Mark Benjamin at Salon backs Nance up. Benjamin dug through some recently-disclosed CIA documents and found what waterboarding actually involved, as practiced by CIA:

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

This is all detailed in Abu Zubaydah’s account to the International Committee of the Red Cross of how he was tortured. But it’s one thing for a terrorist to testify to ill treatment. It’s another for CIA documentation to corroborate his account. Clearly Abu Zubaydah was drowned. As Benjamin observes, this is not the “dunking” that Dick Cheney describes. Whatever apologists like Marc Thiessen might say, the people who performed this torture knew full well that they were torturing people like Abu Zubaydah.

The twelfth [interrogation] technique–which Mitchell and Jessen wanted approved but which Yoo excluded because of the rush to approve waterboarding–is mock burial.

There must have been significant discussion about the decision to exclude mock burial from the Bybee Two memo, because the reference to its exclusion in the report itself (PDF page 60 in the Final Report) includes a page and a half of redactions following the discussion of leaving it out.

We learned last year that the mysterious eleventh technique was prolonged diapering, thanks to the disclosure of the 2004 CIA inspector-general’s report into interrogation and detention. Wheeler’s discovery completes the list of what these two torture enthusiasts advocated.

Still, according to the recently released July 2007 memo from the Office of Legal Counsel, the technique was determined not to cause “serious physical pain or suffering” and not to violate the War Crimes Act. The War Crimes Act prohibits torture and “cruel and inhuman treatment.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

A comparison of the inspector general report with legal memos released from the Office of Legal Counsel within the Justice Department, however, reveals that lawyers were so uncertain about how and whether sleep deprivation could be used legally that their advice to the CIA ranged from restricting its use to 48 continuous hours, to allowing it for 180 hours or more. And although the 2007 legal memo specifically mentions that the CIA said it might use the technique for 180 hours, the lawyers restricted their analysis, in footnote 7, to only the legality of its use for up to 96 hours. Meanwhile, the inspector general report discusses the contemplated use of sleep deprivation on Abu Zubaydah for up to 11 days at a time — or 264 hours straight.

None of the former interrogators, physicians, lawyers or government officials could explain to TWI exactly why the CIA and Justice Department lawyers changed the rules so sharply and frequently. A call to Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard Law Professor and director of the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004 was not returned.

“How they go from 48 to 100 plus hours is anybody’s guess,” said Jack Cloonan, a former FBI special agent who worked in the Osama Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002. “I think that they were making the rules up as they went along,” he said, adding that “they outsourced a lot of this,” referring to the role, recently revealed by The New York Times, of Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two businessmen-psychologists who developed the interrogation procedures for the CIA but had no interrogation experience themselves.

But the experts on sleep deprivation all appear to agree – and the literature on the subject is remarkably consistent – that sleep deprivation is physically and mentally harmful, and largely ineffective at producing useful information. Still, it’s tempting for government officials desperate to get detainees to talk.

“It will elicit information, that’s true,” said Cloonan. “People will talk. But in point of fact the substance is what separates what works and what doesn’t. Did they provide actionable intelligence, and could you verify what was being told?” asks Cloonan. “There’s a big diff between compliance — giving information to stop what they’re being subjected to — and real cooperation, where they’re giving useful information.”

Scientists, physicians and interrogators all say that because sleep deprivation causes extreme confusion and even psychosis, it’s impossible to know if what the detainee is telling interrogators is true or not.

“Sleep deprivation has been extensively studied,” said Dr. Steven Miles, professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, as well as the author of the book, “Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors.” “It will cause people to speak. It does not produce reliable intelligence. It impairs the ability to concentrate in a way that allows the interrogatee to assemble coherent narratives. So it’s counterproductive in terms of information solicitation.”

A December 2006 report from the Intelligence Science Board of the National Defense Intelligence College says that sleep deprivation is associated with, among other things, “increased suggestibility,” adding: “On this last point it is worth noting that suggestibility increases specifically under conditions simulating an interrogation. At least one study has found that “the effect on suggestibility of one or two night’s sleep loss is comparable to the difference in suggestibility between true and false confessors.”

That’s such a basic fact for interrogators that in the book, “Introduction to Forensic Psychology,” by Curt and Anne Bartol, the glossary lists “Coerced-compliant false confessions” as “Admissions of guilt most likely to occur after prolonged and intense interrogation experiences, especially in situations where sleep deprivation is a feature. The suspect, in desperation to avoid further discomfort, admits to the crime even knowing that he or she is innocent.”

As Tom Parker, a former British Intelligence agent, now Amnesty International’s Policy Director for Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Human Rights explained: “Sleep deprivation was never designed as an interview tool. It was used by the KGB and its precursors as a way to break people down to give false confessions. These techniques are not about getting people to tell the truth, they’re about breaking people down to kill their spirit.”

The justification for the technique originated with the idea of learned helplessness, based on studies conducted decades ago on dogs.

“They took dogs, tied them in a cage and shocked them,” explained Miles. “They showed that the dogs would act to resist or escape, unless the dogs learned there was nothing they could do to resist. Then they would just lie there and take it.”

The theory, explained Miles, is that “when used with other techniques it will induce dependence on the interrogator, which will cause the person to comply.” But all the research done on this from around the world reveals that “this technique simply does not gather intelligence.”

Sleep deprivation is always part of a package: as described in CIA inspector general report, prisoners were shackled, semi-starved, put in diapers and forced to stand that way. Their hands were cuffed along the wall close to their chins, according to Department of Justice memos. If they nodded off and stopped standing, the chains would pull at their wrists, waking them up.

Andrea Northwood, director of client services at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, recently told The Associated Press that her organization considers 96 hours of sleep deprivation to be torture.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was tortured in Vietnam, has also said that prolonged sleep deprivation is torture, and recently denied the claim in the CIA inspector general report that he was among several members of Congress who approved its use.

Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister from 1977-83, tortured by the KGB as a young man, famously described sleep deprivation in his book, White Nights:

“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,” he wrote. “I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them” — time to sleep.

Although the technique was prohibited by President Obama, some worry it could be revived in the future because it at least gets people to talk, and it’s generally perceived as less offensive than waterboarding, head-slamming or forced nudity. “Sleep deprivation may be seen as a tempting technique to restore,” wrote reporter Greg Miller in the Los Angeles Times recently.

In justifying the use of sleep deprivation in a 2005 memo, Justice Department lawyers argued that it was okay for CIA interrogators to keep terror suspects awake for seven and a half days straight — because “even very extended sleep deprivation does not cause physical pain.” They relied for that claim on the work of university researchers who found that people who were deprived of sleep for just one night had an increased sensitivity to certain types of pain. Justice Department memos dated May 10, 2005 cited this study to support the conclusion that severe sleep deprivation of up to 180 consecutive hours might cause some increased pain but not “severe physical pain” — even when used together with slaps, stress positions, water dousing and “walling” — slamming a detainee’s head repeatedly against a flexible wall.

“Because sleep deprivation appears to cause at most only relatively moderate decreases in pain tolerance, the use of these techniques in combination with extended sleep deprivation would not be expected to cause severe physical pain,” wrote Steven Bradbury, a principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, who signed the memos. (Bradbury has since left the department and works at a private law firm in Washington. He did not return calls for comment.)

But those same academic researchers have since called the Justice Department’s use of their work “nonsense.” “To claim that 180 hours [of sleep deprivation] is safe in these respects, is nonsense.” Dr. James Horne, with the Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre, told the blog Obsidian Wings. “Prolonged stress with sleep deprivation will lead to a physiological exhaustion of the body’s defense mechanisms, physical collapse, and with the potential for various ensuing illnesses.”

In their studies, the doctors explained, the subjects were well-fed and could play video games and watch television. Detainees under interrogation, on the other hand, were often semi-starved and chained into place, not even allowed to go to the bathroom.

“In a manner, it’s like giving a drug to a patient: if you administer it in small doses for therapeutic reasons, it helps them. If you give it in huge volumes, it becomes toxic — and can even kill them,” another of the researchers cited, Dr. S. Hakki Onen, sleep specialist and geriatrician, told Time Magazine.

Although the Justice Department lawyers wrote that “extended sleep deprivation cannot be expected to cause ‘severe mental pain or suffering,’” the doctors vigorously disagree.

After several days, “the mental pain would be all too evident, and arguably worse than physical pain,” Dr. Horne said to Obsidian Wings.

Notably, a combination of techniques similar to those used by the CIA has been ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights. In the case Ireland v. U.K., the court held that a combination of sleep deprivation, hooding, wall-standing, continuous white noise, sleep deprivation and “the bread and water diet” violated international humanitarian law.

What’s odd, say former interrogators, is that the military knew this and for the most part, resisted using these techniques. The CIA, however, relying on inexperienced contractors who developed its interrogation strategies based on the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) training, seems to have completely ignored common knowledge.

“The point is you realize when you’re going through that [SERE] training, they tell you this isn’t about trying to get useful intelligence out of you, it’s about getting propoganda,” said Matthew Alexander, a 14-year veteran of the air force and leader of an elite interrogations team in Iraq and author of “How to Break a Terrorist.” (Matthew Alexander, seen here on The Daily Show, uses a pseudonym.) Sleep deprivation may be used for no longer than 48 hours in SERE training, according to the inspector general report. “They’re just trying to break down your will.”

“I think people misinterpreted that,” Alexander added. “Mitchell and Jessen, the psychologists, they took that learned helplessness theory, but they’d never done an interrogation. They were so off base.”

On how detainees were transfered from one secret detention facility to another:

The detainee would be made to wear a diaper and dressed in a tracksuit. … The journey times obviously varied considerably and ranged from one hour to over twenty-four to thirty hours. The detainee was not allowed to go to the toilet and if necessary was obliged to urinate or defecate into the diaper.

That would count as a “standard” technique, according to former CIA Director George Tenet’s January 2003 guidance, as “prolonged diapering” lasted longer than three days.

In a section of the report dealing with so-called “stress positions” — forced bodily contortion used not just for inflicting pain but as a sleep deprivation technique — there’s a section about how some detainees were allowed to defecate in a bucket. Not all were that fortunate.

None of them, however, were allowed to clean themselves afterwards. Others were made to wear a garment that resembled a diaper. This was the case for Mr [Walid] Bin Attash in his fourth place of detention. However, he commented that on several occasions the diaper was not replaced so he had to urinate and defecate on himself while shackled in the prolonged stress standing position. Indeed, in addition to Mr Bin Attash, three other detaineesspecified that they had to defecate and urinate on themselves and remain standing in their own bodily fluids. Of these, only Mr [Mohammed Nazir] Bin Lep agreed that his name be transmitted to the authorities.

That would seem the point of the technique: to compel the psychological stress and physical discomfort caused from forcing a person to wallow in his own human waste for extended periods of time. “[T]he general goal of these techniques is a psychological impact, and not some physical effect, with a specific goal of ‘dislocat[ing] his expectations regarding the treatment he believes he will receive…’,” read the CIA medical office’s Sept. 4, 2003 guidelines on “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Now that I think about it, there’s an element of religious coercion to the diapering as well, as observant Muslims cleanse themselves before they pray.

Then again, it appears that while the diapering may have been continuous, the wallowing-in-filth wasn’t. From Bin Attash’s verbatim account as transcribed by the ICRC:

During the standing I was made to wear a diaper. However, on some occasions the diaper was not replaced and so I had to urinate and defecate over myself. I was washed down with cold water everyday.

How long would this go on for? According to the ICRC:

Prolonged stress standing position, naked, held with the arms extended and chained above the head, as alleged by ten of the fourteen, for periods from two or three days continuously, and for up to two or three months intermittently, during which period toilet access was sometimes denied resulting in allegations from four detainees that they had to defecate and urinate over themselves.

My emphasis. The account of the diapering being used in conjunction with standing stress positions is corroborated by the nebulous account of the “hard takedown” procedure in the CIA 2004 inspector general’s report:

According to [REDACTED] the hard takedown was used often in interrogations at [REDACTED] as “part of the atmospherics.” For a time it was the standard procedure for moving a detainee to the sleep deprivation cell. It was done for shock and psychological impact and signaled the transition to another phase of the interrogation. The act of putting a detainee into a diaper can cause abrasions if the detainee struggles because the floor of the facility is concrete.

The diapering appears from the ICRC report not to have been frequent enough to merit its own discussion as a separate technique, but that could be fragmentary information.

In May, following a wealth of disclosures about the role of the Survival Evasion Resistence Escape program, which trains U.S. troops to resist torture, in shaping the Defense Department and the CIA’s interrogation programs under the Bush administration, it appeared that one of the biggest unanswered questions was how and why the CIA under George Tenet knew to turn to contract psychologists with SERE experience like James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen for assistance in devising interrogation programs. Retired FBI agent Ali Soufan testified that one such contractor — identified by Jane Meyer as Mitchell — on the Abu Zubaydah interrogation, the wellspring from which all future CIA “enhanced interrogation” emerged, overrulled all his FBI and CIA colleagues in order to experiment with SERE techniques.

That raised an additional concern: how deeply did CIA interrogation involvement with Mitchell and Jessen, who started a consulting firm after leaving SERE, actually run? Apparently pretty deeply: CIA Director Leon Panetta canceled all contractor involvement in interrogations in the spring, although Mayer reports there are some caveats to that. But it’s unclear, and so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA for “all contracts signed between the CIA and the firm of Mitchell Jessen & Associates between September 2001 and April 2009″ including those where M-J are subcontractors. After I filed it, I realized it was imprecisely worded: since there was no Mitchell Jessen & Associates in late 2001, I probably wouldn’t be able to answer my first question anyway.

As it happens: moot point! Today I got my response, courtesy of Delores M. Nelson, the CIA’s information and privacy coordinator:

… [T]he CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or nonexistence of requested records is currently and properly classified and is intelligence sources and methods information that is protected from disclosure by section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949, as amended. Therefore, your request has been denied pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3).

Now, the fact of Mitchell Jessen & Associates contracting for CIA is not a secret. In addition to Mayer’s reporting, Katherine Eban delved deeply into the company’s history with CIA for Vanity Fair in 2007. The company even replied to her questions. And yet the CIA contends that even confirming the existence of any contracts it signed with the company would jeopardize national security. There’s an appeals process for my rejected FOIA request; I’ll be taking full advantage of it.

In that spirit, consider some newly-declassified information from the so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunals — a now-abandoned procedure to determine if a detainee posed a threat to U.S. interests — at Guantanamo Bay of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. KSM:

“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA concerning the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. “Where is he? I don’t know. Then, he torture me,” Mohammed said of his interrogator. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’ “

Abu Zubaydah:

“They told me, ‘Sorry, we discover that you are not Number 3, not a partner, not even a fighter,’ ” said Abu Zubaida, speaking in broken English, according to the new transcript of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Now, according to former Vice President Dick Cheney — and, just so we don’t get distracted, I AM NOT SAYING DICK CHENEY IS AS BAD AS MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD — there are two CIA documents from 2004 and 2005 wherein the CIA vouched for the accuracy of information it obtained from torturing Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. It would be nice to see those documents. But what could they possibly indicate other than that the agency told Cheney what he wanted to hear about a cherished interrogation program? Or are we to believe that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is lying about having lied? His diabolical skills of deception are just that good? Waterboarding him 183 times, denying him sleep for a week by contorting his body into unnatural positions, restricting his diet to between 1000 and 1500 calories a day — that’s the stuff that works, not any of the rapport-building crap that trained interrogators like Ali Soufan of the FBI advocate because of, like, their experience.

On Friday, the CIA will release a 2004 report on interrogations and detentions written by former inspector general John Helgerson, a report referenced in the recently declassified Office of Legal Counsel documents from 2005. Read it and ask: what would we say about this behavior if another country performed it?

NPR’s Ari Shapiro adds significant new information to that picture. According to Shapiro, Mitchell was in frequent contact with the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center from the site at which Abu Zubaydah was being held, asking for approval for the use of his techniques, and the ACLU yesterday obtained a document to support the claim. Counterterrorist Center officials apparently ran the gauntlet for approving the techniques up to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales.

The source says nearly every day, Mitchell would sit at his computer and write a top secret cable to the CIA’s counterterrorism center. Each day, Mitchell would request permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah. The source says the CIA would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique. That would provide the Administration’s legal blessing for Mitchell to increase the pressure on Zubaydah in the next interrogation.

A new document is consistent with the source’s account.

Late May 19, the CIA sent the ACLU a spreadsheet as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The log shows the number of top secret cables that went from Zubaydah’s black site prison to CIA headquarters each day. Through the spring and summer of 2002, the log shows someone sent headquarters several cables a day.

Now, note that Gonzales at the time wasn’t the attorney general. He wasn’t the chief legal official for the government. He was the president’s lawyer, powerless to bless the actions of a federal agency like the CIA. (Shapiro quotes a number of ex-officials who establish that point.) A separate CIA-White House channel in the spring of 2002 would, at the least, contextualize the CIA’s efforts at getting the approval of the Justice Department for the harsh interrogation regimen — though it’s unclear what legal butt-covering Gonzales would have been able to provide in the first place. Gonzales didn’t respond to NPR, according to Shapiro.

If you go to this page and click on “List of Contemporaneous and Derivative Records (May 18, 2009)” then you can see this voluminous log. There are 580 listed communications from the “field” to CIA headquarters, almost all from 2002. It takes until communication #471 before reaching a point in time when the communication could be about a different detainee from Abu Zubaydah, since it’s not until sometime in November 2002 that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, another detainee the CIA waterboarded, was captured. And 249 of these communications occur before the August 1, 2002 Office of Legal Counsel memo blessing the torture techniques Mitchell advocated. [UPDATE: Marcy Wheeler emails to remind me that the International Committee of the Red Cross' report on the CIA's ex-detainees lists al-Nashiri's arrest as occurring in October 2002 in Dubai, so there are 415 communications that could only be about Abu Zubaydah, not 470. The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer says that these logs, obtained thanks to their lawsuit about the CIA's destroyed torture tapes, only concern the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri.]

This still doesn’t address a central question raised by Soufan’s testimony to a Senate Judiciary Committee subpanel. If Soufan is telling the truth, then someone at the CIA must have overruled the agency’s own torture-dissenting interrogators at the Abu Zubaydah interrogation in favor of Mitchell, an agency contractor. Did any of them send cables to the Counterterrorist Center? Was the Counterterrorist Center aware of their objections to torturing Abu Zubaydah? And if so, why did they overrule their own officers in favor of a contractor who didn’t come from an agency that conducts interrogations? Cofer Black was head of the Counterterrorist Center when the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah began — he’s now an official with Blackwater Xe — and Jose Rodriguez, he of the torture-tapes destruction scandal, took over for Black in May 2002. What did they know and when did they know it? How many of the communications to CIA headqurters listed in the logs were from CIA interrogators at Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation chamber objecting to Mitchell’s techniques?

Steve Kleinman, an Air Force Reserve colonel and a trained interrogator affiliated with the military office that oversees the SERE program, told me last week that the real linchpins here aren’t Mitchell and his SERE colleague, Bruce Jessen, but the senior CIA officials who gave them contracts in late 2001 and “brought [them] in with eyes wide open, to run an interrogation program.” These logs give Kleinman more support for that proposition.

“Last week he retracted that,” Ali Soufan responded.

Graham: “Can you say there was no good information” resulting from torture?

Emphasizing he’s speaking from his first-person experience, “I would like you to evaluate what we got before” torturing Abu Zubaydah, Soufan replies. Graham: “One of the reason these interrogation techniques have survived for 500 years is because they work.”

Soufan: “There are a lot of people who find it easier and aren’t smart enough” to interrogate someone without torture. Graham finishes by saying Soufan isn’t the “only repository” of information on interrogation.

“I have nothing but the highest regard for this gentleman,” Graham alleges.

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) brought the point up to argue against the political argument that informing Congress “incomplete[ly]” amounted to “complicity” in the programs. Apparently such disclosure had rhetorical value in internal Bush administration debate.