Debate:Is Rap music torture?

According to ABC News, suspected terrorists undergoing coercive interrogation have been " forced to listen to rap artist Eminem's 'Slim Shady' album. The music was so foreign to them it made them frantic" [1] Is this dehumanizing treatment banned by the Geneva Convention, and if not, should it be?

I suspect the detail about the kind of music was mentioned to make the treatment sound more ludicrous and less cruel. If you can encourage people to joke about whether rap music is torture, you're deflecting attention from the general character of the treatment itself.

I suspect that the significance of the music's being "foreign" is that the patterns to it are unfamiliar, and it would be preceived as unpredictable noise rather than as music.

What volume level was it played at? Was the real point to induce sleep deprivation?

If you played "music" to me at 110 db, continuously, it wouldn't really matter whether it was rap, Balinese Gamelan music, or Khachaturian's Sabre Dance, it would deprive me of sleep.

But if you say "they were subjected to intense noise" it sounds like it could be torture, whereas if you say "they were subjected to rap music," it sounds like a joke. Dpbsmith 21:23, 23 April 2007 (EDT)

What he said. I was too lazy to type it myself. As far as "torture" or banning under the GC (as if we'd pay attention to such "outdated concepts"), once you reach a certain volume level, which is easy to do in small cinder block rooms, it's not only not "music", it's simply a physical assault - it causes permanent damage, for instance. Human 00:21, 24 April 2007 (EDT)