How 180 Hours Without Sleep Affects the Body

motherboard.vice.com One of the CIA's “enhanced interrogation techniques” repeatedly mentioned in yesterday's Senate Intelligence Committee report was sleep deprivation. In the execu​tive summary, sleep deprivation is described as involving “keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads.” One hundred and eighty hours is the equivalent of seven and a half days, and the summary also notes that sleep deprivation was “frequently concurrent” with slaps, forced nudity, and slamming detainees against walls—or “wallings," to use the CIA term. Abu Hudhaifa, one detainee mentioned in the report, was subjected to ice water baths and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation, before “being released because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to be,” according to the summary.

From ​page 16 of the report

Even though Amnesty International and the Committee against Torture state that long-term sleep deprivation is cruel and illegal, the report suggests that it remains both a popular and effective way to “break down the will of the detainee.”