by hilzoy
From Reuters:
” A newly-released document suggests Osama bin Laden’s former driver may have been subjected to 50 days of sleep deprivation at the Guantanamo prison camp in Cuba, the prisoner’s defense lawyers said on Monday.
Lawyers for Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni in his late 30s, previously alleged Hamdan was beaten and abused. But they said sleep deprivation for 50 days, if proved, would be among the worst abuse he suffered at the hands of his American captors. (…)
Hamdan’s lawyers said they discovered the document among 600 pages of “confinement” evidence handed over to the defense team on Saturday, 9 days before trial. It said Hamdan was put into “Operation Sandman” between June 11 and July 30, 2003.
Operation Sandman has been described in press reports as a program devised by behavioral scientists where an inmate’s sleep is systematically interrupted.
“My view personally is that sleep deprivation of that nature extending for 50 days would constitute torture,” said Joseph McMillan, one of Hamdan’s civilian lawyers.”
It would.
Here’s more on Operation Sandman:
“One of the interrogation procedures described by people who worked at the Guantanamo Bay prison called for an inmate to be awakened, subjected to an interrogation, then returned to a different cell.
As soon as guards determined that the inmate had fallen into a deep sleep, he was awakened again for interrogation, after which he would be returned to yet a different cell. This could happen five or six times during a night, they said.
The procedure was described by those who participated as part of something called “Operation Sandman.””
Sleep deprivation makes people psychotic. They hallucinate. They don’t know what’s real and what’s not. It also makes them willing to say anything to get it to stop, so even if the inhumanity of it doesn’t get to you, the inefficiency would have to. Here are some first-hand accounts:
“John Schlapobersky, consultant psychotherapist to the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, was himself tortured through sleep deprivation, in his case in apartheid South Africa in the 1960s. (…)
“I was kept without sleep for a week in all. I can remember the details of the experience, although it took place 35 years ago. After two nights without sleep, the hallucinations start, and after three nights, people are having dreams while fairly awake, which is a form of psychosis.
“By the week’s end, people lose their orientation in place and time – the people you’re speaking to become people from your past; a window might become a view of the sea seen in your younger days. To deprive someone of sleep is to tamper with their equilibrium and their sanity.” (…)
Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister from 1977-83, was tortured by the KGB as a young man. In his book, White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia, he wrote of losing the will to resist when deprived of sleep.
“In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep… Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.
“I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them.
“He did not promise them their liberty; he did not promise them food to sate themselves. He promised them – if they signed – uninterrupted sleep! And, having signed, there was nothing in the world that could move them to risk again such nights and such days.””
Imagine doing this to someone for fifty days. Imagine that our government did it in our name.
did we also plagiarize this delightful practice from communist dictators? where did this start – does anyone know?
(though i’m not counting out the ingenuity of our fine CIA men and women)
Lesson Plan Eighteen: Behavior Before a Judge
1. Complain again that you were tortured (start complaining earlier when in prison).
2. Complain about mistreatment too.
3. Get a lawyer to help you complain.
4. Use names of security guards when complaining.
5. Be nice to snitches, they might complain later.
6. Complain on behalf of everybody else as well.
So his lawyer says he may have gotten fifty days eh? That’s a long time.
BOB: apparently you missed the part about documents turned over by the government which confirm this.
Who is this John Schlapobersky? And how can we trust a man who is so unstable after being subjected to severe torture? After all, he would say anything at this point, right?
@Brick Oven Bill: It’s a good thing we enabled their devious plan by depriving them of basic rights like habeas, right? I mean, imagine if we’d afforded them due process? What would they have to complain about then? Basic cable????? We are so clever!
I’m sure BOB is willing to undergo the same treatment to show us how easy it really is.
The accounts of the unnamed ‘workers’ in Hilzoy’s link refer to waking a person up “five or six times during a night”.
With respect to the suffering of Mr. Hamdan, Navy SEALS have to stay awake days at a time during their training. No sleepie.
The SEALS can only make it for days, not months. I’ve seen SEALS tip over. This Hamdan guy must be tough.
50 days is, like, months.
BOB:
5 or 6 times a night, he’d be let to fall asleep, then immediately awoken and interrogated. It may not be immediately obvious, but this is worse than making him stay awake consistently. They’re doing it for a reason; it’s a lot more disorienting. That they then would move him to a different location would make this all the worse, if the various locations were distinct. Personally, as someone who has suffered (non-externally-induced) long-term sleep deprivation in the past (though nothing near this magnitude), this sounds horrific. Getting jerked back awake after finally being able to fall asleep when sleep deprived is a physical shock, and distorts one’s perceptions. A lot. Sleep-depriving someone for a week or two would be cruel. To do so for 50 days seems viciously evil, and I cannot possibly imagine that it wouldn’t do irreparable harm.
Incidentally, your last comment seems to imply extreme skepticism of his account of 50 days of sleep deprivation, because SEAL trainees can’t manage to force themselves to stay awake for much more than 50-60 hours. Two points. First, it’s not 50 days w/o sleeping, it’s 50 days w/o uninterrupted sleep. One need not ever let someone fall asleep in order to effect sleep deprivation, nor would it be practical to do so if one aimed extend the deprivation over a long period. Second, the SEALs are trying to keep themselves awake; they’re not being awoken by keepers every time they start to drift off. Wee mite of a difference, both in cause and effect.
Isn’t being a racist bigot BOB’s particular art form? Now we’ve got used to that, would it surprise anyone that he starts making pro-torture comments?
No first-hand experience here, but to judge from what I have read in the memoirs of Soviet prisoners under Stalin, the difference between very inadequate sleep and no sleep at all is immense. People denied any sleep at all typically endured 2 to 3 days. A week was extraordinary. People allowed very inadequate sleep, such as Hamdan, often held out for 2 to 3 months and extremes of 6, 8 or even 10 months have been recorded.
You can survive longer with no food than with no sleep… after about a month or so without any sleep, you die. But, yes, inadequate and interrupted sleep is a different matter.
As for the disgusting BOB: wouldn’t it be a great propaganda coup for the US if it could say “Hamdan says he was tortured, but that’s a lie. Look, here are the reports from the Red Cross and other independent bodies that show how well we treated our prisoners. Look through our own internal documents and you’ll find no evidence of torture or mistreatment. You can watch the videos of his interrogations if you like – they’re admissible evidence in court.”
But, of course, the US can’t say that, not any more.
Look, guys, who are you going to listen to here? Brick Oven Bill, who is clearly in a position to speak authoritatively on this, or some filthy Muslim and his dhimmi lawyer?
Well, when you put it that way, Phil…
Though I can’t seem to find it right now, IIRC a former CIA executive director once remarked in a press interview that sleep deprivation was the one technique that the CIA was not likely to give up.
God Bless America!
From the view of a foreigner, especially as someone from Germany which was freed from totalism and made democratic by the USA, it is very sad to see, what has happened to the land of freedom and of justice.
For hundreds of years the USA has been the keeper of democracy, peace and freedom.
Please do not tolerate, that this is going to chance.
If it’s not the USA who else shold it be ?
@publius:
There has been a conscious and and unconscious effort to try to let the U.S. government off the hook on the question of who developed various techniques of torture, when, and how.
In particular, CIA sources seeking to cover their own rear ends have pushed the line that “we were caught unprepared, with no trained interrogators after September 11 and so had to take lessons from the barbarians”, and unfortunately, Jane Mayer has helped push that line — the greatest weakness in an outstanding, invaluable body of reporting. The “reverse-engineering” of SERE training for use on U.S. prisoners in Guantanamo, the CIA black site prisons, and elsewhere has been discussed as if 1) the techniques were learned from the Chinese and 2) this reverse use of SERE were new.
Anyone who is seriously interested should read Darius Rejali’s Democracy and Torture and Alfred McCoy’s A Question of Torture.
Short answer: Democracies and dictatorships have both developed torture. The democracies have specialized in “no touch” tortures, whose damage to people subjected to them is usually much longer-lasting than physical torture. The U.S. government initiated a large and systematic program of research into torture during and immediately after WWII.
Doctor’s appointment, go to go — more later.
“Please do not tolerate, that this is going to chance.”
You say this as though it were something we have a choice over. In truth, the level of input I, or most other Americans, have over these awful decisions is pretty much the same level as the average German– vanishingly little.
The overwhelming feelings generated by the Bush administration: shame, frustration, rage, and impotence.
Back. More in response to publius’ question:
Counter to 1) and 2) above:
1) The SERE program was developed in response to the breakdown of the U.S. pilot prisoners captured in Korea, but CIA and military torture research had begun years before that.
2) The misuse of SERE to point the way to abuse of prisoners (as opposed to resistance to torture if captured) occurred well before Guantanamo, among Green Berets in Viet Nam. It wasn’t official policy, but it was known and winked at by SERE instructors.
The CIA’s torture manuals were the fruit of the postwar research as well as borrowing from allied dictatorships and communist enemies. They have been in use at least 1963 (KUBARK), and formed the basis for torture taught to U.S. military participants in the Phoenix program in Viet Nam, as well as torture taught through the School of the Americas to Latin American military in the 1960s-1990s, along with in-country training of military and paramilitaries (in Honduras, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, and others).
This long and documented experience with “coercive” interrogation (torture) gives the lie to CIA sources’ protestations that they had no institutional capacity for interrogation and had to improvise when faced with a flood of prisoners in 2001-2.
Despite the long involvement of the U.S. security organs with torture, it is still the case that this administration has taken it to a new and horrific level. Before, torture was acknowledged to be illegal, and denied, and even “reformed” when exposed (e.g., the supposed revamping of the curriculum at the School of the Americas).
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Addington, Haynes, Yoo, Gonzales, Tenet, Ashcroft, Chertoff, and others acted in concert to “legalize” torture, to make it official policy for U.S. personnel — military and CIA — and contractors. They also ordered and “legalized” the capture of people on the president’s say-so and their indefinite incommunicado detention with no review of any kind, a situation that would be likely to result in torture and abuse even if there were not a conscious turn to the policy.
It’s also important not to overlook how early the signs of the Bush policy of lawless, secret, unreviewable indefinite detention and torture appeared, and the participation of so-called liberals in making what was once a settled issue “debatable”.
Thousands of Muslim immigrants were swept into detention in the month that followed the September 11 attacks. Signs of their abuse and mistreatment were already in the press by mid-October.
A Washington Post article by Walter Pincus appeared on p. A6 Sunday, October 21 that was the clearest possible example of a trial balloon for the policy.
Instead of outrage, the result was weeks of chin-pulling discussion by Serious People like Jonathan Alter in Newsweek and Alan Dershowitz in a book promoting “torture warrants” (something Dershowitz had been advocating wrt the Israeli govt decades earlier).
In short, when the histories are written, it will be absolutely clear that We Knew.
We Knew, and very few of us did eff-all.
Some who knew even helped cover it up: The Democratic Congressional leadership facilitated the passage of the Military Commissions Act in September 2006, which included retroactive immunity for those who carried out the policy of torture.
Some of the exceptions to wilful not-knowing, silence, and passivity are Obsidian Wings posters. In that connection it should be noted that Katherine was one of the research assistants for Jane Mayer’s book.
We Knew, and very few of us did eff-all.
Nell, I agree with everything you said, but would you mind clarifying what you meant by “We Knew”? Some of the facts you mention seem like the sort of thing that was known by a small number of experts of devotees but not really general knowledge. In that sense, it seems like chemical vapor deposition: an important bit of technical knowledge well understood by a few experts but something for which the vast majority of people know nothing about. If you’re trying to say that enough people in the media understood the chain of causation that they should have been publicizing this or that regardless of what was widely known we all should have known that such things were done in our name, I can understand that. I just have this lingering sense that if you pulled someone off the street and asked them if they they knew about the individual items you listed, they would stare at you blankly.
Again, I pretty much agree with what you’re saying, I just want to some clarification of the “We Knew” bit.
I just have this lingering sense that if you pulled someone off the street and asked them if they they knew about the individual items you listed, they would stare at you blankly.
Oh, absolutely. I’m talking about elite knowledge: members of Congress, media, pundits, anyone who’d followed U.S. foreign policy closely for the last few decades.
And, of course, human rights lawyers and disreputable leftists who’d denounced all these incidents, often years before they were acknowledged in the mainstream. After a few decades of being proven consistently right about these atrocities, some of us stopped giving the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt in matters of torture. This led to our being dismissed as “America haters”.
The inability to start fresh, to pretend each time that nothing like this has ever happened before, is a real handicap for ambitious pols and pundits.
For reporters who are careful not to give away their knowledge of the past in their coverage, it can lead to scoops and Pulitzers: Dana Priest was reporting on U.S. torture in the 1990s. I’m sure that her failure to give the government the benefit of the doubt helped her get onto the story of CIA secret prisons and torture as early as she did (December 2002).
Nell: In that connection it should be noted that Katherine was one of the research assistants for Jane Mayer’s book.
And in that connection, Katherine should be thanked, for her sterling work over many years.
Turbulence: I just want to some clarification of the “We Knew” bit.
Well, for starters, Turb: anyone with access to the San Francisco Chronicle knew as early as January 2004 that the US was kidnapping citizens of allied nations, flying them to countries which were supposedly members of the Axis of Evil, and having them tortured, on suspicion of terrorism.
All the regulars at Obsidian Wings also knew all about this case, from January 2004, thanks to Katherine: click on the Mahar Arar tag on the right sidebar, sometime – scroll back to the beginning of the thread, and start from there.
(FWIW, for not-unrelated reasons, May 2004 was the last time I visited the US, and the last time I ever intend to visit the US, until there’s some acknowledgment from your government that what they did to Mahar Arar was criminal. It’s not the only reason, but it’s certainly one of them.)
But more than that: anyone with access to UK news would have known, from July 2003, that at the very least something highly suspicious was going on in Guantanamo Bay, because that was when the US announced that it intended to hold a show trial of two British citizens against whom they appeared to have damn-all evidence to show, but who had apparently confessed to enough to be put on trial. Again, by January 2004, it was clear that some terrible things were happening in the US’s oubliette in Guantanamo Bay.
So, yes, Turbulence. Years ago – four years at least, if you were only as well-informed as someone who reads a daily UK newspaper or a good blog like Obsidian Wings – we knew.
How far we have come! Does anybody remember the portion of the movie “Stalag 17” when the camp commandant questions a recently captured American flyer, clearly using sleep deprivation, and the Red Cross representative reminds the commandant that there can be war crimes tribunals after the war? We’ve become the bad guys, thanks to the Pretzel Idiot Boy Bush and his nefarious compatriot Shoot ’em In The Face Cheyney, and all of their syncophantic bully boys.