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Sgt. Ben Allbright knows something about sleep deprivation. During the first six months of the Iraq war, his job was to guard prisoners in Al Qaim, a makeshift base near the Syrian border where U.S. troops conducted aggressive hunts for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Every day, soldiers hauled in about 20 new detainees for questioning by military interrogators or CIA operatives. To "get them out of their comfort zone" before the interrogation, Allbright told news-week recently, the drill was to keep the Iraqis awake for 24 hours or longer. The guards would stand the prisoners up in old shipping containers, their hands tied behind their backs and their faces blindfolded and facing the wall. "After a while you'd see their knees buckling, or you'd see one of them lean forward and put his forehead against the wall to try to sleep." When that happened, Allbright would holler into the container or bang on the metal side with a stone or a club.
Is that inhumane? Is it legal? President George W. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act into law last week, laying down guidelines for Guantánamo prisoner tribunals and addressing the issue of interrogation tactics. Before the law was passed, the president had stressed the need to give CIA interrogators clear guidelines for questioning suspects. Most legal experts believe the new law criminalizes the harshest techniques used by the CIA since the attacks of September 11, including the mock drowning measure known as waterboarding. But the bill also creates a broad gray area in which some of the less dramatic methods--sleep deprivation, along with forced standing, hooding and stress positions--might still be part of the interrogation package. Neither the Pentagon nor the CIA would comment on their techniques, but the wiggle room bothers critics. "It seems pretty clear that they want to keep a gray area so that tactics can continue to be used that fall into that area," says Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, a prominent military defense lawyer.
Many experts question whether such methods are even effective. Sleep deprivation in particular has been used as an interrogation tool in different places around the globe throughout the past century, with questionable results. In America's Prohibition era, cops in the Chicago Police Department were known to sleep-deprive suspected criminals to extract confessions, many of which turned out to be false. In Northern Ireland, British troops used it in crackdowns on the IRA until a European court ruled in a minority opinion that it constitutes torture. When the CIA studied the utility of various interrogation methods in a broad 1960s survey known as Kubark, the agency concluded sleep deprivation made suspects more apathetic under questioning, not necessarily more compliant. Yet by 2001, the measure was being used on Afghan guerrillas in secret CIA detention centers, according to the testimony of both prisoners and soldiers.
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Part of the problem is that sleeplessness inhibits clear thinking and can trigger hallucinations. "It's a little like getting drunk," says Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who heads the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorder Center. While little is known about why humans need sleep, Mahowald says, the effects of deprivation have been widely studied. Within 24 hours, parts of the brain that control higher-level tasks--judgment, reasoning, self-monitoring--become impaired. Beyond a day, the subject actually slips into a state of semiconsciousness--something akin to a sleepwalker who can perform physical activities but has limited cognitive power. "Those kinds of changes might help an interrogator get someone to talk," Mahowald said. "But the things he says should not be counted on as reliable." What happens when sleep is deprived for longer stretches? Researchers have never subjected humans to more than a few days of sleeplessness. But when the University of Chicago deprived rats of sleep in a seminal study in the 1990s, the rodents survived three weeks without a wink, then died.
In CIA prisons, the record for sleep deprivation is shorter--but apparently not by much. Human Rights Watch, which interviewed the lawyers of 20 detainees held in a secret prison in Afghanistan as late as 2004, says some of them were sleep-deprived for up to two weeks, though sometimes allowed short naps. The facility, known among detainees as "the dark prison," was among the harshest run by the United States since the start of the war on terror.
Not everyone dismisses the effectiveness of sleep deprivation. The Israelis think it can help to pry valuable information from reluctant captives. Though Israel's Supreme Court banned torture in a 1999 ruling, interrogators regularly use sleep deprivation against Palestinians. Avi Dichter, Israel's minister of Public Security and the former head of Shabak, Israel's FBI, defends ?the technique: "When you're tired, is it easier to question you? I think yes. And I think we're all built the same, includ-ing terrorists."
Allbright, the sergeant who served in Afghanistan, has doubts. By the time questioning of sleep-deprived prisoners began, he recalls, they were so desperate to nod off they'd provide whatever answers the interrogators wanted to hear. Confessions included details about WMD that didn't exist. Allbright, a reservist who now studies law at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, also believes sleep deprivation leads to a slippery slope. In sessions he says he witnessed, when interrogators couldn't wrench information from tired suspects, they'd resort to threats and in some cases to physical abuse. Allbright had read the Geneva accords on his breaks from guard duty, and complained to superiors about the breach of conduct. "They'd either laugh it off or they'd tell me it's above my pay grade," he says. (The Pentagon had no comment on Allbright's allegations.) Eventually, he was transferred to another base and given a different job. That was in late 2003, when the war in Iraq was still fresh and the procedures often vague. With a new law now in place, only some of them are clearer.
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