I have on good authority that this song was played at something called the "Jihadi Bar," a place where CIA interrogators working at a Black Site went to unwind. That and other secrets of undisclosed torture prisons are found within my interview with ex-interrogator Glenn Carle for Danger Room.
Much like at Guantanamo, detainees at this specific Black Site -- I don't know this for sure, but will irresponsibly speculate based on certain clues that it was in Afghanistan but not at Bagram -- had heavy metal blasted at loud volumes, constantly, to torture them. Alas, Carle couldn't tell me if one of the songs he heard there was "Bodies" by Drowning Pool, a staple on the torturers' mixtape of the 00s.
Adam Serwer points out how easy it will be for a revanchist right-wing administration to return to institutionalized torture, thanks to Obama's fateful decision not to seek legal sanction against the architects of Bush's torture policy. I was stunned to hear David "Live Our Values" Petraeus nudge the door open for a return to torture in his confirmation hearing last week, so I asked Carle the following:
DR: David Petraeus, the incoming CIA director, suggested to Congress that there might be circumstances where a return to “enhanced interrogation” is appropriate. What would you say to him?
GC: That there is almost no conceivable circumstance in which the enhanced interrogation practices are acceptable or work. This belief is a red herring, wrong, and undoes us a bit. We are better than that. Enhanced interrogation does not work, and is wrong. End of story.
But we would rather do the viscerally satisfying thing in the heat of our emotions than the right thing, as David Petraeus once observed. We're an American band.
Comments