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In 2008, reports came that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had been tortured by songs such as Decide’s “F*ck Your God” and Eminem’s “White America.” 

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According to The Huffington Post, a new documentary from Al Jazeera shows that detainees may also have been subjected to musical torture of a softer variety.

Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base were forced to wear headphones blasting music from Sesame Street on repeat for hours or days on end.

Christopher Cerf, the award-winning composer of Sesame Street, was stunned to learn how his music was being exploited.

“My first reaction was this just can’t possibly be true.. 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 music in Guantanamo to actually do deep, long-term interrogations and obviously to inflict enough pain on prisoners so they would talk.”

This isn’t the first time that music from Sesame Street has been used to break the will of prisoners. In 2003, the U.S. reportedly used the soundtrack to enervate Iraqi POWs.

This sounds like something you would see in a movie. There’s no reason that a country whose sole existence is predicated upon the ideals that liberty and justice is an inalienable right should have allowed these egregious human rights violations.