An article by Greg Miller at the L.A. Times has lifted the veil on the profound terror lying behind the supposedly known nomenclature of torture. Miller focuses on the use of "sleep deprivation," a term we will now have to always render in quotes, as the irony of describing one sort of torture as a means of covering up three or four other kinds of torture is both diabolical and morbidly depraved.
Let me explain. The L.A. Times article begins as a tale of GOP and CIA pushback against President Obama’s decision to release the Office of Legal Counsel memos a few weeks back, igniting thereby the dry tinder of scandal, and, if you believe the scaremongers, threatening the security of the country.
…CIA Director Michael V. Hayden… expressed disbelief that the administration was prepared to expose methods it might later decide it needed.
"Are you telling me that under all conditions of threat, you will never interfere with the sleep cycle of a detainee?" Hayden asked a top White House official, according to sources familiar with the exchange.
Hayden, who must have pulled a couple of all-nighters in his time, mimics the arguments of a myriad of ignorant commentators who compare the sleep deprivation forced upon "war on terror" prisoners with the time they stayed up all night with the buds and still aced the test the next day, or dragged through work, or drove to Las Vegas on jugs of hot coffee and NoDoz (or something not entirely OTC). How impudent and naive these anti-torture liberals must be?
Yes, how ignorant! for I had been preparing an article for some time to counter such views, combing through the U.S. Army’s own manual on combat stress and sleep deprivation, scientific literature, and clinical case studies, but it turned out that I didn’t even know what "sleep deprivation" was. Seriously. I didn’t know it needed to be understood with bracketed quotes. The government has taught me, and now I know, and now you will know.
The reason, as Miller tells us, John Helgerson’s 2004 CIA Inspector General report on the Company’s interrogations found "sleep deprivation" more problematic than any other technique, except waterboarding, was "because of how it was applied." Stephen Bradbury describes "sleep deprivation" in his May 10, 2005 memo. Up until now, the media has focused on the outrageous time limits: up to 180 hours of continuous wakefulness (over 7 full days), down from 240 hours earlier in the CIA), but the duration was only the half of it:
The primary method of sleep deprivation involves the use of shackling to keep the detainee awake. In this method, the detainee is standing and is handcuffed, and the handcuffs are attached by a length of chain to the ceiling. The detainee’s hands are shackled in front of his body, so that the detainee has approximately a two- to three-foot diameter of movement. The detainee’s feet are shackled to a bolt in the floor. Due care is taken to ensure that the shackles are neither too loose nor too tight for physical safety. We understand from discussions with OMS [CIA Office of Medical Services] that the shackling does not result in any significant physical pain for the subject. The detainee’s hands are generally between the level of his heart and his chin. In some cases, the detainee’s hands may be raised above the level of his head, but only for a period of up to two hours. All of the detainee’s weight is borne by his legs and feet during standing sleep deprivation. You have informed us that the detainee is not allowed to hang from ‘or’ support his body weight with the shackles. Rather, we understand that the shackles are only used as a passive means to keep the detainee standing and thus to prevent him from falling asleep; should the detainee begin to fall asleep, he will lose his balance and awaken, either because of the sensation of losing his balance or because of the restraining tension of the shackles. The use of this passive means for keeping the detainee awake avoids the need for using means that would require interaction with the detainee and might pose a danger of physical harm.
Shackled in forced positions with limited movement, mostly forced to stand for hours or days on end, and kept awake, these techniques amount to forced standing, forced positioning, limitation of movement (hence a form of kinesthetic deprivation), and disorientation (fear of falling).
Yet there is more. The prisoner is often if not usually nude, save for a diaper, which is reportedly changed often enough not to cause a rash, but certainly humiliating and meant to induce shame. Meals are fed to the prisoner by hand, which is also humiliating, but these meals are not food as we might think of it, but "bland, unappetizing" "commercial liquid meal replacements" containing 1500 calories maximum per day. (The American College of Sports Medicine recommends a minimum of 1800 calories per day for men, 1200 for women. In other words, these prisoners are slowly starving. The restricted diet is to be discontinued if a prisoner were to lose ten percent of their body weight. By way of comparison, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM), loss of five percent or more body weight in a given period is a telling sign of clinical depression.)
If the prisoner cannot stand, due to disabling swelling in the legs, edema or other physical disability, which Bradbury assures us is not painful — because CIA medical personnel told him so! — then they are removed from the hanging shackle and "would not be permitted to dangle by his wrists." But, supposedly standing sleep deprivation does not allow hanging by the shackles or wrists. One must presume then that some dangling by the wrist would be allowed by standing sleep deprivation, or why the prohibition for those medically released? So now we can add suspension to our list of techniques included under the rubric "sleep deprivation."
The non-standing prisoner is shackled to a stool too small "to permit the subject to balance himself to be able to go to sleep." If this, too, is beyond the physical capacities of the prisoner, they undergo "horizontal sleep deprivation."
The detainee’s hands are manacled together, and the arms placed in an outstretched position — either extended beyond the head or extended to either side of the body — and anchored to a far point on the floor in such a manner that the arms cannot be bent or used for balance or comfort.
Once the prisoner is able to, it’s back to the standing form of sleep deprivation.
In practice, as Bradbury’s other May 10, 2005 memo makes clear, these "enhanced interrogation techniques" — of which "sleep deprivation" is only "one" — are usually used in combination with each other. The baseline environment consists of white noise and continuous light, which Bradbury disingenuously ascribes to security concerns, but it is really a form of environmental and sensory/perceptual manipulation, to be traded off with sensory overload ("loud noises").
What this L.A. Times story demonstrates is the proclivity of the CIA and other government torturing agencies to twist the meaning of words, and stuff into the nomenclature of one "technique" or procedures a veritable cornucopia of different torture methods. In this "enhanced interrogation" version of sleep deprivation, forced sleep deficit was combined, as we can see, with shackling, forced positions and forced standing, humiliation, manipulation of diet, sensory overload, and possibly other torture procedures.
So, this is what the CIA and U.S. government has been selling as "sleep deprivation!" The situation is ominously reminiscent of the Army Field Manual’s use of the "Separation" technique in its Appendix M. It, too, is really an omnibus set of procedures, including solitary confinement, restriction of sleep (I’m not using the term "sleep deprivation" here in order to avoid confusion), partial sensory or perceptual deprivation, use of fear, and likely use of sensory overload, and manipulation of environment, among other possible variations. The AFM purposely confuses procedures used for security with those used to break down a human being. It talks about isolation or separation as if it were a single procedure, when, like the CIA’s use of "sleep deprivation", it masks an entire torture program of its own.
In the case of Bradbury/CIA’s EID techniques, we can understand now that when Hayden, or Cheney, or any other torture apologist says sleep deprivation only means the disruption of sleep cycles, we know that to be a blatant, criminal lie. When the CIA says "sleep deprivation," they mean forced shackling and forced positions, suspension, production of swelling in the lower extremities, disorientation and fear, humiliation, diet manipulation and slow starvation, along with forced wakefulness.
Like an evil version of a Russian Matryoshka doll, as you look deeper and deeper, behind a supposedly straight-forward, if debilitating torture technique like sleep deprivation, there lies nested, one within the other, greater and greater forms of torture and abuse. As Miller’s article makes clear, they would like to return to this form of extreme torture. When proponents ask for a return to use of "sleep deprivation," at least now we know what they are talking about: extreme torture. (Apparently the use of sleep restriction under isolation and fear and partial sensory deprivation or overload, with sleep rationed at 4 hours maximum per day for up to 30 days, with possible extensions, as currently the case in the Army Field Manual for GWOT prisoners, is not enough for the EIT crowd, even if the Army’s own Combat Stress manual cites the debilitating nature of the 4 hour minimum, particularly if circadian rhythms are disturbed.)
Everything the government says about torture and interrogation is a lie. At least that’s what I have to assume until and unless the government makes it clear that it will call things what they are, will hold the most blatant and depraved sorts of criminal behavior to account. Meanwhile, it is the least we can ask of the press, and now the blogging world, that they do what Greg Miller has done, not take government pronouncements as received wisdom, but begin to speak the truth.
Update: After writing and posting this story, it was pointed out to me that the bulk of the material, as concerns the mixing of sleep deprivation with stress positions and other torture procedures by the CIA, as part of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" described in the Bradbury memos, was discussed in an excellent article by Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent back on April 29. I should have known an astute reporter like Spencer would have been on this issue from the beginning, beating out the L.A. Times by over a week. I regret missing his story at the outset, and encourage readers to follow up their interest in this issue by reading his rather more newsworthy piece. — Jeff Kaye
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May God Damn every one of these traitors.
How close are we to passing the German infamy ?
but I thought it was reported (from the Red Cross report) with some reliability that the two star pupils were kept hanging from their chains (not balanced on it, once their muscles gave way or, in one case, given that they only had one functioning leg), up to 6 hours at least (by their own admission) and almost certanily for much longer. Those reports also said doctors would come in to measure the swelling in the victims’ legs, presumably to ensure that gangrene does not set in, even while they were basically screaming in pain.
This isn’t sleep deprivation. It’s medieval torture. “Standing upright with the hands above one’s head [secured by shackles]”, for up to 2 days, was considered to be major torture in Elizabethan England, requiring the issuance of a Pricy Council torture warrant. The other forms of torture requiring the use a warrant in those bad ‘ole days were racking and the use of heated pokers – quintessential medieval tortures considered to be in the same league. ‘course in the bad ‘ole days, they probably didn’t bother to have a doctor measure the swelling. Those measurements must be what differentiates “enhanced interrogation” from “torture” in the enlightened opinions of Mssrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld.
By the way, do any of these memos say anything about whether putting John Walker into a freezing freight container, chained in such a way as to render him completely immobile, blinded and gagged in his own waste, intentionally leaving a bullet in his leg (thus keeping him in excruciating pain), and then having soldiers pound the walls of the container day-in-and-day-out, for 8 days, constitute torture? ’cause, you know, I’m having some difficulty imagining a more abusive way of spending 8 days).
This is torture. Nothing more, nothing less.
And doesn’t the ICRC report talk about scars on the wrists, too?
And it all migrated – to the “frequent flyer” program at GITMO and on.
Meanwhile, Roxanna Saberi is about to be released by the Iranians- for which I am very glad. But how she was handled as a suspected illegal enemy combatant by Iran vs how we have handled the same doesn’t make for good PR for the US.
I guess the rack was in the shop.
Of course they were left hanging, and the fact kind of leaks out when Bradbury clarifies that those cut down, because of the swelling and “non-painful” edema in their legs”, won’t be left hanging by their shackles (not like those medically cleared by same by the humanistic docs in OMS, who, after all recognized that a human being couldn’t stand more than 7-1/2 days of this treatment non-stop).
It is barbaric torture of the worst sort, and one wonders how the supposed scientific interrogation crowd at the Agency stood this. But then, even “clean” torture brutalizes those who practice it, and then it’s a quick slide down into Salo and SS-like brutality.
Didn’t they also come in and re-set shoulder dislocations so they could get back to “not” hanging by the shackles?
Thanks for this post.
But, what can we do to discredit these criminal morons form previous and (sadly) current administrations and in the press? Dr. James Horne conducted the sleep research that was used to justify this disgusting stupidity –he was never consulted by the torture planners of course.
He said, in an e-mail to Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings and Political Animal, that from his experience, any information gained from a sleep deprived individual would be unreliable. And in Horne’s research, the only stress was sleep deprivation –he wanted to isolate the effect of sleep deprivation. So the subjects were treated very well otherwise, well fed, medically monitored repeatedly, and a subject could quit at any time. And from THOSE subjects, Horne doubts that what they say can be reliable.
So, we got valuable, actionable intelligence from sleep deprived torture victims who may well have been hallucinating? Really? Torture is immoral, illegal, does great harm to our long run national interest, and does not produce reliable information. How many strikes before you are out in this here game/
I read an interview Glenn Greenwald had with an international human rights lawyer. The lawyer said that the U.S. has treaty obligations to thoroughly investigate the torture. So, we should investigate, and, depending on the outcome, prosecute those who broke the law, no matter how high the office or what the party affiliation.
——
James Horne, director of the Sleep Research Center at Loughborough University in Britain, said he was never consulted by U.S. officials and didn’t know how his work was being used until the memos were released.
“My response was shocked concern,” Horne said in an e-mail interview.
…
Even if sleep deprivation succeeded in getting prisoners to talk, he said, “I would doubt whether the state of mind would be able to produce credible information, unaffected by delusion, fantasy or suggestibility.”
http://www.washingtonmonthly.c…..018117.php
Thank you for exposing yet more the depravity of these soulless bureaucrats of barbarity. Hopefully some day they will be held accountable. Don’t they belong in the same class as Mengele?
Bob in HI
Here’s the link to the full ICRC report. See page 35, where ICRC reports the scars on KSM’s wrists and ankles, consistent with reports of standing sleep deprivation for one month.
Agreed. As I ended my hypothetical opening statement by the prosecution in US v Bradbury, Bybee, and Yoo:
Nice post, Jeff!
a man will go insane without sleep, it’s clearly torture in every sense of the term
I think the North Koreans/Chinese in the Korean War used to do the sleep torture thing by simply having a soldier stand by ready to smack either their victim or a nearby wall with a truncheon if they dozed off. I guess basically racking somebody and calling it “sleep deprivation” was the American innovation.
Of course the government lies about these techniques.
The next time you hear that a government official is talking about any form of torture, just imagine that Dick Cheney is the government official in question. Even when Obama is quoted as talking about torture, imagine that it’s Dick Cheney’s words coming out of his mouth.
This is the only way to understand the reality of our situation WRT torture.
Excellent post, Jeff.
Now that the term “global war on terror” is politically incorrect can we stop calling these men “detainees” and refer to them as what they really are, “prisoners?” CheneyCo did its best to have these men murdered by the state.
Great post, Jeff. So grateful for all the work you’ve done over the last years to spotlight this evil and spotlight those culpable.
But but.. We are supposed to be looking ahead.
The stock cartoon of the prisoner in a mediaeval dungeon has a nearly naked guy hanging from shackles. It’s going to be hard to find that funny any more.
actually.. if they’re not legally Prisoners-of-War according to shrubco, and they’re not enemy combatants anymore, since that status was basically illegal, than what precisely were they? Abductees? Desasparicidos? Kidnapping victims? What should one call it when one’s government tortures those it kidnaps?
They were entertainment for Bush and Cheney. They probably have videos of the sessions and enjoy the screaming and crying. This is the most cold-blooded thing I have ever seen and I can’t imagine a group of people sitting around in a room planning these horrible things. How could they look at each other the same ever again?
Laboratory experiments and conduits for the ongoing fabrication of lies in order to justify more war?
Pretty shocking video by Channel Four in Britain from a few years ago
Torture – The Guantanamo Guidebook
WARNING! GRAPHIC
http://www.informationclearing…..e17666.htm
You note that
What you’ve not noted, and may not have known, is something I learned during my Army days:
Which, FWIW, is why the Army has recently upgraded the MREs from about 1200-1500 calories per MRE (x 3 MREs per day under “optimum” conditions – i.e., you can carry enough and stomach all of them) – soldiers were losing significant amounts of body weight.
So, while it is correct to note that the captive victim of torture was getting just short of “enough” calories for a normal person, he was getting maybe 1/3 or even as little as 1/4 of the calories he, in a sleep-deprived state, required. Multiply that by 11 days, and you can see:
Why is anyone on any level who participated in this horror not being held to account for criminal behavior? Anyone who was present is guilty of atrocities.
And I am still waiting to learn about the attacks that saved millions of people’s lives which were foiled by these techniques.
I don’t think the totalitarian regimes of the mid-twentieth century are the best precedents. shrubco may have aspired to make America into a second Rome and shrub himself might’ve aspired to Bonapartean glory, but what he achieved was much more modest – closer to the Latin thuggery of Galtieri or Peron or Pinochet – disorganized, anarchic, incomplete wannabe fascism with a side of corruption, while still calling it all “Democracy” accompanied by “necessary measures” to stop the enemy of the day (communism back then..)…. Meanwhile, the real agenda was simply pillaging the treasury while distracting the public with fear and war.
Anyone who has ever had difficulty sleeping knows how profoundly disturbing that can be.
I wonder about the pilots, 2 to a plane, who fly those 30 hour missions from the U.S. midwest to bomb some poor unsuspecting civilians in the U.S. Middle East.
Fascinating. Thank you for that.
When you examine up close what’s going on it’s terribly disturbing – enhanced interrogation sounds like a phrase Frank Luntz came up with – marketing rubbish.
Call a spade a spade – it’s torture
You’ve done a masterful job, Jeff, of explaining how this is not just “sleep deprivation.”
But let’s look a little deeper. Consider Jeff’s scenario in a cold damp cell, where periodically you get a “shower” – a blast of cold water that maybe would want to knock you over, if you weren’t shackled. And every time you fall asleep, you are indeed, hanging painfully by those ceiling shackles or bent over, fingers just touching the wall, barely balanced on your toes. And on top of that, it’s all dark or there’s constant bright lights. And you’re all alone – without any sort of legal assistance or anyone who treats you as a human being. Maybe your holy book is trampled on or plowed through your diaper. Or maybe you’re “baptized” or wrapped in an Israeli flag. And around you, you can see it’s all being captured by cameras. And your captors are mocking you, laughing at how your urine and feces are leaking down your legs, and you begin to feel you’d much rather be dead…. You envy the occasional rat or insect that is free to scurry away…
That’s torture too. It breaks down human dignity, the personality begins to fragment – you can’t let yourself remember the past – too painful – you can’t long for a better future – too painful. Your brief dreams are filled with nightmares. Your waking NOW is a living nightmare.
What you report is exactly what sleep deprivation researchers have found. You can go without sleep or without food – but not the two together. One must be upped if the other goes down.
One more thing. Losing 10% of body weight constitutes a diagnosis of anorexia.
I like “Prisoner of War”.
How many died and we haven’t heard about it?? Did any independent international organization have a list of the detained? No.
I’d bet that many died in captivity – essentially murder.
This is an excellent post, and your comment topped it off.
They punch in the gps location of where they are going (destination or rendezvous point for refuelling) then take a nap.
I appreciate your kind words. I wish we could send kind thoughts to all, right, now, who suffer unknown.
Oh, that makes me feel so much better. Not. The stories about all those uppers they feed the killer pilots, I suppose are bogus. Not.
Eugene Robinson, on Keith, avers that he doesn’t know one person who thinks that Colin Powell hasn’t served his country admirably, in several administrations, UN performance aside. Guess he doesn’t know how to google Coling Powell My Lai massacre.
On NPR a torture goon defending what was done said ‘It was sixteen (awake) on, four (sleep) off round the clock.
Did they take the doodles on bush’s memo pad and institute them as policy.
Remember rummy joking about how he stands at his desk for eight hours and the prisoners are only chained for four. Funny I didn’t see any pictures of him chained to the floor and ceiling with human waste dripping down his leg . Anybody got a link to those pictures?
Not surprising that the researchers found that – being in the Army teaches one a lot about sleep shortage (I won’t call it deprivation) and dealing with it, and you don’t need a fancy degree or nothin’. But, the fact that they had these guys on 1/3 rations (i.e., 1/3 of what they needed) constitutes an entirely separate war crime.
On the Vietnam Geneva cards they were referred to as “captives”.
My 8 month-old daughter was, for a while, only sleeping in 30-40 minute increments, awakening with screams and tears. My wife and I soon learned that, yes, sleep deprivation is torture.
Driven insane? Absolutely!
For anyone who doesn’t know, this technique is very old but in the past went by a different name: crucifixion. The idea is the same. Keeping someone’s hands and arms above the head rapidly becomes extremely painful. The Romans achieved this position by hanging someone from a cross, hence the name: crux cross and fixus fastened to. How painful it was can be surmised from another word which derives from this practice: excruciating or from the cross. Good to know in 2,000 years we have come so far.
It has been obvious for a long time that the party that sold Dick Cheney to us as a “responsible adult” has propagandized all news from the government. “Yoo” can’t believe a word the Bush Administration has written or said for public consumption…
How I’ve thought of them for some time. All ingredients are there except large-scale roundups of citizens, and the groundwork for that was clearly being laid. (I suspect some quiet heroism on the part of civil servants and maybe some appointees to be what saved us there.)
Please investigate the possibility that combining sleep deprivation with exposure to temperature extremes is a method of inducing hyperalgesia.
Can’t you just imagine it now, when daddy goes home and his children ask him what he did to fight the terrorists?
You are right, scribe, in that I did not know that. It amplifies the awfulness of what was already bad. Thanks for bringing up that point, for I thought I was stretching the point when I wrote the prisoners were subjected to “slow starvation”. I hadn’t realized how prescient that characterization was.
Hello readers: I hope that you go back and check out the update I left in the article, noting (with link) an article that Spencer Ackerman wrote on this same subject late last month. I can’t believe I missed it. While it covers much the same ground (though not entirely), I think it has rather more news in it, as it is a work of journalism, and mine the blog, and is very much worth reading.
We have always been known for our labour-saving devices.
It’s all about the art of re-framing the argument.
Reframe the Argument…Win the Debate On Torture…
http://progressnotcongress.org/blog/?p=517
Did any of you lose any one when the towers fell? Do you think they cared if we lost any sleep? or do you think they gave a second thought about the thousands upon thousands they murdered or the families still being tortured because their loved one died a horrific death… no
I knew four people who were in the towers that day, and fortunately they all made it out (one just barely, who was badly injured). But that is not the point.
Even if torture were moral and legal, I think it should be a crime to use it because the overwhelming majority of experienced interrogators that I am aware of say it does not work. So, why go any further on the issue? Why pay attention to TV fiction, and ignorant self-interested politicians and media gasbags?
Even if torture were legal and moral, I for one would still want investigations, and if warranted, prosecutions, because using it goes against the best evidence about sound policy for gathering vital intelligence. On grounds of malfeasance alone, there should be sanctions for using torture.
If it turns out to be true that some of the torture was used in an attempt to confirm false suspicions of a al Qaeda-Iraq link, then that should be prosecuted also.
to Jeff Kaye: thanks for the update.