A Torture Mystery: How Did the CIA Come to Use Stress Positions for Sleep Deprivation?

[struggle4progress]

By SPENCER ACKERMAN 4/29/09 6:00 AM

... In an August 1, 2002 memorandum outlining interrogation methods that the CIA could lawfully employ on captured al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, then-OLC chief Jay Bybee authorized the technique of sleep deprivation, writing that the CIA’s goal was “to reduce the individual’s ability to think on his feet and, through the discomfort associated with lack of sleep, to motivate him to cooperate” with his interrogators. There is no discussion in the memorandum, declassified by the Obama administration on April 17, about how the CIA would keep Abu Zubaydah awake. Yet Bybee wrote, “it is clear that depriving someone of sleep does not involve severe physical pain within the meaning of the statute. … Based on the facts you have provided us, we are not aware of any evidence that sleep deprivation results in severe pain or suffering.”

But by the time the OLC reevaluated the CIA’s interrogation program in 2005, it revealed that the technique was overwhelmingly physical. “The primary method of sleep deprivation involves the use of shackling to keep the detainee awake,” wrote Bybee’s eventual replacement, Steven Bradbury, on March 10, 2005. “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 feet are shackled to a bolt in the floor, giving him a “two-to-three-foot diameter of movement.” His hands “may be raised above the level of his head, but only for a period of up to two hours.” His weight is “borne by his legs and feet during sleep deprivation,” ensuring that he had to keep awake, for if he “los his balance” from exhaustion he would feel “the restraining tension of the shackles.”

Both memos gave legal approval to the use of stress positions like shackling. And both memos contemplated and blessed the use of techniques in combination with each other, finding that no conceivable permutation of combined techniques would constitute “severe pain or suffering” or “severe mental pain or suffering.” But until the release of the 2005 memo, there had been no official acknowledgment that sleep deprivation as practiced by the CIA depended on physically restraining a detainee ...

In a confidential February 17, 2007 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross — recently obtained and published by the New York Review of Books’ Mark Danner — several detainees formerly in CIA custody who had been subjected to stress-position-based sleep deprivation described the practice. “I was kept sitting on a chair, shackled by hands and feet for two to three weeks,” said Abu Zubaydah. “If I started to fall asleep a guard would come and spray water in my face.” The cell in which he was kept was “kept very cold” through air conditioning, according to the Red Cross report, and “very loud ’shouting’ music was constantly playing on an approximately fifteen minute repeat loop twenty-four hours a day.” Other detainees said that feces would run down their legs “when they defecated while held in the prolonged stress standing position” ...

http://washingtonindependent.com/40935/a-torture-mystery

[HillbillyBob]

1. severe pain or suffering” or “severe mental pain or suffering"

Anyone who thinks that severe mental pain and suffering does not result from long term sleep deprivation should be married to my ex for a while.
Who would pick an argument over something trivial just before bedtime, there were no correct answers and every thing I said would result in more shouting and whining some times all night.
This was at a time when I was working 2 jobs, and restoring an old house plus working on old furniture we would buy at yardsales, auctions or antiques places then sell. This was during runnyrayguns depression called recession, it was depressing for me I'll tell ya. Instead of working 2 pizza hut jobs I should have been working air traffic control.
It is hard to explain the anguish and misery.
I'm tired of hearing from the rpigs " but, but, they are terrorists".
No they were SUSPECTS and as I said when I first heard about torture of these folks, "WTF happened to innocent until proved guilty?
"What evidence do we have on these folk?"
If the Constitution does not apply to those who we hold in prison then who the hell does it apply to?

[leveymg]

2. "Stress positions" are just a euphemism for some very old atrocities