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you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for langley you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture. of. me it would be to me if he is. in atlanta.

it would. be. good.

one told them they actually use music to break prisoners so the idea that my music at a role in that is kind of outrageous. to keep the cia the leads that would be easy interrogating people if they were this week in. the music was so loud. and it was probably some of the worst torture that they faced. all right chris take it from the top were ready. it's incredible anything goes and hearing badge and national.

insurance club go. well i've always liked music i think most people do actually. music means good luck to me among many other things i love that i've had a chat to to write music partly for a living and largely for fun that's also helping people. it's incredible. nation. christopher soft as a composer for sesame street because his music helps to teach young children how to read and write for forty years he's been working for the famous children's television show during this time he's written more than two hundred songs. their surname.

for his work christopher has won many awards. in the show the cookies sesame street residents like big bird sing his songs the ricks of today with magic numbers strange words or the names of the callers but these innocent children songs were abused for inhumane. in two thousand and three it transpired that the u.s. army tortured the detainees with sesame street music for days. now my first reaction was this can't possibly be true this is just too crazy. and it was absurd but of course i didn't really like the idea that i was helping break

down prisoners. but it was much worse when i heard later that they were actually using the the music in and guantanamo to actually do deep one term interrogations and obviously to inflict enough pain on i'm prisoner so they would talk. off the terrorists that attacked us on september the eleventh two thousand and one the government struck by the media at least the global war on terror began. world wide u.s. soldiers and their allies rounded up as many suspects as possible to interrogate them they were not exactly squeamish in dealing with the detainees.

these him. just spock worldwide outrage and two thousand and four they show how us soldiers abused iraqi detainees. until recently this document was top secret it's a guideline for interrogation methods compiled by the office of medical services of the american secret service the cia. the medical specialists carefully describe the torture procedures cia agents are allowed to use during interrogations they focus on methods that leave no visible traces on the prisoners such as noise and loud music permitted noise levels are as follows music as loud as the noise of a highway for eighteen hours a day at the volume of a crank motorbike was. as loud as a truck engine at full throttle for four hours. and as loud as

a jackhammer. for two hours. human rights groups force in courts for the publication of these torture guidelines still most of the pages look like this are reasons of national security the government says but for human rights were such as such as thomas kean and they still form a clear picture of what musical torture methods were used. prisoners were forced to put on headphones they were attached chairs the headphones were attached to their head and they were left alone just within these six for very long periods of time sometimes hours even gains and listening to repeated loud music. music was being used at guantanamo. in kabul and afghanistan. and in

any number of hidden sites music as torture. i do troubles christopher so much that he's decided to go on a journey to find out more about how and why music is used in this way this is fascinating to me because of the har music being perverted to serve evil purposes if you like but i'm also interested in how that what is it about music that would make it work for that or. i also want to sort of learn about why anybody would even think of doing something like that. i'm not really so troubled that my songs got you just the idea that they're torturing people at all and i really feel pretty strongly that it. and.

it seems really incredible to me that america would be torturing prisoners at all after all we've what wars in the past against countries who do that to try to get them to stop so the idea that we would be doing it ourselves to save our own freedom is very rough.

christopher's first stop is chicano guard here he wants to meet a soldier who served as a prison guard in guantanamo for nine months. chris irons was only nineteen years old when he witnessed how a prison those were tortured with music he finally left the army and started to criticize their methods publicly now age twenty three years on employed and homeless. kristie i've been really interested in coming to talk to you because some of my music even might have been used and there it is you ever see music being used to kuantan along oh yeah yeah there's it was in the gold building. i mean music would just blast out of that room like i mean it's like they had a whole concert it was like a i mean it was it was like a dance club style. music system that they had set up just rock in this room for with all this kind of like american you know rock music you know you leave somebody

in there for a couple hours like that in a stress position i've seen interrogations go on. for you know ten twelve hours i came i had i worked twelve hour shifts and several times i came in right at the beginning of my shift and moved a detainee into an interrogation booth and then didn't ever for the rest of that day move that person on and sometimes it was like two songs playing against each other in completely off tempo just like blaring you know say this rock music with like a johnny cash song against each other they play them both of the same in the same room yes and.

the whole interrogation thing seems so weird that they focused so much on using things that weren't necessarily i guess i just had such amped up expectations of what torture was that when i saw torture as. you know listening to music and stressful positions i think like most people it just didn't really strike me and i i think my hot head had a hard time working around why that was really torture but then you know i came to realize. it's you know these are these are just really insidious psychological techniques that are being utilized and it's not you know it's not the torture of like a movie you know we don't have people wired up to rocks and we don't have you know we're not pulling out toenails but we are doing is leaving them in really uncomfortable positions on the floor in the cold for hours and hours and hours listening to music that's way too loud that they hate on many cultural bases you

know just things to piss them off and break them down. but i think that most of them are already pretty broke and i don't know how effective these things were because i think the the just the just being in the cage alone has already broken a lot of people you feel it really changed your life oh definitely they were for a long time these feelings of you know this this guilt these feelings that these this was wrong wait on me very heavily because i think that this was a really huge wake up call for me and i don't know if i would have wanted to continue to be in my self centered little american bubble was there one thing in particular was it the war itself or was it what you had to do or both it made you feel that it's all those things it's all of them together it's that it's that my experience in this one place was so horrible but this one place is just i mean really just the smallest tip of the iceberg the awareness of the amount of injustice that's going on in this war to me is is total izing it doesn't allow me or him to think about anything else.

music torture this perfidious idea has been around for thousands of years until however the koreans and the chinese were the fust to systematically use music as

a psychological weapon during the korean war in the early one nine hundred fifty s. three years north korea and china for going south korea and the united states. more than seven thousand americans were captured many were tortured the idea of of like north east being used in interrogation really started with the north koreans and the chinese and starting the korean war it was you know it was called brainwashing it got very big into toy so why i guess since that time there has been a belief that that music would work and interrogation purposes. after the korean war experiments were conducted at mcgill university to better understand the methods of the chinese scientists and talk to drugs and to test subjects kept them awake for days and blasted them with music with devastating effects. the results of these

tests were supposed to better train american soldiers to withstand torture but the cia used them to optimize their own interrogation methods the us intelligence guidelines show how an anti torture training program was turned into a manual for torture as a cynical case of reengineering. the goal is to confuse the prisoners to break them psychologically and to make them feel awfully weak and powerless. two of the preferred tools noise and loud music. the cia allows up to seventy two hours of continuous deafening sound during interrogations making it impossible to sleep. my understanding is that the cia believes that would be easy to interrogate these people if they

were so weak and if they if they didn't have the will that they were brought in with but i have i have absolutely no incentives for why or what went on. but how does music torture work to find out christopher is on his way to meet a man who knows everything about torture methods. i don't think music has a dark side so much as the use of music can have a dark side. you can write a song that's very dark where you can use a perfectly normal song for dark purposes. any song i would think if you played it

over and over and loud enough and incessantly enough for long enough time to drive anybody crazy. in rural pennsylvania chris wants to meet mike ritz he's a former u.s. army interrogator and now works as a consultant for the government. but he hasn't lost his old skills. but there are few people who know more about music torture them he does like hey chris cerf our yeah. i love trying to understand a little bit better about how music is used in interrogation the event name of the game here is to create some dependency of that prisoner on the interrogator you want the prisoner dependent on the interrogator and the more you can isolate that person the better you're going to be able to do that and sound is in isolation you know up here whereas you know you saw. a lot of reports of guantanamo bay and staff other things like mittens said there's

a tactile oh i say or goggles they can't see or hoods you know these are all designed to isolate the individual and sound as another way of doing so just having so much sound that you can experience any other sounds correctly on. so you make any of yourself think right so for that point of view just it's not so much that it's musical it's just that it's incredibly loud and then it's keeps you from hearing anything also could keep you awake so you won't sleep so it creates some sort of sleep deprivation it's all designed to keep you closed in your own small world as a prisoner so that you can't you have this fear of the unknown and the stress sort of building and but then you're still saying that it's the person who saves you from the partially that has a chance to get a good answer for you to get to get to the truth right i mean that's what people need to focus on that this is about the truth so it's a matter of balancing things i mean you do want some some stress because what gets you to talk to me is the stress i put on you it's the release from the stress and

i'd love to get some sense of what it feels like to have this happen to you. if you think through some way we could we could try that out now i mean we're certainly willing to manipulate you just i can't believe i'm asking you have to recognize that you're not going to have the same shock of capture experience i hope you know it's coming and there's certainly a psychology to that so what we're doing is a very contrived but you probably will get a general sense of it and you certainly get a sense of the isolation and that's what you think all experience most is so isolating. and i just been begging for some relief from the right and so when when when the feeling is that you're looking for that relief that's time to come talk to me about your problem and you'll come but you'll come to me if i don't come to you and i can't come and you're not here any and. you have no control right that's the point ok i'm giving up now.

all right stupid this and i got a few rules for you before you go down with me do you hear me. first thing the last thing out of your mouth is thirty you understand the. first thing and last thing out of your mouth the sir do you understand that yes sir try sir yes sir dumbing sir yes sir good second thing always have your poems out do not bow a fist at me while think you're trying to hit me if i think you're trying to hit me i'll rip it and head off you understand me yes try sir yes sir dummy sir yes sir i got a dumb one next thing never be taller than i am tall do you understand that yes well you taller than i am tall are you taller than i am tall right now no sir you're not you looked on that i am tall so i had to answer very good.

ok sir but i'm moving. it's going to. come up. when you say yes her all right let's go yes sir yes sir dummy sir yes sir good going to hand out for you john i am a. going to. mike

mentioned earlier that you forget the reality and of course i began to wonder now exactly how long is this going to go on how long does my good friend with a camera think this is a cool thing to shoot and how soon should i break stylus or court i have in the hands think miss it i really just realizing this i think and i think like a prisoner i began to think well they get mad at me if i start kneeling what will happen if i lay down with him when he come and hit me and i mean the fact that i would actually even think that gives you a sense of what this would be like after more than a few minutes a day. the

sound of the university of montreal scientists examine how music affects our brains and our feelings. the set up is unique musicologists scientists and psychologists combine their expertise to find out for example whether music can trigger particular negative emotions or quality that would make it tougher to torture. the leg so now sensory dissonance means for example two notes that are very close in terms of pitch pus not this dissonance creates a kind of friction in the outer. brain interprets this as something unpleasant we also know that dissonant music activates certain brain regions that are associated with the perception of negative emotions except sounding my sony get the.

this experiment shows how our bodies respond to unpleasant sounds these electrodes measure skin conductivity heart rate and blood pressure while the test person listens to music. the candidate writes this piece as pleasant. but the body reacts very differently to the dissonant piece she writes it has unpleasant. this feeling has nothing to do with musical taste or cultural background but is related to how specific structures in the brain respond to music . the amygdala regions that's not ok to do in the temporal lobes sorry about the scientific terms. but they said near the center of the brain all

self-will but there is one on each side dish equity with the life they are shaped like omens. and made up of different causes you in particular to think what's special about the emic dollar is that they have connections to several other brain regions. visual system and the auditory systems you know have a clear standards so they are well placed to receive signals for example acoustic alarm signals and then send to several other regions of the brain on the piano where you toss midlife and weed out also know that music can trigger a fear and that the recognition of this fear takes place in this structure if i get a little woozy sauce it's to get. the results of this work show that music kind of like discomfort anxiety and even fear perfect qualities for a psychological weapon.

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i know but my my my my my my the top of the u.s. says it wants to win the hearts and minds of the afghan people but it sure is losing a lot of credibility lately.