Not Quite Bleeding from the Ears: Amplifying Sonic Torture

Abstract

This paper examines “sonic torture,” which refers to using sound reproduction technologies to blast prisoners with a continuous noise at peak loudness in order to coerce cooperation. I propose two ways to understand sonic torture's deafening noise—by examining how its technological embodiment coerces prisoner behavior, and by analyzing how people re-amplify the sound's embodiment when they condemn or advocate torture in the greater “soundscape.” I first argue that the concept of “amplification,” in both its electronic and rhetorical senses, links the capacity of noise to alter moods and behaviors to how people communicate about sound. Second, I analyze victims’ testimony to show how they amplified their pain when describing the indescribable brutality of sonic torture. Third, I examine how torture advocates used amplification to justify sonic torture as a form of “torture lite,” dictating what prisoners will or will not hear.

Keywords:

• Amplification
• Interrogation
• Noise
• Soundscape
• Torture

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2007 NCA conference. Thanks to Drs. Ned O'Gorman, Debra Hawhee, and Phaedra Pezzullo for their advice and encouragement.

Notes

For reports of myriad sonic torture cases, see Bayoumi, “Welcome to the Disco”; Cusick, “‘You are in a place that is out of the world … ’”; “‘No Blood, No Foul': Soldiers’ Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq”; and Rejali, Torture and Democracy, 360–84. For a history of the weaponization of sound, see Goodman, Sonic Warfare, and Cusick, “Music as Torture/Music as Weapon.”

Although it is difficult to ascertain the decibel levels in torture chambers, prisoner Yasir al-Qutaji, said of “The Disco” torture chamber in Iraq that his interrogators had to “talk to me via a loudspeaker that was placed next to my ears” in order to hear their questions (qtd. in Bayoumi 32).

On the importance and complexities of “reading sound,” see Goodale, “The Presidential Sound.”

Ballengee agreed with Scarry when she noted, “Perhaps the most ‘effective’ aspect of torture is its rhetorical agility” to produce many meanings (15).

“Futility music is designed to convince the prisoner of the futility of maintaining his position” (Smith).

Irish prisoners arrested by the United Kingdom in 1971 also called noise the most painful of the “five techniques” (Rejali 364).

Scarry mentioned “information-gathering” and “intelligence-gathering” as specific euphemistic misdescriptions based on a “fiction of power” that justifies and motivates torture on the grounds of needing information (12 and 57).