Music: Torture tunes.

The Wall Street Journal has a short article on some of the songs and musicians that the U.S. military has used to "enhance" their interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The number one tune on the WSJ's short list is disheartening.

1. Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA"
It should stand as no surprise that a large majority of the songs used in Guantanamo Bay consisted of seemingly patriotic ditties like Springsteen's most famous American anthem. One Spanish citizen accused of being linked to the terrorist network Al-Qaida claimed his interrogators played this song the majority of the time during his entire two year stay in the Cuban prison. However, Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director of the UK human rights charity Reprieve, noted that it may not have been the most patriotic choice since "the message of the song is harshly critical of American policy, condemning the war in Vietnam and describing a veteran's effort to find work."

Is there any modern pop song with a weirder political life than the Boss's anti-heroic, bitterly pointed tune? When Springsteen originally conceived the tune, it was low-fi, minimalist number that could have easily found it way on Nebraska or Darkness on the Edge of Town. Eventually, Springsteen decided to go for a cognitively dissonant epic feel that would, at once, be both an ironic take on bombastic American triumphalism and a sonic statement that elevated the size of the story to the point it could not be ignored.

At least, he thought it couldn't. The protest tune quickly became a hit and then, with greater irony than Springsteen could conceive, it became the campaign theme song for Ronald Reagan. Springsteen demanded the Reagan campaign stop using his tune, but the damage was done. It's virtually impossible not to hear this clear non-celebratory song and not catch a disagreeable whiff of (thoroughly undeserved) Reagan Era jingoism.

Though even that doesn't beat the irony of the fact that a song about a forgotten veteran of the archetypal American military quagmire has been refashioned for use as a weapon in our latest foreign adventures.

I wonder if the soldiers blasting this music at prisoners ever listen to the lyrics and ponder how they'll be treated when they come back home. Like the vet in the song, they'll be returning from a massively unpopular conflict into an economy that most likely can't reabsorb them. It must be odd, doing this nation's dirtiest work, all to a soundtrack that serves to remind them of how disposable they are.

The article doesn't discuss the efficacy of blasting loud noise at prisoners, but a discussion of prolonged and repetitious exposure to loud noise appears in John Conroy's Ordinary People, Unspeakable Acts: The Dynamics of Torture. In 1971, twelve Irish prisoners were rounded up by the British government as part of an anti-terrorism push called Operation Demetrius. The prisoners formed the test case for the application of the Five Techniques: a torture regimen devised by the British and Irish governments that included wall-standing (rigid standing positions that prisoners kept until their muscles gave out), hooding, subjection to noise, deprivation of sleep, deprivation of food and drink. The combined affect of these techniques is horrific and potentially deadly. Notably, one of the prisoners interviewed stated that, of all the things that were done to him, he could only remember one of techniques clearly: Years, later he still vividly recalled the noises he was exposed to.

Stuff: Torture was their business.

The NY Times has a disheartening profile on Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the contractors who created the C.I.A.'s guidelines for extreme interrogations. And what a well-qualified duo they were:

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

Former shrinks for the military's SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program a the Air Force Survival School, these two gents parlayed their knowledge into a consulting business that reworked the torture techniques SERE training was supposed to help US troops resist into a suite of techniques C.I.A. operatives could use against suspected terrorists. From these to "experts," the C.I.A. received a bundle of techniques derived from Chinese tortures used on captured American and UN troops during the Korean War. These techniques included "slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and waterboarding." The goal of these techniques, according to created "a comparable level of fear and brutality to flying planes into buildings."

When Abu Zubaydah was captured in March of 2002, Mitchell and Jessen were called in to consult with interrogators who had questions about the legality of the some of the techniques the consultants had endorsed. Mitchell and Jessen must have been very persuasive about the legality of their plans: Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in two weeks, an average of five times a day.

Torture pays the bills! Mitchell and Jessen made $1,000 to $2,000 a day. Just how much the C.I.A. paid them in total is classified, but the amount is estimated to have been in the millions.

Books: Your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandpappy's torture porn stash.

A new German history on topic of torture reveals that our distant ancestors showed a profound flair for creating truly crappy ways to treat people. Profiled in the English-language edition of Der Spiegel, Extreme Violence in the Visuals and Texts of Antiquity by Martin Zimmerman, the political use of violence intended to inspire "loathing, dread, horror and disgust."

What do we learn from the bloodthirsty depravity of the ancients? Well, mainly that it sucked to be an ancient Assyrian. From the article:

But the Assyrians seem to have been the masters of brutality. They were also extremely verbose about the grisly ends they wreaked upon their enemies. "I will hack up the flesh and then carry it with me, to show off in other countries," exulted Ashurbanipal, an Assyrian king who reigned from 668 to 627 BC. And his heir liked to cut open the bellies of his opponents "as though they were young rams."

"The king was the deadliest," explains Andreas Fuchs, a specialist in the study of the Assyrians. "It was he alone who decided what would happen to the victims. The ability to make those decisions was the very essence of personal, royal power."

Shock and awe at such punishments permeated every dealing one had with the ruler. For example: "A message from the king to the Governor of Kaleh: "700 bales of straw. On the first of the month, at the very latest. One day late and you're dead."

Provincial governors who did not co-operate could reckon with the most horrible of deaths.

Flaying involved the delinquent official being staked to a peg and having the skin on his back torn off. Staking involved the executioner hammering a stake through the victim's lubricated anus. The goal was to place the rounded, wooden stake so carefully that it only just pushed the internal organs aside. Many victims lived for days skewered like this.

Brutal, admittedly, but even more bizarre is how downright surreal some of these sinister tortures were. The Persian practice of "throwing victims to the ashes" for example, sounds like something the writers of Saw XXIV might well throw into their movie:

The sentence, "throw them into the ashes" meant that the candidate would have to stand for days in a room filled with ash. At some stage the person would collapse from fatigue, at which point they would breathe the ash in. Even if they managed to pick themselves up, their lungs would fill up with grey flakes sooner or later, resulting in slow suffocation.

Ugh.

The images above and below come from the lurid, creepy image gallery that accompanies the article.

Link proliferation: I'm telling her every lie that you know that I never did.

You're not from around here

B-Sol of VoH, nationally and internationally known as the hardest working man in the list making business, has posted a ranking of the best foreign horror flicks of all time.

Here's the bottom 10. The number one is a bit of a truly unexpected upset.

10. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) – Germany
11. Audition (1999) – Japan
12. The Host (2006) – South Korea
13. Zombi 2 (1979) – Italy
14. Dead Alive (1992) – New Zealand
15. Ringu (1998) – Japan
16. Inside (2007) – France
17. [REC] (2007) – Spain
18. Shaun of the Dead (2004) – United Kingdom
19. Wolf Creek (2005) – Australia
20. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) – United Kingdom

Not even a nice place to visit

Foreign Policy follows up with a completely different kind of list. Here's the worst prisons in the world, including Israel's Camp 1391, the officially non-existent "Gitmo" of Israel, and Equatorial Guinea's Black Beach prison, where, according to Amnesty International, incarceration is essentially "a slow, lingering death sentence."

Oddly, one of the worst prisons in the world can be found in Paris. Here's FP's description of France's La Santé prison: a little slice of Hell nestled right in the City of Lights.

The last remaining prison in Paris -- it's located near the Montparnasse area -- was established in 1867 and has housed everyone from surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire to legendary assassin Carlos the Jackal. The prison's name, which means "health," might seem ironic considering the conditions inside. Mattresses are infested with lice, and because prisoners are only allowed two cold showers per week, skin diseases are common. Overcrowded cells, rat infestations, rape, and the humiliation of prisoners' families were also common.

In 1999 there were 124 suicide attempts in La Santé, almost five times as many as in California's entire prison system during the same period. These facts only became available in 2000 when the head surgeon of the prison, Véronique Vasseur, published a bestselling book chronicling abuses in the prison. The book caused an uproar and a celebrity campaign to improve prisons throughout France, but little in the way of progress. France's prison conditions were condemned by the U.N. Human Rights Committee and the country's own minister of justice in 2008.

Satan is real

The music blog Aquarium Drunkard had is offering a free mp3 of the Louvin Brothers' famous tune "Satan is Real," from the cult album of the same name. From AD's intro:

The Louvin Brothers’ album Satan Is Real is without a doubt the Rosetta stone of fire and brimstone country gospel. Released in 1960, wrapped up in quite possibly the greatest iconic album cover of all time, the LP pulled no punches.

I like that polyester look

This has crap all to do with horror, but since we're talking music, the 20th anniversary (yes, you're that old) remastered edition of the Beastie Boy's Paul's Boutique is now available for listening enjoyment. And that's awesome.

Here's the video for "Hey Ladies."



Grandpa Jason walkers his way back to Crystal Lake

The Old Gray Lady takes on the George Burns of horror icons in a NY Times fluff piece about the F13 reboot. Most telling line:

“There’s a tremendous benefit to staying in the same genre and producing movies for the same amount of money over and over,” said Mr. Fuller, “because you really learn who your key players are and how best to work with them.”

"Over and over" indeed.

Recently, a reviewer praising the My Bloody Valentine remake ended his positive review with the line: "Sure more can always be asked for, but more shouldn’t be expected." That should become the official tagline of the slasher film revival.

All praise to Doug Savage, artist behind the Savage Chickens web comic.

Stuff: "Obviously, my evolution has taken place at a rapid pace."

To let you really know that I'm back, we're going to drag today's entry back to an evergreen topic here on ANTSS: torture.

Hey, if you're going to be blocked from work computers as sheep, might as well be blocked as a wolf. That's what Grammy ANTSS always used to say.

In certain sections of the Axis o' Blogging, there's an increasingly shrill chatter about the likelihood of prosecuting Bush administration officials for war crimes in connection with the administration of torture both domestically and abroad. What has passed without much notice is the sentencing of one Chucky Taylor (shown above), born Charles McArthur Emmanuel, the first U.S. citizen to ever be convicted under the federal anti-torture statutes of the United States of America.

Earlier this month, the Honorable Cecilia M. Altonaga of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida handed down a sentence of 97 years, ensuring that Taylor, an African American native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, will most likely die in federal prison.

Altonaga, a Bush appointee and one-time short list contender for the Supreme Court, called Taylor's actions "sadistic, cruel and atrocious." She went on to say, "It is hard to conceive of any more serious offenses against the dignity and the lives of human beings."

The fullest description of the bizarre life and times of Chucky Taylor, American son of African warlord Charles Taylor, can be found, in of all places, Rolling Stone magazine, in a 2008 article writing a few months before Taylor's conviction.

From the article:

Emmanuel and Taylor eventually moved into a cozy apartment together. They soon had a son, Michael, who passed away at seven months, and a daughter, Zoe. On February 12th, 1977, after a torturous labor, Emmanuel gave birth to Chucky; he weighed 12 pounds, 14 ounces. Chucky had gray eyes and a ghostly pale complexion, a vestige of Emmanuel's white grandfather. When Charles Taylor arrived at the hospital, "he didn't believe that the boy was his kid," Emmanuel says. "He didn't look like he was a black baby." They named their son Charles McArthur Emmanuel.

The couple never married, but they enjoyed several idyllic years in their Dorchester apartment. "We lived together for eight years," Emmanuel says. "I was considered his common-law wife."

During Chucky's first year, Emmanuel was the breadwinner, though Taylor juggled jobs at Sears and Mutual of Omaha. Chucky, Emmanuel says, "was the happiest baby." One day, around Chucky's first birthday, Taylor saw his son drinking from a baby bottle. He plucked it from his son's hands and threw it out the window. "You're too grown for bottles," he declared.

Despite moments of domesticity, Taylor led a separate life outside the home. He partied and protested with other Liberian activists living along the East Coast. In 1980, he traveled back to Liberia just in time for a coup by a small band of army officers. In a volatile political climate, Taylor quickly proved to be a canny opportunist: He married the niece of a general, ingratiating himself with the new government. He called Emmanuel, asking her to move to Liberia, but she refused.

Later, after Taylor was caught stealing from the post-coup government, he fled to the US. There he was arrested by US Marshals, but escaped the Massachusetts jail he was being held in and fled back to Africa.

Emmanuel moved on with her life. In the mid-1980s, she married a man named Roy Belfast and relocated the family to a two-story brick home on the corner of a quiet street in Orlando. Chucky slept in a small bedroom, barely big enough for his bed and dresser, but he made room for a turntable, a mixer and a massive set of speakers. As he grew from a boy into a teenager, his light complexion darkened. He began to strongly resemble his father, who was drifting in and out of prisons in Ghana and Sierra Leone, and into Muammar el-Qaddafi's paramilitary training camps in Libya. In 1989, on Christmas Eve, Taylor re-emerged as a self-styled revolutionary leader, invading Liberia with a small band of guerrillas. A month later, Chucky went with his mother to the Orange County Clerk's Office and changed his name to that of his stepfather, becoming Roy Belfast Jr. "I was his father at the time," Chucky's stepfather says simply.

A few years later, right around Christmas, Chucky answered the phone at home. Now in his early teens, he was a quiet kid, awkward and shy. The man on the line asked to speak to his mother. Emmanuel wasn't home at the time, but before Chucky hung up, the stranger explained that he was the boy's father.

"My dad called," Chucky announced when Emmanuel returned home a short while later. "I didn't want to talk to him."

Emmanuel was stunned. It had been so long since she had heard from Taylor, she couldn't understand what Chucky was telling her at first. "Who's your dad?" she asked, bewildered.

In 1990, young Chucky went to visit his father. Impressed by the importance and power of his father wielded in Liberia, the young Taylor was unable to readjust to life in America. In 1994, he got in trouble with law and, rather than face jail time, he was shipped off to be with his father. By that time, Taylor had "officially" been elected President of Liberia:

Taylor had finally been elected president, sweeping into power with 75 percent of the vote. His campaign slogan was a bizarre mixture of honesty and thinly veiled threat: "He Killed My Ma, He Killed My Pa, But I Will Vote for Him."

Despite a tempestuous relationship, Taylor put his son in charge of the nation's Anti-Terror Unit. The federal indictment describes the unit's tactics:

In April 1999, a rebel group attacked the town of Voinjama, near the border with Guinea. As described in the federal indictment, Chucky traveled to a checkpoint near the site of the attack with members of the Anti-Terrorist Unit. Civilians fleeing the town streamed over the St. Paul River Bridge, deeper into Liberia. Chucky stopped a group passing through the checkpoint. He asked whether there were rebels among them. According to the indictment, he then "selected three persons from the group and summarily shot them in front of the others." The ATU detained several survivors and brought them to the base at Gbatala; by that time the prisoners had been pistol-whipped by Chucky and several ATU officers. The prisoners were then tossed into pits, which were covered with iron bars and barbed wire, and subjected to a laundry list of torture, including being burned by cigarettes and having plastic melted on their genitals. At one point, according to the indictment, Chucky ordered the execution of a prisoner, but when an ATU officer raised his gun, Chucky instructed him to cut off the man's head instead. Several officers held the man down, forcing his head over a bucket. "The soldiers then severed [the victim's] head by cutting his throat from back to front as blood dripped into the bucket, while he screamed and begged for his life," the indictment states.

After Taylor's government collapsed, Chucky did what any kid raised on American pop culture would do: He made a gangster rap album.

Chucky followed him there, and over the next several years his life took a nomadic turn. He ventured to South Africa, Libya, Paris and London. In 2005, he spent several weeks at a studio in Trinidad, recording 20 hip-hop tracks. "I grew up in the era of hip-hop," he says. "Obviously, my evolution has taken place at a rapid pace. It is a snapshot of my mind frame at that time." Federal agents confiscated a notebook of his lyrics, which included the lines "We ain't takin' no slack/Y'all try to tackle mine/Layin' bodies in stacks" and "Take this for free/Six feet under is where you gonna be."

You can hear a fairly crappy track from Taylor's album, an awkwardly produced contempo-R&B influenced track called "Angel," at the end of the Rolling Stone article. It is, in my humble opinion, painfully awful.

Stuff: "The Permanent Uncle."

You know those flicks where a bunch of people, most likely but not necessarily young and boorish Americans on vacation, stumble across some isolated community in some out of the way backwater? And, of course, it turns out that the community they stumble on to, though it may seem harmless at first, is actually made up of psychos who engage in all manner of hellaciousness.

I know you know the movies: From Wicker Man to any psycho-hillbilly flick. It is a staple of horror filmdom.

Well, here's the real world analog.

Welcome to Colonia Dignidad, Chile.

From the American Scholar article "The Torture Colony," by Bruce Falconer:

Deep in the Andean foothills of Chile's central valley lives a group of German expatriates, the members of a utopian experiment called Colonia Dignidad. They have resided there for decades, separate from the community around them, but widely known and admired, and respected for their cleanliness, their wealth, and their work ethic. Their land stretches across 70 square miles, rising gently from irrigated farmland to low, forested hills, against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains. Today Colonia Dignidad is partially integrated with the rest of Chile. For decades, however, its isolation was nearly complete. Its sole connection to the outside world was a long dirt road that wound through tree farms and fields of wheat, corn, and soybeans, passed through a guarded gate, and led to the center of the property, where the Germans lived in an orderly Bavarian-style village of flower gardens, water fountains, and cream-colored buildings with orange tile roofs. The village had modern apartment complexes, two schools, a chapel, several meetinghouses, and a bakery that produced fresh cakes, breads, and cheeses. There were numerous animal stables, two landing strips, at least one airplane, a hydroelectric power station, and mills and factories of various kinds, including a highly profitable gravel mill that supplied raw materials for numerous road-building projects throughout Chile. On the north side of the village was a hospital, where the Germans provided free care to thousands of patients in one of the country's poorest areas.

Sounds pretty nice. But, wait, there's more. There's always more:

The truth, so unlikely in this setting, is that Colonia Dignidad was founded on fear, and it is fear that still binds it together. Investigations by Amnesty International and the governments of Chile, Germany, and France, as well as the testimony of former colonos who, over the years, managed to escape the colony, have revealed evidence of terrible crimes: child molestation, forced labor, weapons trafficking, money laundering, kidnapping, torture, and murder. Orchestrated by Paul Schaefer [the group's founder, pictured above – CRwM] and his inner circle of trusted lieutenants, much of the abuse was initially directed inward as a means of conditioning the colonos to obey Schaefer's commands. Later, after General Augusto Pinochet's military junta seized power in Chile, the violence spilled onto the national stage. Schaefer, through an informal alliance with the Pinochet regime, allowed Colonia Dignidad to serve as a torture and execution center for the disposal of enemies of the state.

Falconer profiles the colony's founder and its religious way of life that at first, while certainly not fit for a decadent urban-dwelling libertine like myself, sounds no more sinister than life amongst the Shakers.

But a creeping paranoia about internal corruption and the external threat of communist insurgents turned the colony in a surreal prison. Again, from the article:

The outer perimeter of Colonia Dignidad was marked by eight-foot fences topped with barbed wire, which armed groups of men patrolled day and night with German shepherd and doberman attack dogs. Guards in observation posts equipped with shortwave radios, telephones, binoculars, night vision equipment, and telephoto cameras scanned the landscape for intruders. These were, of course, imaginary. But if invaders were to succeed in getting through the perimeter, they would come upon a second tier of inner defenses: strands of copper wire hidden around the village, which, if stepped on, triggered a silent alarm. Doors and windows in most buildings were equipped with armored shades that could be drawn shut in the event of an invasion. Dormitories were outfitted with alarms and surveillance cameras, and the entire village sat atop an extensive network of tunnels and underground bunkers. When the alarm sounded, as it frequently did during practice drills, men belonging to the security force grabbed their rifles and waited on their doorsteps for instructions.

With no genuine external enemies to fight, Schaefer and his most trusted lieutenants turned their energies inward. The practice of confession provided them with plenty of people to punish. The guilty were starved, threatened with dogs, or beaten—sometimes by Schaefer himself, more often by others acting on his orders. The harshest treatment was reserved for those who, for one reason or another, Schaefer simply did not like. He called them "the rebels." They could be identified by their clothing: the men wore red shirts and white trousers, the women potato sacks over their long dresses. The other colonos despised them, usually without knowing why.

One such rebel was a Chilean colono named Franz Baar, adopted by the Germans at 10. By the time he was a teenager, Schaefer singled him out as a troublemaker. As Baar now remembers it, a group of men approached him one day while he was working in the carpentry shop and accused him of stealing the keys to one of the dormitories. When Baar denied it, he was beaten unconscious with electrical cables—his skull broken—and loaded into an ambulance. He awoke some time later in the Colonia's hospital, where he would remain as a prisoner for the next 31 years.

Baar was kept in an upstairs section of the hospital never seen by the local Chileans who sought treatment there. As he later described to me, his days began with a series of intravenous injections, after which the nurses brought him bread and a plate with 12 to 15 different pills. Once satisfied that he was properly medicated, nurses delivered his clothes and shoes, hidden from him to reduce the likelihood of escape. After he dressed, a security detail escorted him to his job at the carpentry shop. Baar worked on heavy machines in a cramped space. The injections and pills slowed his movements and made him clumsy. Today, scar tissue on his forearms maps the places where the electric saws bit into his flesh. Baar was forced to work late into the night, sometimes until 3 A.M. He was not permitted to eat with the rest of the community. Instead, his meals were delivered to him at the carpentry shop, where he devoured them in isolation.

A still worse punishment awaited in rooms nine and 14 of the hospital, where Baar and other colonos unfortunate enough to draw the full measure of Schaefer's fury were subjected to shock treatments. A female physician worked the machines, her manner detached and clinical. Patients were strapped down and fitted with crowns attached by wires to a voltage machine. Baar told me how the doctor seemed to enjoy watching him suffer. "She kept asking me questions," he said. "I heard what she was saying and wanted to respond, but I couldn't. She was playing with the machine and asking, 'What do you feel? Are you feeling something?' She wanted to know what was happening to me as she adjusted the voltage."

And more:

At the opposite end of the social spectrum from the rebels was a group of boys Schaefer affectionately called his "sprinters." If Schaefer wanted to speak with someone working in a remote corner of the property, he sent a sprinter off to summon him. Schaefer trained his sprinters to assist in even the most mundane of personal tasks, like helping him to put his shoes on or holding the phone to his ear as he spoke. No job was too small. For the boys lucky enough to be chosen, the position brought pride and power.

But this special status was also a source of trouble for them. It was an open secret that Schaefer was a pedophile, just as the authorities had accused him of being long before in Germany. He enjoyed taking sprinters along during his daily tour of the Colonia. Because zippers were inconvenient, their uniforms included loose-fitting athletic shorts with an elastic waistband. He allowed his favorite sprinters to stay overnight in his room in a child-size bed set up alongside his own, sometimes sleeping with two or more sprinters at once. His routine, it later emerged, included feeding them sedatives, washing them with a sponge, and sexual manipulation.

Eventually, Pinochet began using the colony as a torture center and death camp.

In truth, no one knows how many people were killed inside Colonia Dignidad. One former colono recently told Chilean government investigators that, on Schaefer’s orders, he once drove a busload of 35 political prisoners up into the Colonia’s wooded hills and left them in an isolated spot by the side of a dirt road. As he drove back down alone, he heard machine gun fire echoing through the forest. No bodies were ever recovered. According to at least one former high-ranking colono, the bodies of executed prisoners were exhumed in 1978, burned to ash, and dumped in the river. Others claim that the dead were buried in individual graves scattered about the hills and valleys. All that seems certain is that many of the prisoners who went into Colonia Dignidad were never seen again.

After the collapse of Pinochet's U.S.-supported dictatorship, the colony's founder took it on the lam, but was eventually caught.

Paul Schaefer was extradited to Chile aboard a military transport plane several days after his arrest and placed in a maximum-security prison in Santiago. In May 2006, he was convicted of child molestation and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He received an additional seven-year sentence in August 2006 for weapons violations, and three for torture. Further prosecution is being considered on charges of forced labor, tax evasion, kidnapping, torture, and possibly murder. Schaefer is 86 and confined to a wheelchair. His health is poor and he is attended full-time by a nurse, but his mental condition seems to have improved: "He was cold and arrogant," said one of the judges who interrogated him for several hours in Santiago. "Every so often he would call in the nurse to check his blood pressure. When I asked him questions, he pretended not to hear."