This is something that’s been around the blogosphere — Marcy’s pointed to it, as has Yglesias, and I apologize to others if I’ve inadvertently left them uncredited — but I haven’t really felt it’s got the attention it deserves. If you read the August 1, 2002 OLC memo, it doesn’t discuss the use of any physical techniques to deprive a detainee of sleep. But the March 10, 2005 OLC memo says that "shackling" a detainee is the CIA’s "primary method" of sleep deprivation. How did to reconcile the discrepancy? I don’t know, but going off those memos and the ICRC report on CIA detainees, I explore it in this new piece for the Washington Independent.

Experts say individual methods of torture are commonly combined, and can have more than one physiological or psychological effect. “Each term, like ’stress positions,’ covers a wide variety of techniques, but they’re used together,” said Scott Allen, a Rhode Island-based doctor and medical adviser to Physicians for Human Rights. “With the use of a stress position, it’s virtually impossible for someone to sleep.” …

It is unclear how the CIA came to believe that shackling and stretching a detainee was an allowable form of inducing sleep deprivation, but senior CIA officials approved of the determination. According to the memorandum, on January 28, 2003, then-CIA Director George Tenet issued two “guidelines,” one on interrogations and one on detentions policy, which are still classified. Hints appear in the May 10, 2005 memorandum: use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” required prior written approval “from the Director [of the] Counterterrorist Center, with the concurrence of the Chief, CTC Legal Group,” and a “contemporaneous record shall be created setting forth the nature and duration of each such technique employed.”

Attempts to reach Tenet for comment were unsuccessful, as were attempts to solicit responses from key Tenet-era CIA deputies. The CIA declined to comment for this article.

A question I’m still trying to get an answer to: when U.S. troops were subjected to sleep deprivation through the SERE program, did that deprivation come from shackling, or from some other method? In other words, was SERE the place where stress-positions-as-sleep-deprivation arose; or did the CIA experiment, so to speak?