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Eric Fair served as an interrogator in Iraq working as a military contractor for the private security firm CACI.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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[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.