If hearing Barney the dinosaur sing "I Love You" one more time seems like torture, try it on a loop for the next 24 hours.

According to a new piece on the Huffington Post by Andy Worthington, author of "The Guantanamo files," the children's show song that became the musical earworm of the '90s was one of many songs used by the CIA to enhance interrogation techniques in the War on Terror.

Songs used by the CIA varied wildly from children's songs and popular commercial jingles all the way to American hip-hop and death metal.

The variety often was intentional, intended to jar the senses, Worthington said. Prisoners would spend hours listening to a song like "Take Your Best Shot" by the metal band Dope on a constant loop, only to hear it get replaced unceremoniously by the Meow Mix cat food jingle.

In the moment, the juxtaposition of songs was funny. But eventually, it could grow maddening, Worthington writes.

American music – whether from commercials or actual songs – helped drown out the prisoners' inner thoughts, Worthington said, without providing them a familiar song from their own culture for which to escape into. Genres like heavy metal were particularly effective, because many Muslims had never heard anything like it before.

Interrogators often resorted to musical themes. The "bad Muslim," for example, often played on devout Muslim men's inclination toward sexual purity and/or celibacy by pairing sexually-explicit songs with interrogation by female interviewers.

In another variation of "bad Muslim," interrogators played Arabic music on the first day of Ramadan, which the subject believed was against Islamic law.

Another major aspect of "music torture," Worthington writes, was the seemingly random nature of when music would come on or turn off in order to affect sleep patterns.

Not all of the artists whose music was used were happy with the practice. Singer David Gray is one of many artists to ask for his music to be removed from the CIA's playlist.

"What we're talking about here is people in a darkened room, physically inhibited by handcuffs, bags over their heads and music blaring at them. That is torture. That is nothing but torture. It doesn't matter what the music is - it could be Tchaikovsky's finest or it could be Barney the Dinosaur. It really doesn't matter, it's going to drive you completely nuts."