Lol, I had sleep deprivation for 56 days during basic training... As they describe it, deprivation consists of waking the prisoners up in the middle of the night and making them change cells... Hardly worth of the shock and awe that this headline is attempting to provoke. Also, doesn't seem too extreme considering this guy was captured with 2 surface to air missiles in his car and was Osama's driver and probably has critical information as to the location of Osama or Taliban forces. Information that could not only end the war but save lives while doing it... Masbury wants us to focus on how tired the war criminal is rather than what his role in the killing of innocent Americans was. Al...

Lol, I had sleep deprivation for 56 days during basic training... As they describe it, deprivation consists of waking the prisoners up in the middle of the night and making them change cells... Hardly worth of the shock and awe that this headline is attempting to provoke. Also, doesn't seem too extreme considering this guy was captured with 2 surface to air missiles in his car and was Osama's driver and probably has critical information as to the location of Osama or Taliban forces. Information that could not only end the war but save lives while doing it... Masbury wants us to focus on how tired the war criminal is rather than what his role in the killing of innocent Americans was. Also, perhaps Masbury should read the whole story rather than linking to snippets on a lib sound byte site. As smart as he is it seems he would also know not to put too much credence to a defense lawyers statement as if it's fact.

"They wanted to make training a little more realistic," says Baker. "Put this orange suit on."

Locke gave Baker a code word – red - to shout out in case of trouble. From under the bunk, Baker heard the extraction team coming down the causeway. In sworn statements, however, four members of the team said they thought they were going after a real detainee.

"My face was down. And of course, they’re pushing it down against the steel floor, you know, my right temple, pushing it down against the floor," recalls Baker. "And someone’s holding me by the throat, using a pressure point on me and holding my throat. And I used the word, ‘red.’ At that point I, you know...

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"They wanted to make training a little more realistic," says Baker. "Put this orange suit on."

Locke gave Baker a code word – red - to shout out in case of trouble. From under the bunk, Baker heard the extraction team coming down the causeway. In sworn statements, however, four members of the team said they thought they were going after a real detainee.

"My face was down. And of course, they’re pushing it down against the steel floor, you know, my right temple, pushing it down against the floor," recalls Baker. "And someone’s holding me by the throat, using a pressure point on me and holding my throat. And I used the word, ‘red.’ At that point I, you know, I became afraid."

Apparently, no one heard the code word ‘red’ because Baker says he continued to be manhandled, especially by an MP named Scott Sinclair who was holding onto his head.

"And when I said the word ‘Red,’ he forced my head down against the steel floor and was sort of just grinding it into the floor. The individual then, when I picked up my head and said, ‘Red,’ slammed my head down against the floor," says Baker. "I was so afraid, I groaned out, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier.' And when I said that, he slammed my head again, one more time against the floor. And I groaned out one more time, I said, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier.’ And I heard them say, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,' you know, like he wanted to, he was telling the other guy to stop."

Bloodied and disoriented, Baker somehow made it back to his unit, and his first thought was to get hold of the videotape. "I said, 'Go get the tape,'" recalls Baker. "'They've got a tape. Go get the tape.' My squad leader went to get the tape."

Every extraction drill at Guantanamo was routinely videotaped, and the tape of this drill would show what happened. But Baker says his squad leader came back and said, "There is no tape."

"That was the only time that I heard that a tape ha

Baker started having a seizure that morning and was whisked to the Naval Hospital at Guantanamo. "[He looked like] he'd had the crap beat out of him. He had a concussion. I mean, it was textbook," says Riley. "[His face} was blank. You know, a dead stare, like he was seeing you, but really looking through you."

Baker was airlifted to the Portsmouth Naval Medical Center in Virginia, where doctors determined he had suffered an injury to the right side of his brain. He was released after four days, and Baker says he requested to go back to Cuba.

"I wanted to go back and perform my duties," says Baker. "I wanted to be back with my unit."

Baker ...

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Baker started having a seizure that morning and was whisked to the Naval Hospital at Guantanamo. "[He looked like] he'd had the crap beat out of him. He had a concussion. I mean, it was textbook," says Riley. "[His face} was blank. You know, a dead stare, like he was seeing you, but really looking through you."

Baker was airlifted to the Portsmouth Naval Medical Center in Virginia, where doctors determined he had suffered an injury to the right side of his brain. He was released after four days, and Baker says he requested to go back to Cuba.

"I wanted to go back and perform my duties," says Baker. "I wanted to be back with my unit."

Baker got back to Guantanamo, and hoped no one would notice he was having seizures, but they got to the point where he says he couldn't hide them: "I was shaking and convulsing around people."

Some days, he says, he was having 10 to 12 seizures per day.

What does he think would have happened if he had been a real detainee? "I think they would have busted him up," says Baker. "I've seen detainees come outta there with blood on 'em. …If there wasn't someone to say, 'I'm a U.S. soldier,' if you were speaking Arabic or Pashto or Urdu or some other language in the camp, we may never know what would have happened to that individual."

Documents released by the FBI offer new details about the interrogation practices used to question prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the Associated Press reports this morning.

AP says "FBI agents documented more than two dozen incidents of possible mistreatment at the Guantanamo Bay military base, including one detainee whose head was wrapped in duct tape for chanting the Quran and another who pulled out his hair after hours in a sweltering room."

The documents show special agents were very concerned about the consequences of having interrogators impersonate FBI investigators. "The...

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Documents released by the FBI offer new details about the interrogation practices used to question prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the Associated Press reports this morning.

AP says "FBI agents documented more than two dozen incidents of possible mistreatment at the Guantanamo Bay military base, including one detainee whose head was wrapped in duct tape for chanting the Quran and another who pulled out his hair after hours in a sweltering room."

The documents show special agents were very concerned about the consequences of having interrogators impersonate FBI investigators. "These tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralization nature to date and . . . have destroyed any chance of prosecuting this detainee. If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will be not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [by] the 'FBI' interrogators," an agent wrote in an e-mail quoted by the Washington Post.

I was intimately involved with my children from the moment of the onset of labor; in fact, we had some serious illness after the birth of the second in which my four-year-old and I were the only ones standing. That is NOTHING like systematic sleep deprivation, which is not about "how tired" someone is, but is about induced pyschosis. Do you honestly think the KGB did it to make people tired? Consider this comment from the BBC of John Schlapobersky, consultant psychotherapist to the
Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, who was himself tortured through
sleep deprivation, in his case in apartheid South Africa in the 1960s:...

I was intimately involved with my children from the moment of the onset of labor; in fact, we had some serious illness after the birth of the second in which my four-year-old and I were the only ones standing. That is NOTHING like systematic sleep deprivation, which is not about "how tired" someone is, but is about induced pyschosis. Do you honestly think the KGB did it to make people tired? Consider this comment from the BBC of John Schlapobersky, consultant psychotherapist to the
Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, who was himself tortured through
sleep deprivation, in his case in apartheid South Africa in the 1960s:

"I was kept without sleep for a week in all. I can
remember the details of the experience, although it took place 35 years
ago. After two nights without sleep, the hallucinations start, and
after three nights, people are having dreams while fairly awake, which
is a form of psychosis.

"By the week's end, people lose their orientation in
place and time - the people you're speaking to become people from your
past; a window might become a view of the sea seen in your younger
days. To deprive someone of sleep is to tamper with their equilibrium
and their sanity."

Staying up with babies allows you an hour here and there. It's demanding, but it's a world different from absolute sleep prohibition, often done in a forced standing position, with physical pain administered when the victim crumples, until he stands again, amidst hallucination and pyschotic episodes.

Sure, it doesn't hurt like pulling out your fingernails. But it's been used by torturing groups from the KGB to South Africa, who found it inflicted unbearable suffering.

And, of course, like all modes of torture, it produces utterly unreliable evidence. They say what they think you want to hear.

@masbury - sorry to hear about your kids' issues, have those myself and can certainly empathize... but you clearly understood what I was driving at. Yes, the KGB used the tactic, although in a different setting (i.e. there were no prayers 6 times a day there like there are at Gitmo)... they would place a person naked in a cold and very small room (so small you couldn't sit or lie down) and then they would continuously drop cold water droplets from the top on that person and wake them up several times per night.
With your description of involvement with the kids - you know (better than debbyski obviously) just how difficult it is to first get used to lack of sleep and then dealing with it ...

@masbury - sorry to hear about your kids' issues, have those myself and can certainly empathize... but you clearly understood what I was driving at. Yes, the KGB used the tactic, although in a different setting (i.e. there were no prayers 6 times a day there like there are at Gitmo)... they would place a person naked in a cold and very small room (so small you couldn't sit or lie down) and then they would continuously drop cold water droplets from the top on that person and wake them up several times per night.
With your description of involvement with the kids - you know (better than debbyski obviously) just how difficult it is to first get used to lack of sleep and then dealing with it on a continuous basis. And as you pointed out - it does a number on you in terms of tiredness, irritability etc. and that's still while you're getting some sleep. Can you imagine (putting logic forward and propaganda/ideology aside) what it would be like to actually not sleep for that long? Seriously, can you? There's no way, I bet this character wouldn't even last a week of 'NO SLEEP'.