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posted by takyon on Saturday April 16 2016, @05:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the involuntary-sleep-deprivation dept.

Eric Fair served as an interrogator in Iraq working as a military contractor for the private security firm CACI. [...] Fair writes about feeling haunted by what he did, what he saw and what he heard in Iraq, from the beating of prisoners to witnessing the use of sleep deprivation, stress positions and isolation to break prisoners.

[...] Raad Hussein is bound to the Palestinian chair. His hands are tied to his ankles. The chair forces him to lean forward in a crouch, forcing all of his weight onto his thighs. It's as if he's been trapped in the act of kneeling down to pray, his knees frozen just above the floor, his arms pinned below his legs. He is blindfolded. His head has collapsed into his chest. He wheezes and gasps for air. There is a pool of urine at his feet. He moans: too tired to cry, but in too much pain to remain silent.

[...] Sleep deprivation, as I've said before, can be accomplished in a matter of hours. You can let someone go to sleep in a dark room with no windows, and you can wake them up in 15 or 20 minutes. They have no idea how long they've been asleep. And with no windows, they have no idea what time of day it is. You can let them go back to sleep, and you can wake them up in 20 minutes. They still have no idea. And they've since—within 45 minutes, they've lost all sense of time. Two or three hours later, you can convince this person that he's been living for four or five days, when it's really only been an hour.

[...] [The purpose of sleep deprivation:] The complete lack of hope. It is to strip away someone's hope and to insert a different way of thinking into their mind, which would be my mind into theirs, so that they're going to cooperate with me.

Part 1: http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/7/a_torturer_s_confession_former_abu

Part 2: http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/7/ex_abu_ghraib_interrogator_israelis_trained


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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday April 17 2016, @04:50AM

    by RamiK (1813) on Sunday April 17 2016, @04:50AM (#333130)

    Correct. Which is why scientist make terrible soldiers.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @04:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @04:54AM (#333134)

    I'd rather have free-thinking, principled soldiers who question horrible orders than mindless drones who do whatever they're told, even if the latter are more efficient.

    • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday April 17 2016, @12:10PM

      by RamiK (1813) on Sunday April 17 2016, @12:10PM (#333235)

      But you can't have it both ways. You can't send young kids to a foreign country and kill on command without conditioning to take orders without asking questions or the first thing they'll ask is why they're killing people in the first place. So, if you want to avoid horrible things from happening, you need to build the chain of command with enough external oversight to make sure it doesn't. Any talk of principles of free-thinking in a military is just wishful thinking. Worse, it keeps you from reforming with oversight in mind since you keep telling people should just behave and be punished when they don't, instead of making sure they do by putting people in bases who actively police these rules.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @07:53PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @07:53PM (#333368)

        I don't want it both ways. I do want soldiers who question the validity of the wars themselves. If that means it is far more difficult for the government to go to war or find soldiers, then good.