One man's tune is another man's torment.

Any parent who's ever listened to the raspy growl and shredding guitars of Cannibal Corpse emanating from a teenage boy's bedroom knows that the joy of music is in the ear of the beholder.

That's well known to the U.S. government, too. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that prison guards at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where America holds suspected terrorists, played a range of songs at high volume that would thrill your average head banger, but was meant to torment the average terror suspect. These extended sessions, which the CIA insists ended in 2003, were designed to break the will of prisoners.

Now the musicians who recorded those tracks want the feds to change their tune. Last week, Trent Reznor, Tom Morello, Steve Earle, Pearl Jam, Jackson Browne, R.E.M. and others launched the Campaign to Close Guantanamo, a high-profile push to shut down the prison and get more details about the government's use of music during interrogation sessions.

"At Guantanamo, the U.S. government turned a jukebox into an instrument of torture," said Thomas Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive, the independent, nongovernmental research institute housed at George Washington University that first learned the details of the military's tactic.

The torture-edition of the U.S. Navy iPod reportedly included songs by AC/DC, the Bee Gees, Metallica, Marilyn Manson and Britney Spears, who famously told CNN in 2003 that she supported then-President George Bush "in every decision that he makes."

Oops, then he tortured again.

Also included on the playlist was the Meow Mix TV jingle and the theme song to Sesame Street: "Sunny day, sweepin' the clouds away, on my way to where the air is sweet..."

Apparently, the prison guards weren't lacking in situational irony.

During one 10-hour interrogation, documents show that suspected terrorist Mohamedou Ould Slahi was assailed nonstop with a light show and a loud recording of Drowning Pool's hard-rock anthem "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor."

Central Intelligence Agency spokesman George Little told the Associated Press that the CIA used music only for security, "not for punitive purposes--and at levels [79 decibels far below a live rock band."

Law enforcement agencies have been using this tactic for years, with mixed results: In 1993, the FBI blasted an eclectic playlist--including Tibetan chants, bugle calls, Christmas carols and Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'"--at the besieged Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in an attempt to unhinge the renegade religious cult.

A decade later, the government reprised the tactic.

"Guantanamo is known around the world as one of the places where human beings have been tortured--from waterboarding to stripping, hooding and forcing detainees into humiliating sexual acts--playing music for 72 hours in a row at volumes just below that to shatter the eardrums," Tom Morello noted. "Guantanamo may be Dick Cheney's idea of America, but it's not mine.

"The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me--we need to end torture and close Guantanamo now."

NATIONAL CAMPAIGN TO CLOSE GUANTANAMO

Learn more at closegitmonow.org . closegitmonow.org.

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