Poor David Gray. For those who don't keep up with these kinds of things, the successful MOR songster has had quite an upsetting week. As a purveyor of gentle, low-key melodies, Gray must surely have envisioned that his oeuvre would most commonly be utilised at dinner parties. Or maybe on the soundtrack of a cookery show, over shots of some asparagus, and Jamie Oliver raising his glass to the camera.

Imagine Gray's bewilderment, then, to learn the news from the interrogation chambers at Guantanamo Bay. There, apparently, US forces have been repeatedly playing Gray's upbeat hit single, Babylon, to torture inmates. Stuck on repeat for up to 14 hours a day, Gray's song joins Barney the Dinosaur's I Love You, Metallica's Enter Sandman and the theme tune from Sesame Street as songs being used by the Army's Psyops, or Psychological Operations Company, to break the will of their captives.

Perhaps I have spent too long in media and marketing circles, but it does strike me that there's practically a Guantanamo Greatest Hits in this, now. The pre-publicity is dynamite. I can't quite believe that Simon Cowell hasn't licensed the idea, and maybe got Chico involved in some way.

In the UK, reaction to Gray being used in Guantanamo has been fairly unanimous. In that everyone has found it hilarious. As I pointed out to my husband, as a rock critic, sitting in a room all day, listening to David Gray against his will is pretty much his job. My sister, who works in Woolworths, chipped in with the information that, if you really want to psychologically destablise someone, the store's policy of playing the Now That's What I Call Xmas! double album non-stop from October 31 to December 24, is far more devastating. “I once self-harmed myself with a stapler when Stop The Cavalry came on, so I could get an early break,” she sighed. “And I'd do it again, if I had to.”

Yes. Of all the people involved in this incident, David Gray comes out the worst. Everyone's laughing at him. But as Gray pointed out, this is a fundamentally wrong-footed reaction. “What we're talking about here is people in a darkened room, in handcuffs, bags over their head, with music blaring at them. That is nothing but torture. No one wants to think about the fact that we've gone above all legal process, and we're torturing people.” And of course, you realise that Gray is right. Military interrogators don't, by and large, vaguely tease their captors. They're not just winding them up a bit with Babylon before lunch. If a torture technique has been used for ten years by the biggest military power in the world, you can probably assume that they've found it to be quite effective.

Because, like an evil inversion of everything your mother ever told you, the American military has discovered something important. That the greatest weapon really is a sense of humour, after all. Beat a prisoner with a chair-leg and international criticism is vociferous. Engage in something which could ostensibly be described as “quite silly”, however, and the world is fatally confused. After all, if you're at the UN, and spend all day being handed memos about floods and asteroids and genocide in Darfur, it's hard to get instantly outraged about some guy in Cuba being made to listen to a David Gray single on repeat. And by creating that moment of bemusement, the Americans have managed to invent a war-crime that not only doesn't meet with protest, but that people are borderline fond of. People find David Gray being used as a weapon of torture quite...cute.

“Isn't it great that the Western world has found a way of getting information out of people that doesn't involve electrocution - just iTunes?” I used to think to myself, before I had considered the full facts. “It's like we've taken a sad song, and made it better. By torturing people with it.”

Presumably delighted by the discovery that Kofi Annan will never go to the bottom of the international stairs and tell America to turn its stereo down, the Americans have been looking into a whole range of other, similarly uncriticisable weapons. According to Jon Ronson's frequently amazing book, The Men Who Stare At Goats, the US Army also, at one time, worked at developing a Gay Bomb. When dropped into a battle zone, it would have made soldiers “sexually irresistible” to each other, and presumably made John Lennon's axiom Make Love, Not War an almost instantaneous physical reality. Subsequent classic films on the horror of war would have included The Pulling Fields, The Bums Of Navarone and Having Ryan's Privates.

Had the US Army pressed on with this weapon, it would have been borderline impossible to mobilise solid, international protest, such as Greenham Common, against it. Aside from the fact that most TV reports on the subject would be fatally compromised by news anchors giggling, there's also the consideration that Gay Bomb protesters could be accused of homophobia - and so prey to a fatal counter-demonstration by Peter Tatchell. And I can't even imagine how Newsnight's computer graphics team would illustrate the Theatre of War. Perhaps they would have to rename it the Theatre of Phwoargh. And start referring to “extremely friendly fire”.

So is all this a cunning new move for the future of warfare? Introducing weapons and interrogation methods that are so ludicrous, peace protesters end up feeling a bit embarrassed even raising the subject? If so, it has to be said, it's a pretty good one. Silencing discussion on the atrocities of war not because they are so unspeakable - but because everyone's afraid they'll look like a humourless twerp who missed out the joke if they do.

Times Recommends

• There's no future for prophets of doom
• New Labour family seethes with hatred
• Shallow, fake... Palin's beyond parody