Torture in War // Current

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Can You Die From Lack of Sleep?

CIA interrogators at Guantanamo Bay subjected dozens of detainees to sleep deprivation, shackling the prisoners in a standing position for up to 11 days at a time. Recently released Justice Department memorandums claim sleep deprivation studies show that "surprisingly, little seem[s] to go wrong with the subjects physically." Wait, is it really safe to go without sleep?
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No—extended bouts of sleeplessness can cause an array of physical symptoms and might eventually kill you. The effects begin within the first 24 hours of sleep deprivation. First, the body undergoes subtle hormonal changes—cortisol and TSH levels increase, leading to a rise in blood pressure. A day or two later, it stops metabolizing glucose properly, creating carbohydrate cravings. (This phenomenon may have gone unnoticed among the detainees, who were already on a calorie-restricted diet.) A person's body temperature will also drop, and his or her immune response becomes somewhat suppressed. All of these physiological changes are reversible, though—take a nap, and you'll be on the road back to normal.
Related in Slate
Amanda Schaffer discussed why people sleep. William Saletan reported on the military's sleep-reduction program. David Plotz tried a drug for the chronically sleep-deprived. Seth Stevenson tested over-the-counter sleep aids.

It's possible that given enough time, sleep deprivation can kill you. While no human being is known to have died from staying awake, animal research strongly suggests it could happen. In the 1980s, a University of Chicago researcher named Allan Rechtschaffen conducted a series of groundbreaking experiments on rats. After 32 days of total sleep deprivation, all the rats were dead. Curiously, researchers still do not agree on the cause of death. It's possible that the rats' body temperature dropped so much that they succumbed to hypothermia. Another theory posits that the rats' immune systems became so depressed that bacteria normally sequestered in their intestines spread throughout their bodies—though Rechtschaffen counters that his rats perished even when they were administered antibiotics. A third explanation points to some evidence of brain damage among the sleep-deprived rats. It's also possible that extreme levels of stress contributed to the rats' demise.CIA interrogators at Guantanamo Bay subjected dozens of detainees to sleep deprivation, shackling the prisoners in a standing... more

atomiclegion
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1 month ago

My draft bill against Reditions, and torture Part1

Military Responsibility and law against torture Act MRLAT
By: Brian Hill
House Bill # 1
A BILL
TO BE ENTITLED
AN ACT
PURPOSE: To create a ban on torture, secret renditions, and to preserve the reputation of our Military and put our soldiers less at risk
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES:
Sec. 1. This order of law will create a ban, considering it a criminal offense, and lead to a punishment of any United States Citizen, Represenative, Congressmen, Congresswomen, Senator, Political personell, Military personell, generals, and anyone else serving our country from engaging in criminal offenses against this Act.
Sec. 2. This order has been created for the sake of human rights everywhere, the punishment of real terrorists and lead to fair trials on all suspected terrrorists and so if enough evidence as provided by the Constitution of the United States, and will by this law all forfeiture of torture rights, all rights to secretly abduct United States citizens and non Citzens alike will also be enforced with this law, on any institution funded by the United States, under any governmental control by anyone working for the United States government
Sec. 3. Definitions:
(a)Torture includes any abuse, unwillingful sexual conduct, unwillingful strriping of any clothing from any Citizen and non Citizen accused of any type of crime or midconduct, slandering against any person detained whether a citizen or non citizen of our country, taking away the rights of citizens and non United States citizens of talking to a lawyer, friends, family if there is any case of being accused of wrong doing such as terrorism, drug dealing, and any other crimes under U.S amd international law, taking away the rights of any human being from being allowed to show up at a court hearing as mentioned in the Constitution, denying the rights to be treated like a innocent human being just because of that persons belief, religious status, viewpoints, and even who that person works for. Torture is denying the persons rights to challenge their accusations whether it be terrorism, whether it be drug dealing, or whether it be any crime commited in or outside the United States. Torture is hurting somebody until the torturer gets a confession out of the tortured. In fact torture is a unrealiable method and will produce false terrrorism confessions and lead to innocent men getting the death penalty or even worse torture and abuse.

(b)Secret Renditions is any type of secret police, or government kidnapping and also forbiddon under the United States Constitution of having the right to be secured in your houses, and keeping your posessions may not be infringed unless you were convicted of a crime but there is also a Constitutional Amendment of not being allowed to conduct cruel and unusal punishment which including sexual and non sexual abuse, the electrocution of any prisoner, citizen, and non citizens alike of our Country, any method that may lead to permanent damage, humilation of the human body. Exceptions to bodily harm includes tranquilizing an out of control prisoner or citizen. Renditions are kidnapping anybody who is a Citizen or non US Citizen covertly without any court trials, without any responsiability, or any public alerts on the kidnapping, also includes government agents and personel commiting any deletion of data of the person being kidnapped.
(c)A proper hearing is the right to endure the same type of court trial that is given to regular criminals and law breakers, the right to have a witness, evidence, and even words held against the accused. This court trial must have at least a judge, jury, witnesses supoenoaed, and even people suaponoed by the government, and courts.Military Responsibility and law against torture Act MRLAT By: Brian Hill House Bill # 1 A BILL TO BE ENTITLED AN ACT... more

USWGO
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1 month ago

The Washington post: a whipped pup?

Where has the spirit of Watergate gone? The US broadsheet (and scourge of former president Richard Nixon) appears to have gone... more

Mr_Costello
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3 months ago

Torture due to desperate search to find Iraq/911 link

It was during this period that CIA interrogators water-boarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah... more

banditalamode
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3 months ago

Iraqi militia kill gays with anal glue torture

From the translated Al Arabiya article: A prominent Iraqi human rights activist says that Iraqi militia have deployed a... more

banditalamode
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3 months ago

TORTURE: Holding America to account

Editorial
The Guardian, Saturday 18 April 2009

Torture: Holding America to account
To read the four newly released Bush-era memos on America's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" for terror suspects is to enter a very dark moral world indeed. It is the Orwellian world of the concealed global detention network set up by the CIA on President Bush's authority after 9/11 in which suspected terrorists - many of whom may have had a lot of blood on their hands - were secretly held in US bases from Afghanistan to Romania and systematically tortured. A world in which Britain is implicated too, do not forget.

The memos do not admit torture, of course. The United States, Mr Bush famously claimed in 2006, "does not torture". The memos embody a cynical bureaucratic attempt to align what went on in the secret prisons with that claim. Yet no one who reads their argument that the threat of imminent drowning caused by waterboarding does not reach the level of "prolonged mental harm" which the Bush lawyers argue is necessary to constitute torture, can doubt that torture is precisely what the CIA had been permitted and encouraged to carry out. The truth, as the new US attorney general Eric Holder has said, is clear: "Waterboarding is torture."

Jaw-dropping though they are, the memos are not the only evidence of the Bush administration's embrace of torture. Two years ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was given access to 14 Guantánamo detainees who had been through the "alternative procedures". Their experiences, retold in two recent essays by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books (one of which we republish inside our own Review today), tell of the relentless abuse of detainees who were kept naked in low temperatures for weeks, forced to live in permanent bright light (or total darkness), required to wear nappies, deprived of solid food, blindfolded, shackled, forcibly shaved, and compelled to wear earphones through which loud music was repeatedly played.Editorial The Guardian, Saturday 18 April 2009 Torture: Holding America to account To read the four newly released... more