Friday, April 29, 2016

In the Cold War period of the 1950s, the CIA installed Radio Free Europe[21] in Glória do Ribatejo, Portugal, and on June 7, 1956, officially formalized the relation by inviting the new PIDE’s director, António Neves Graça, to visit CIA headquarters.[22] Here are two brief examples from a top-secret document with ten articles and several sections and clauses, entitled “Proposed Agreement Between the Policia International e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)”

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In 1957 one of the prisoners, Humberto de Lima Morais, stated in his affidavit that after being subjected to the statue torture for several days, he had begun to hear a familiar voice at night. Listening more closely, he had been able to discern the words of a dialogue, in which one voice was clearly his mother’s. She was saying: “‘I am alone and I have no one else, please.’ And the deep male voice of an agent, he thought, had replied, ‘It is only for a day or two, madam.’”[19] However, he could be inclined to admit that it may have been a hallucination, due to his weak physical state. The power of memory on our deepest perceptions and desires is paramount, so that each memory of a voice or other sound is always mediated, deferred and transformed, to a point that “we no longer know what we heard and what we think we’d heard.”[20] Nevertheless, based on similar cases and statements, such apparent hallucinations were actually the result of the use of manipulated sound materials, assembled to produce a state of emotional and psychological confusion through indirect listening, characteristic of acousmatic violence, with the aim of breaking and invading the prisoner’s subjectivity and morale.  

 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mp/9460447.0009.101/--acousmatic-and-acoustic-violence-and-torture-in-the-estado?rgn=main;view=fulltext

Cielo e terra (duet with Dante Thomas)