A coalition of musicians including Pearl Jam and R. E. M. backed a formal demand yesterday to be told if their songs had been used to torture detainees in Guantánamo Bay and Iraq.

There have been many allegations by former prisoners that they were blasted with excruciatingly loud music for months on end — a tactic that is banned under the UN Convention Against Torture but not yet from the US Army Field Manual.

The musicians spoke out as a freedom of information request was lodged by the US campaign group No More Guantánamos, a legal move backed by the British human rights group Reprieve, which has been campaigning against “music torture” for more than a year.

According to evidence gained by human rights organisations, the list of music used included songs ranging from the death metal band Deicide’s F*** Your God to the song most frequently blasted at inmates, I Love You by Barney the Purple Dinosaur, the children’s TV character. Former detainees have said that the tactic was one of the worst and most painful used against them.

Thomas Blanton, the executive director of the National Security Archive, a freedom of information organisation helping the musicians, said: “At Guantánamo the US Government turned a jukebox into an instrument of torture. The musicians and the public have the right to know how an expression of popular culture was transformed into an interrogation technique.”

Tom Morello, guitarist with the band Rage Against the Machine — whose song Killing in the Name of was also used — said: “The fact that music I helped create was used as a tactic against humanity sickens me.”

The musicians’ campaign comes as the Obama Administration has been forced to concede that the President’s pledge to shut Guantánamo by January will fail. His bold promise to close the prison within a year of coming to office has run into myriad political and logistical problems, including fierce opposition at home to the transportation of detainees to US prisons and a reluctance by Western allies to receive many of the remaining inmates. Congress is refusing to fund the closure of the facility, which still holds about 220 prisoners.

After the September 11 attacks and the War on Terror it appears that the use of loud music first became common inside Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, scene of the infamous inmate abuse photographs.

Haj Ali, the hooded man in one of the most notorious pictures, told of being stripped and forced to listen to a looped version of David Gray’s Babylon at a volume so loud that he said he thought his head “would explode”. Metallica’s Enter Sandman was often used in Guantánamo Bay, while Queen’s We Are the Champions was a favourite among US guards at Camp Cropper in Iraq. One Iraqi talked of being taken to an unidentified location and blasted with music in a building referred to as “the disco”.

Last year the retired Lieutenant-Colonel Dan Kuehl, of the US Air Force, who teaches psychological operations to the US military, invoked the Old Testament use of loud music. “Joshua’s army used horns to strike fear into the hearts of the people of Jericho,” he told the St Petersburg Times in Florida. “His men might not have been able to break down literal walls with their trumpets but the noise eroded the enemy’s courage.”

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