WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: On Using Happy Flowers Tunes to Interrogate Iraqi Prisoners
Listen to these songs and read how this GI uses it to get information from witnesses. Click on the CD Covers Art to hear 2 cuts. From Wkipedia The musical group, Happy Flowers, was formed in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1983 by John Beers (“Mr. Horribly Charred Infant”) and Charlie Kramer (“Mr. Anus”). The band is known for combining improvisational tuneless noise with wailing vocals and primal screams. Their humorous songs consist of rants about childhood traumas.
For example; We came across a bomb in the road and while waiting for EOD to arrive to disarm it, I noticed a guy on the other side of a canal watching the area with binoculars. So we have a bomb, we have a triggerman… unfortunatly, by the time we can get around the canal he managed to escape. The triggerman was within 50 meters of a house. We go to the house and of course the gentleman living there has seen nothing. We had questioned this guy before and not gotten any information so this time, we put him in the Humvee, tell him we are taking him with us and start playing “Mom, I Gave the Cat Some Acid” over and over.
After about an hour of Happy Flowers and being told that we don’t want to take him, and that if he would tell us what he knows we will take him back home, he finally tells us who the triggerman is, where we can find him, where other bombs are hidden and ID’s 3 corrupt policemen.
Here is the problem in Iraq. The Iraqis understand that we follow a code of conduct and the answer to every question we ask is always “I don’t know anything about that” Unless you catch a terrorist red handed, they know you will release them in 2 days. We are not allowed to harm a prisoner and I have absolutely no problem with that, but you have to be creative to get information. That’s Psychological Warfare comes in. It doesn’t work on the hardened terrorist, but it does work on the guy who knows who the terrorist is, or is involved but not in a major way. Such as the Farmer who hides bombs because he is told if he doesn’t he will be killed. If we can make his stay with us unpleasant and make him feel that it will continue until he is willing to give a statement that will allow us to apprehend the real bad guys and put them away, that’s all we can really hope for.