A Little Torture: New Revelations of CIA Sleep Deprivation Programme

Despite the best efforts of Bushmen/Bushwomen to explain away torture --- 1) it wasn't torture because the President ordered it 2) it wasn't torture because bouncing off walls isn't that bad and, most recently, 3) OK, if it was torture, Democratic senators knew about it --- the story hasn't quite gone away. The Senate Intelligence Committee is persisting with an investigation of CIA methods, and Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times today offers the latest revelation, from Justice Department memoranda, of the extent of "enhanced interrogation":

More than 25 of the CIA's prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation. At one point, the agency was allowed to keep prisoners awake for as long as 11 days; the limit was later reduced to just over a week.

Anticipating the response that a bit of forced insomnia wasn't that bad (in the spirit of Donald Rumsfeld's note when he approved the "enhanced" methods, ""I stand for 8-10 hours a day"), let's add this:

The prisoners had their feet shackled to the floor and their hands cuffed close to their chins....Detainees were clad only in diapers and not allowed to feed themselves. A prisoner who started to drift off to sleep would tilt over and be caught by his chains....
When detainees could no longer stand, they could be laid on the prison floor with their limbs "anchored to a far point on the floor in such a manner that the arms cannot be bent or used for balance or comfort".

Despite the extent of these measures and their uninterrupted duration, they were considered "less severe" than other "corrective" or "coercive" methods.

As for the safety and effectiveness of sleep deprivation, James Horne, the scientist whose work was mis-used by the Justice Department and CIA to give legitimacy to the programme, writes:

To claim that 180 hours is safe in these respects is nonsense. [And] even if sleep deprivation succeeded in getting prisoners to talk, I would doubt whether the state of mind would be able to produce credible information, unaffected by delusion, fantasy or suggestibility.