Music in psychological operations

Music in psychological operations
Type
  • Psychological warfare
  • torture
Location
  • United States
  • Iraq
  • Greece
  • Israel
  • South Korea
Effects
  • Sensory deprivation
  • sleep deprivation
  • food and drink deprivation, and stress positions

Music can be used as a tool of psychological warfare. The term "music torture" is sometimes used to describe the practice.[citation needed] While it is acknowledged by United States interrogation experts to cause discomfort, it has also been characterized as having no "long-term effects".[1]

Music and sound have been usually used as part of a combination of interrogation methods, today recognized by international bodies as amounting to torture.[2] Attacking all senses without leaving any visible traces, they have formed the basis of the widely discussed torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They were, however, devised much earlier in the 1950s and early 1960s, as a way to counter so-called Soviet "brainwashing".[3] Methods of "noise torture" or "sound torture", which include the continuous playing of music or noise, have been paired with sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, food and drink deprivation, and stress positions.

  1. ^ "Sesame Street breaks Iraqi POWs". BBC. 23 May 2003. Archived from the original on 14 October 2007. Retrieved 27 November 2007.
  2. ^ UN Committee Against Torture 1997 "Concluding observations: Israel. 09/05/1997." "CAT/C/SR.297/Add.1 of 9 May 1997". Archived from the original on 28 July 2014. Retrieved 20 July 2014.
  3. ^ McCoy, Alfred W (2006). A Question of Torture. CIA Interrogation. From the Cold War to the War on Terror. New York: Henry Holt and Co.pp.