Since it now seems [certain] that the Obama Administration is carrying on its own fun & games with a particular class of human beings, see: The “black prison,” Obama’s Afghan torture center and the APA, I though it might be useful for a quick refresher re: one of the favourite games played but only for fun, of course.
Chapter 13
Pages 290 - 292
Deprivation of Sleep
Describing his torture by sleep deprivation by the Soviet police, Menachem Begin observes that anyone subjected to this condition knows that “not even hunger or thirst are comparable to it.”152 Experts now agree that sleep deprivation “is a basic, and potentially dangerous, physiological need state, similar to hunger or thirst and as basic to survival.”153 Additionally, sleep deprivation reduces a body’s tolerance for musculoskeletal pain, causing deep aches first in the lower part of the body, followed by similar pains in the upper body.154 Animal tests suggest that REM sleep deprivation increases sensitivity to mechanical, thermal, and noxious electrical stimuli.155
Sleep-deprived people are highly suggestible (a condition not unlike drunkenness or hypnosis), making sleep deprivation ideal for inducing false confessions.156 Sleep-deprived subjects also have vivid auditory and visual hallucinations, making this practice ideal for documenting such remarkable events such as secret pacts with the devil.157 Hippolytus de Marsilliis (b. 1451), an Italian lawyer, is credited with introducing this technique into the Catholic Inquisition’s toolkit.158 But Inquisitional interrogators soon were aware of the unreliable character of sleep deprivation, and in particular the vivid hallucinations of subjects. The preferred technique of the Inquisition was the rack. It was Protestant countries that embraced sleep deprivation. The Calvinist Church of Scotland adopted sleep deprivation for witch interrogations in the 1640s, making it the first nation to apply sleep deprivation systematically. Scottish torture included standard instruments except for the rack, about which lawyers had doubts.159 Sleep deprivation was legally less dubious. Guards took turns shaking and pricking victims, or victims were forced to walk perpetually for two days or more, combined with a limited diet. The English Parliament prohibited “swimming” witches in 1645, and so English witch hunters followed the Scottish model, combining sleep deprivation and forced sitting or walking to extort confessions.160
Sleep deprivation was not a common torture in the early modern period. Torturers preferred to whip, stretch, burn, pierce, cut, and brand their victims. In the modern era, common use of sleep deprivation occurred first in democracies or the colonies of democracies. In 1854, a British commission reported that it was a common practice among colonial police in India.161 In the 1930s, French torturers in Saigon used sleep deprivation combined with electricity, falaka, meals of salt, and positional tortures on Vietnamese nationalists.162 American police also revived sleep deprivation in the early twentieth century as newspapers condemned more coercive techniques.163 Detectives took turns interrogating suspects for hours or days (in a stifling interrogation room, hence the sweating). They kept them awake by shining bright lights into their eyes, shaking them, or making constant noise.
Sweating appears in Europe in the 1930s. The British police were not unfamiliar with sweating, what they called “extended interrogation.”164 Likewise, Stalin’s police sweated suspects, using sleep deprivation, like U.S. police, to generate false confessions for public trials. The Soviet style in sweating carried over into Communist states and then to revolutionary Iran in the 1990s.165
The Gestapo was the first to use sleep deprivation to gather military intelligence. The first reports appear in the late 1930s. In 1942, Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller authorized “sharpened interrogation” for terrorists, approving sleep deprivation, starvation, exhaustion exercises, regulated beating, and confinement in dark cells—but only to gather intelligence on those who had “plans hostile to the state,” not to get confessions of guilt.166
Franco’s police in Spain turned to sweating in 1939.167 Between 1940 and 1948, British military interrogators in a clandestine London prison sought to extract confessions of war crimes from 3,573 German POWs. To this end, they subjected the prisoners to a regimen of sleep deprivation, forced standing, exhaustion exercises, cold water showers, and beatings.168 In 1943, British and American agents introduced Brazilian police to sweating, helping them interrogate a German spy ring with sleep deprivation, forced standing, and clean beating.169 This combination has since appeared in other countries, including Argentina, Portugal, and South Korea.170 Sleep deprivation was a standard part of British interrogation in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and the current Israeli shabeh procedures.171
American courts finally barred sleep deprivation for domestic policing dur-ing World War II. In 1941 Tennessee police subjected one suspect, Ashcraft, to sleep deprivation and interrogation for thirty-six hours until he confessed he had killed his wife. In Ashcraft v. Tennessee (1944), the Supreme Court did not simply toss out the confession as unacceptable in any democratic society; it linked sweating directly to the practices of “certain foreign nations dedicated to an opposite policy,” namely, “physical or mental torture.”172
After 9/11, the U.S. military authorized sleep deprivation of prisoners for up to seventy-two hours, far longer than what Ashcraft was subjected to.173 The CIA also authorized sleep deprivation in combination with standing handcuff restraints for more than forty hours.174 Local commanders and interrogators, military and civilian, also took initiatives. At Camp Cropper, near Baghdad Airport, one prisoner being kept awake for ninety-six hours.175 At Guantnamo, guards exercised sleep deprivation under the cover of moving detainees from one cell to another every hour or two, a technique called “the frequent-flier program.”176 In 2002, American interrogators on the ground in Afghanistan developed a technique they called “monstering.” The commander “instituted a new rule that a prisoner could be kept awake and in the booth for as long as an interrogator could last.” One “monstering” interrogator engaged in this for thirty hours.177
Notes:
152. MenachemBegin,WhiteNights,trans.KatieKaplan(NewYork:HarperandRow, 1977), 108.
153. J.A.E. Fleming, “Pharmacological Aspects of Drowsiness,” in Forensic Aspects of Sleep, ed. Colin Shapiro and Alexander Smith (Chichester, NY: John Wiley and Sons, 1997), 152.
154. Martha Lentz, Carol Landis, James Rothermel, and Joen Shaver, “Effects of Se- lective Slow Wave Sleep Disruption on Muscolskeletal Pain and Fatigue in Mid- dle Aged Women,” Journal of Rheumatology 26. (1999): 1586–92; S. Hakki Onen, Abdelkrim Alloui, Annette Gross, Alain Eschallier and Claude Dubray, “The Ef- fects of Total Sleep Deprivation, Selective Sleep Interruption and Sleep Recovery on Pain Tolerance Thresholds in Healthy Subjects,” Journal of Sleep Research 10 (2002): 35–42.
155. S. Hakki Onen, Abedelkrim Alloui, Didier Jourdan, Alain Eschallier, and Claude Dubray, “Effects of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) Sleep Deprivation on Pain Sen- sitivity in the Rat,” Brain Research 900 (2001): 261–67.
156. M. Blagrove and L. Akehurst, “Effects of Sleep Loss on Confidence-Accuracy Relationships for Reasoning and Eyewitness Memory,” Journal of Experimental Psychological: Applied 6.1 (2000): 59–73; Shapiro and Smith, Forensic Aspects of Sleep, 29–64, 99–130.
157. Walter R. Gove, “Sleep Deprivation: A Cause of Psychotic Disorganization,” American Journal of Sociology 75.5 (1970): 782–99; Roger Eastmen, “When Will I Sleep Again?” Airline Pilot, November 1987, 10–14; David Tyler, “Psychological Changes During Experimental Sleep Deprviation,” Diseases of the Nervous Sys- tem 16.10 (1955): 293–99.
158. Innes, The History of Torture, 44.
159. Christiana Larner, The Enemies of God (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 107; Diarmaid Macculloch, The Reformation (New York: Viking, 2003), 555. Innes,
160. The History of Torture, 117–18.
161. Ibid., 157.
162. Hemery, Revolutionnaires vietnamiens, 164–65.
163. See chapter 3, “Lights, Heat, and Sweat.”
164. Scott, The History of Torture, 277; Deeley, Beyond Breaking Point, 139; 157.
165. Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). See chapter 3, “Lights, Heat, and Sweat.”
166. Chief Muller, “Decree of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, 12 June 1942 regarding third degree methods of interrogation [1531-PS],” in IMT, Trial, 27:326–27.
167. Cuevas, Prison of Women, 79, 183, 202–3.
168. Cobain, “Secrets of London Cage,” 8. See chapter 15, “Forced Standing and Other Positions.”
169. Stanley Hilton, Hitler’s Secret War in South America, 1939–1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 249, 251, 255–57.
170. AI, Mission to Argentina, 37; AI, Report of an Amnesty International Mission to the Republic of Korea (London, 1976), 28, 36–39; Alexandre Manuel, Roge ́rio Ca- rapinha, and Dias Neves, PIDE (Funda ̃o, Portugal: Jornal do Funda ̃o, 1974), 70, 98, 108–10, 128, 152, 180, 196.
171. Yuval Ginbar, Back to a Routine of Torture, trans. Jessica Bonn (Jerusalem: Public Committee against Torture in Israel, 2003), 45, 48–50, 54, 58, 61; Yuval Ginbar, Flawed Defense, trans. Jessica Bonn (Jerusalem: Public Committee against Tor- ture in Israel, 2001), 29–31, 35, 37, 38, 41.
172. Ashcraft v. Tennessee, 322 U.S. 143 (1944), 155.
173. Esther Schrader and Greg Miller, “U.S. Officials Defend Interrogation Tactics,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2004, A11; “Officials: Interrogation Techniques May Be Banned,” May 14, 2004, http://www.cnn.com.
174. Ross and Esposito, “CIA’s Harsh Interrogation Techniques.”
175.International Committee of the Red Cross, Report of the ICRC on the Treatment by Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq during Arrest, Internment and Interrogation (February 2004), 15. See also “ ‘Big Steve’ and Abu Ghraib,” Salon.com, March 31, 2006, http://www.salon.com.
176. Jane Mayer, “The Experiment,” New Yorker, July 11 and 18, 2005, 70–71.
177. Greg Miller, “Bound by Convention,” Stanford Magazine, November–December 2004, http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2004/novdec; see also Mackey and Miller, The Interrogators, 288–89.