• Established churches only, please. Drew Zahn, WorldNetDaily (2009-05-22): Home: No place for Bible study. In which a San Diego home Bible study group is confronted by the county government’s war on the informal sector.

• The War on the Informal Sector, cont’d. Brad, WendyMcElroy.com (2009-04-26): Book Rental Is Illegal?

• Against the Intellectual Enclosure Movement. Kevin Carson, Center for a Stateless Society (2009-05-15): Copyright Communism?

• Gagsters in Blue. Kevin Carson, Center for a Stateless Society (2009-05-22): Gangsters in Blue and William Grigg, LewRockwell.com Blog (2009-05-13): Gang-Bangers in Blue. The Gangsters are still on their game. If we hope to resist it, the first thing to do is to understand it, and in that interest, I encourage all anti-statists to make as much use of this phrase as possible. And not just because I run GangstersInBlue.org (Rather, I run the website because I think it’s important to get the phrase out there.)

• We’re like a tick. Hey man, you said it, not me. Birmingham, Alabama is getting its own storm-trooper elite saturation squad to swarm targeted neighborhoods, apparently with a special focus on socioeconomic cleansing (street corner issues like narcotics and prostitution). (Cf. GT 2008-12-05: Don’t turn your back on the Wolfpack on saturation tactics.)

• On principles. Julian Sanchez (2009-05-04): Morality Isn’t Free

• Pull the other one. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2009-05-19): The CIA Wouldn’t Lie! Reality dials Washington, D.C. and gets sent straight to voicemail.

• Today in news of the obvious. Las Vegas Sun (2009-05-23): [A government] Safety program goes awry and Las Vegas Sun (2009-05-19): Bank bailout does little for those who need help most . Don’t look so surprised.

• State socialism means never having to say you’re sorry. @ndy, Andy the Slack Bastard (2009-05-25): Dear President Chávez. In which Hugo Chávez, revolutionary President-for-Life, continues his far-sighted socialist leadership by having 14 union steelworkers sent to prison for 5 to 10 years as punishment for going on strike. He was able to do this because their boss is the Venezuelan government, due to a nationalization which state socialists hailed as a triumph for the working class. Meanwhile, Australian Anarchists reply by sending an open invitation for Citizen Chávez to come to Australia for a special fraternal greeting from the Biotic Baking Brigade.

• The Two Socialisms and the Revenge of Proudhon. Coming to a theater near you this summer. Shawn Wilbur, In the Libertarian Labyrinth (2009-05-07): French mutualism beyond Proudhon

• You say pissed-off, man-hating, dykes with an excess of body hair like it’s supposed to be a bad thing…, cont’d. Roderick Long, Austro-Athenian Empire (2009-05-25): How to convert a big tent into a small one.

• Unbreaking the business model. Roderick Long, Austro-Athenian Empire (2009-05-25): Contingency markets and IP Want to reward innovation? Don’t fall back Intellectual Protectionism to force others to support your broken business model; instead, use the web to discover demand and pay for supply.

• On the web as distributed computing platform. Tim Bray, ongoing (2009-05-25): HTTP and the Fallacies of Distributed Computing

• On living with summer stars and dystopia. soul searching with christ and gacy (2009-05-25): the dead flag blues

Communications:

• Modesto Anarcho #11. Issue #11 of the valley’s insurrectionary journal of class struggle is out and now available for reading online.

• 2nd annual Hamilton Anarchist Bookfair (June 6). Pat Murtagh, Molly’sBlog (2009-05-24): CANADIAN ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-HAMILTON: POLICE KEEPING A BEADY EYE ON THE HAMILTON ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR. Check it out both for the announcement of the bookfair (which is coming up on June 6 in Hamilton, Ontario), and also for a report on and reply to Ontario hate-cops who have lots of government funding and nothing better to do with their time than nose around for hate crimes at anarcho book bazaars.

• San Jose Anarchist Cafe (June 7). The Anarchist Cafe is not a place, it’s an event: an informal meet-up for folks interested in hometown anarchy. There’s a new A-Cafe getting started in San Jose, California; the first-ever meeting is happening on Sunday, June 7, 2009. See http://sanjose.anarchistcafe.org/ for details and contact information.