On Fri, 12 Jan 2007, Dwayne Monroe quoted an FT article headlined:
> Guantánamo inmates "driven insane"
> By Guy Dinmore in Washington
The core of this article (which is given at the URL) concerns al-Rawi, a UK non-citizen resident whose lawyers say that can see from the progress of their meetings that he's losing his mind. Dinmore published a longer article on the same subject on December 20th where the lawyers describe how now, when he comes to see them, he often stares off into space or laughs uncontrollably, whereas 9 months ago, he seemed like a normal person.
They are also very clear on what causes it: extreme sleep deprivation. Making it worse is extreme isolation and extremes of heat and cold, as well modulated starvation and various humiliations.
There's no real mystery of how this happens. Everyone has known for at least 50 years that extreme sleep deprivation turns your mind to mush. The idea that this guy has not be able to sleep for 9 months is an unbelievable level of torture. They report that he is kept in a cell with the lights on 22 hours a day -- and presumably the 2 other hours he's out of his cell and not sleeping then either.
The ironic thing is that sleep deprivation torture was for decades a staple of right wing lore about the Soviet Union. It was a staple truth in such literature that it was the mental torture that made the KGB truly diabolical, and sleep deprivation and isolation was the core of their technique. Menachem Begin of all people wrote a book with this idea as its theme, entitled "White Nights" -- i.e., nights without sleep. He said it was the thing that all inmates feared more than anything else. And that this was the simple answer to the question of how they got all those guys during the purge trials to confess to such absurdities. (IIRC, he or someone else said it was also the answer to how they got people to confess to absurd things during witchcraft trials centuries earlier.)
But somehow during all these last few years of discussing torture, this whole trope of how this is the most horrible torture of all has been forgotten. And people speak openly about how the goal of such "interrogation techniques" (i.e., torture techniques) is to "break a person down" -- aka to drive them insane, to destroy their emotional cohesion -- as if were a bureaucratic procedure that no one should be ashamed of. So that when someone says "they're being driven insane" it's a complete shock because when you phrase it that way, it sounds like a bad thing.
It's really quite amazing, when you think about it. We've not only become our worst nightmare, we've forgotten we ever had that nightmare.
Michael