sleep deprivation

The Justice Department released more documents — or, at least, less-redacted documents — late Friday to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of the government’s obligation in a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
These latest documents provide a glimpse of the early struggles between the FBI and the Pentagon over just how to conduct [...]

The Center for Constitutional Rights says it just learned today that the government has videotapes of the interrogation of its client, Mohammed al Qahtani, a Saudi Arabian man who was subjected to the “First Special Interrogation Plan” overseen by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Although CCR has been representing al Qahtani for years, since at [...]

Last week, a federal judge ruled that the government had failed to justify the detention for the last seven years of a 50-year-old Kuwaiti engineer who worked for Kuwait Airlines and had gone to Afghanistan to do charitable work. He was seized by the Northern Alliance, turned over to U.S. authorities, and shipped to Guantanamo [...]

New documents obtained by TWI related to the case of Mohammed Jawad, an adolescent tortured by Afghan police and then abused again by U.S. interrogators, suggest that not only certain CIA interrogations, but also interrogations by the Department of Defense demand a broader investigation.

A military judge’s ruling that U.S. officers used “cruel and inhuman” treatment and possibly “torture” on an Afghan teenager imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay provides strong support for the argument that the government should embark on a broader investigation of the treatment of “war on terror” detainees during the Bush administration.

Documents reveal the CIA was allowed to deny detainees sleep upward of 80 to 180 hours at a time.

As Spencer noted, in responding to a federal judge’s order to turn over another batch of documents including President George W. Bush’s authorization of CIA secret prisons, and records of investigations into the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, the Department of Justice instead opted to file a document yesterday explaining why it’s actually not [...]

On page 30 of the 2004 CIA inspector general report, the CIA’s interrogation guidelines provided for “standard techniques” of interrogation that include, among other things, “sleep deprivation not to exceed 72 hours.” Clearly the CIA must have told John Helgerson, the inspector general, that those were the limits.
Moreover, in Footnote 34, the IG reports that [...]

No matter how much former Vice President Dick Cheney insists that torturing prisoners in secret CIA prisons worked (and Spencer has already laid out the huge holes in that argument) — he and his fellow Republicans who still stand by their “enhanced interrogation techniques” can never prove that using less abusive techniques would not have [...]

In a section of the 2004 CIA inspector general report about interrogation techniques that were used on detainees by the CIA but never approved by the Justice Department — including mock executions, blowing cigar smoke into someone’s face until he became ill, squeezing a detainee’s neck “to restrict the detainee’s carotid artery … [until he] [...]