Yes it is accepted by most people outside the US that torture isn't just waterboarding or pulling out someone's fingernails but can include even music that is even music which you like or see as benign .
Red State Upstate makes this point using a very simple TV ad when it is played over and over for hours on end is in fact torture. Dick Cheney erroneously still argues that such torture brings forth good actionable intel . This is nonsense as Joe Wilkerson and many others have pointed out. So why torture ? To put the fear of God as it were into the people who threaten the US and just to get revenge for 9/11 originally but as time went on the US and British soldiers and others wanted revenge for the last attack in Iraq or elsewhere which maimed or killed one of their own.
From Red State Update
Music Used As Torture At Guantanamo
From: travisandjonathan | Oct 25, 2009 | 18,704 views
Jackie and Dunlap on all the liberal musicians who are mad that their music was played to torture terrorists
So what if society has cast some people aside and then told them they shouldn't be upset about not having a job or working 60 hours a week at a low paying minimum wage job or if the Bank just foreclosed on their house and their car why be sad just smile and always as Monty Python says in Life of Brian "always look on the bright side". That's fine when someone has the career the money etc. but for those who suddenly find themselves on the other side with the POORS they have a right to be sad or angry .
Here's a clip from the film "AClockwork Orange " in which the main character is being tortured using images and music and drugs as part of a so-called cure of a criminal through negative reinforcement or aversion therapy . Alex is not just changed by the experience but is broken he is no longer the person he was and never will be so he has been turned into something less than an autonomous individual no longer possessing the ability to make an autonomous choice. In essence his tormentors his torturers have induced a psychotic break.
A ClockWork Orange, Ultra ViolenceOneEyeWonderWeasil
see video below about the creator Ewen Cameron in a BBC documentary The Memory Thief of this technique for "Brainwahing". The US since 9/11 has utilized a number of Cameron's techniques to break prisoners/ POWs that is so called "Detainees".
Best of the last week
Liberals and the Mainstream Media supported The Bush/Cheney policies of an illegal unwarranted invasion of Iraq and the abuse and torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afhans, Pakistanis, Pashtoon . It is somewhat disengenuous to hear liberals and some democrats bemoaning the policies of the Bush/Cheney regime now while at the time they were as eager to go to war against whomever as long as America got its revenge. No body count would be high enough to assuage their thirst for blood. Torture, renditions, assassinations, murders, rape was the price these foreign countries were expected to endure in silence. Instead the so-called insurgency in each country has continued to grow while anti-Americanism has spread and deepened around the globe.
Jingoism & Revenge: 'US media integrity a 9/11 casualty'
9 11 Legacy Torture, rape 'war of no boundaries'
Before Dick Cheney and the gang decided to redefine "Torture" most people would have agreed that torture is not confined to one or two techniques such as "waterboarding " or pulling out someone's fingernails. Most people were prior to 9/11 aware that torture also included various forms of physical and psychological torture as in sleep deprivation , sensory deprivation, sensory overload , threats, intimidation, humiliation , long term isolation .
For instance President Obama allowed Bradley manning to be kept in solitary confinement for about a year . Solitary confinement is considered by international law to be a form of torture. In the case of Manning they doubled down by adding sleep deprivation that is keeping the lights on in his tiny cell 24/7 and guards checking on him by waking him up every 15 minutes or so under the guise of concern that he might commit suicide. Manning has also been kept on various drugs ostensibly for his own good but more likely to keep him unbalanced and confused . Doe the Obama administration just want to make him suffer as a way to send a message to other would be Whistleblowers.
The experts know that torture in whatever form will not generate useful intelligence. The person being tortured will say just about anything to stop the torture. There are those who are the most committed to their cause who are prepared to undergo torture including physical and psychological abuse. American personnel in the CIA or Special Forces etc. undergo training so that they will be better prepared if the enemy uses various forms of tortureso they will not give up any useful intelligence.
The very people such as the Religious Right in the US claim that torture is relative and that it is not in any way immoral. According to them the Bible and Jesus approve of torture especially when it is used on Non-Christians.
This is somewhat surprising since the uberconservative Christians are always going on about the evil of modernity that all values or life styles, religious beliefs etc. are of equal value . So they attack liberalism which they believe to be at its core pernicious and anti-Christian or even anti-God and that liberalism as an ideology promotes the worst forms of immorality justified by relativism, multiculturalism, pluralism, tolerance and religious freedom .
The technique as such used in the film A Clock Work Orange was largely the result of one once renowned psychiatrist Ewen Cameron who worked in Canada as an employee of a supposedly secret CIA project .The CIA wanted to know if "brainwashing" was possible and could they use techniques to create more compliant POWs or abducted enemy secret agents or even further was it possible to create a Manchurian candidate.
But the main point is that in the film Alex's love Beethoven's 9th symphony becomes a weapon to be utilized by his tormentors. The US' military and CIA etc. have been even more creative by using music and songs which are upsetting or which attack their values and traditions and religious beliefs played over and over in an endless loop . The looping of sound in this way goes back to CIA experiments in the 1950s to 1960s in trying to discover if brainwashing was actually possible . The technique was mainly developed by a very cooperative Canadian psychiatrist who found it hard to resist the money involved.
Ewen Cameron, Memory Thief - Part 1
Uploaded by ectorg on Jul 28, 2006
Scottish documentary on Ewen Cameron, who worked with the CIA on brainwashing techniques using electroshock therapy. His grisly methods and CIA funding are detailed in the book by John Marks (1979), "The Search for the Manchurian Candidate" and the later book, "In The Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments."
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The Years of Shame by Paul Krugman New York Times, Sept. 11, 2011
What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.
A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.
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