Music: Torture tunes.

The Wall Street Journal has a short article on some of the songs and musicians that the U.S. military has used to "enhance" their interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The number one tune on the WSJ's short list is disheartening.

1. Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA"
It should stand as no surprise that a large majority of the songs used in Guantanamo Bay consisted of seemingly patriotic ditties like Springsteen's most famous American anthem. One Spanish citizen accused of being linked to the terrorist network Al-Qaida claimed his interrogators played this song the majority of the time during his entire two year stay in the Cuban prison. However, Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director of the UK human rights charity Reprieve, noted that it may not have been the most patriotic choice since "the message of the song is harshly critical of American policy, condemning the war in Vietnam and describing a veteran's effort to find work."

Is there any modern pop song with a weirder political life than the Boss's anti-heroic, bitterly pointed tune? When Springsteen originally conceived the tune, it was low-fi, minimalist number that could have easily found it way on Nebraska or Darkness on the Edge of Town. Eventually, Springsteen decided to go for a cognitively dissonant epic feel that would, at once, be both an ironic take on bombastic American triumphalism and a sonic statement that elevated the size of the story to the point it could not be ignored.

At least, he thought it couldn't. The protest tune quickly became a hit and then, with greater irony than Springsteen could conceive, it became the campaign theme song for Ronald Reagan. Springsteen demanded the Reagan campaign stop using his tune, but the damage was done. It's virtually impossible not to hear this clear non-celebratory song and not catch a disagreeable whiff of (thoroughly undeserved) Reagan Era jingoism.

Though even that doesn't beat the irony of the fact that a song about a forgotten veteran of the archetypal American military quagmire has been refashioned for use as a weapon in our latest foreign adventures.

I wonder if the soldiers blasting this music at prisoners ever listen to the lyrics and ponder how they'll be treated when they come back home. Like the vet in the song, they'll be returning from a massively unpopular conflict into an economy that most likely can't reabsorb them. It must be odd, doing this nation's dirtiest work, all to a soundtrack that serves to remind them of how disposable they are.

The article doesn't discuss the efficacy of blasting loud noise at prisoners, but a discussion of prolonged and repetitious exposure to loud noise appears in John Conroy's Ordinary People, Unspeakable Acts: The Dynamics of Torture. In 1971, twelve Irish prisoners were rounded up by the British government as part of an anti-terrorism push called Operation Demetrius. The prisoners formed the test case for the application of the Five Techniques: a torture regimen devised by the British and Irish governments that included wall-standing (rigid standing positions that prisoners kept until their muscles gave out), hooding, subjection to noise, deprivation of sleep, deprivation of food and drink. The combined affect of these techniques is horrific and potentially deadly. Notably, one of the prisoners interviewed stated that, of all the things that were done to him, he could only remember one of techniques clearly: Years, later he still vividly recalled the noises he was exposed to.

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True Crime: Fakenstein?

THe NY Times is reporting on a multiple court cases involving the forgery of horror memorabilia. From the article:

Over the last several months, collectors of movie memorabilia have been rocked by claims that a Georgia-based collector, Kerry T. Haggard, has corrupted what had been seen as a relatively safe market for classic horror film posters by selling or trading forgeries of the promotional art for pictures like “Frankenstein," "Dracula,” and "The Mummy."

In July a Los Angeles collector, Ronald Magid, filed suit against Mr. Haggard in Federal District Court in California. Mr. Magid claimed he had been persuaded to swap Mr. Haggard 20 genuine posters and other memorabilia valued at about $150,000 for nine items Mr. Magid said were fakes.

In August another collector, James Gresham, filed a similar suit in Federal District Court in Michigan. That suit claims that Mr. Haggard had joined a restoration artist to create forgeries, 28 of which Mr. Gresham bought or traded for in deals he valued at $852,400.

In an answer filed on Monday to the California complaint, Mr. Haggard denied committing any fraud, contending in turn that Mr. Magid had not only damaged his reputation with smears on various Internet sites, but also sold him items that Mr. Haggard, upon reselling them, were told were fake. As of Friday, federal court records available online did not show a response by Mr. Haggard in the Michigan case.

Because I don't trade in high-priced horror collectables, I can find humor in Haggard's profoundly skewed sense of self importance. Again, from the article:

In response to an e-mailed query, Mr. Haggard said he was the victim of a “colossal frame-up.”

He added: “The monsters of fiction that I have loved & adored so all my life have destroyed my life in a conspiracy not seen since Lee Harvey Oswald."

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News: Ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting tang walla walla, bing bang.

I don't even know how to introduce this, so let's just cut straight to the article from the BBC about what appears to be a giant, possibly government-backed witch hunt in Gambia.

Up to 1,000 Gambian villagers have been abducted by "witch doctors" to secret detention centres and forced to drink potions, a human rights group says.

Amnesty International said some forced to drink the concoctions developed kidney problems, and two had died.

Officials in the police, army and the president's personal protection guard had accompanied the "witch doctors" in the bizarre roundup, said witnesses.

Gambia's government was unavailable to comment on the claims.

The human rights group asserted that many of those abducted were elderly.

The London-based rights group said the witch hunters, said to be from neighbouring Guinea, were invited into Gambia after the death of the president's aunt earlier this year was blamed on witchcraft.

To put this in scientific context, in 2007 the president of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, announced that he had developed a cure for AIDS. MSNBC describes Jammeh's treatment:

From the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia’s president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eyes in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste onto the rib cage of the patient — a concoction he claims is a cure for AIDS.

He then orders the thin man to swallow a bitter yellow drink, followed by two bananas.

“Whatever you do, there are bound to be skeptics, but I can tell you my method is foolproof,” President Yahya Jammeh told an Associated Press reporter, surrounded by bodyguards in his presidential compound. “Mine is not an argument, mine is a proof. It’s a declaration. I can cure AIDS and I will.”

To properly work, the cure must be taken on a Thursday and, more troubling, the patient must stop taking any anti-retroviral medicine.

Though it is not clear exactly what he thinks he is doing, critics have suggested that Jammeh's faith in his herbal "cure" stems from his mistaken notion that AIDS is caused by some sort of intestinal parasite. He also claims to be able to cure asthma and high blood pressure.

To put this in a human rights context, Jammeh – who is, curiously enough, the Vice President of the International Parliament for Safety and Peace – has been linked to the deaths of 12 student protestors, at least 2 journalists critical of his administration, 44 Ghanaian immigrants, and 10 foreign nationals denounced variously as criminals and spies. In 2008, he announced that his government would begin a policy of beheading homosexuals. Several years ago, folks started an online petition to get the International Criminal Court to indict him for crimes against humanity.

Jammeh is actually serving his third term as president, winning the 2006 election with nearly 70% of the popular vote.

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Stuff: Zombies and your money.

As if pop horror's seemingly endless wallowing in zombie crudolla wasn't spirit-killing enough, the phenomenon has reached a new misery inducing levels by being linked to the other great soul-numbing fact of modern American life: the economy.

Welcome to the era of the American zombie bank.

For a group not noted for their poetic sensibilities, financial types have some truly descriptive and colorful slang. Way back in 1997, in a Wall Street Journal article about the "lost decade" in Japan (a ten-year slump in Japan's economy experienced zero growth), economist Edward Kane coined the term zombie bank. Zombie banks are created when a combination of government support and shady accounting practices not only prevent banks from failing, but turns them in sucking black holes of crappy value. In the colorful phrasing of WSJ reporter Martin Mayer:

Such walking dead devour their own good assets every night, and thanks to the magic of compound interest they become exponentially more insolvent . . . But governments and central banks vouched for the zombie banks, which were able to keep borrowing dollars from banks in other countries.

In theory, a propped up bank could be saved by the correct balance of wise stewardship and carefully managed injections of cash. In practice, a often badly handled combo results in a bank that just keeps negating the cash injections with its ever growing debt. This doesn't just obliterate any wealth the government may throw at the bank, but starts to drag on the health of other banks. As mentioned above, the zombies continue to borrow money just like a healthy bank would. Unfortunately, this wealth doesn't circulate back out into the system in the form of profit-generating loans. Instead, like the government support, it vanishes down the ever-growing debt-hole of the zombie bank.

This grim term invented to explain the collapse of the Pacific Rim economic boom has, zombie-like, risen again. Only, this time, experts are using it to describe American banks receiving bailout money from the gov.

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