I'd Rather Be Waterboarded

Al-Gore Jazeera Explores Sesame Street Songs As Instruments Of Torture

Songs of War, a recent documentary produced for Arabic news agency Al Jazeera, explores claims that music from Sesame Street as well as heavy metal and rap songs were used in the torture of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.

After being alerted that some of his educational children’s music was used as a weapon of war, GRAMMY award-winning songwriter Christopher Cerf set out on a mission to learn more about what he believed to be an “inhumane” use of his work. Al Jazeera’s cameras followed as Cerf personally interviewed former soldiers and detainees.

According to the report, prisoners, shackled and held in private cells, were subjected to near-deafening music from Metallica, AC/DC, Marilyn Manson, Drowning Pool, Eminem, Bruce Springsteen and Rage Against The Machine in addition to popular children’s classics from Sesame Street and Barney the purple dinosaur.

I will make one exception for the Sesame Street music, however: