Sleep deprivation
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Sleep deprivation was among the techniques approved by the U.S. Department of Justice and applied by the Central Intelligence Agency to high-value detainees as part of the post-September 11 enhanced interrogation program. It is considered, in John Kiriakou's assessment, "clearly worse than waterboarding."

Physiology

Research by the American Psychological Association on sleep deprivation found that humans "begin to go insane at seven days with no sleep" and begin to die of organ failure around day nine. Kiriakou has cited this same seven-day/nine-day timeline repeatedly and consistently across interviews, sometimes giving the CIA's authorized ceiling as 12 days and elsewhere as 14, in one account, "14 days beyond the point of death" some prisoners were already suffering.

CIA authorization and practice

The CIA was authorized to keep prisoners awake for up to 12 days, well past the 7-day onset of clinical insanity established by the APA literature. "People died from sleep deprivation." Kiriakou says the technique killed at least one prisoner outright.

The 2014 Senate Torture Report documented sleep deprivation of up to 180 hours (approximately 7.5 days) with prisoners "hands shackled above their heads" in stress positions throughout.

Documented permanent psychiatric injury

Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a September 11 co-conspirator, was rendered permanently clinically insane by CIA sleep deprivation. The diagnosis is the Pentagon's own, "the Pentagon's psychiatrist who's saying he's insane, not his defense attorneys", and bin al-Shibh has been declared by the Department of Defense as unable to be tried.

APA timeline and CIA authorization

According to John Kiriakou, the American Psychological Association's research on sleep deprivation established the following timeline: subjects begin to lose their minds by day seven; by day nine they begin to die; by day eleven, organ systems begin shutting down. The CIA authorized sleep deprivation for up to twelve days.

Mechanics

Kiriakou described the sleep-deprivation setup used in the enhanced interrogation program: the prisoner is chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling, unable to sit, lie down, or otherwise get comfortable, while strong industrial-strength lights are kept on continuously and music, Kiriakou has variously described it as death metal, hard rock, or loops alternated with children's jingles, plays at high volume twenty-four hours a day. In a separate description of the same setup, Kiriakou said the explicit purpose was to drive the prisoner insane: "That's exactly what happened. We made them crazy." In some cases the insanity became permanent, leaving prisoners unable to participate in their own legal defense.

Rumsfeld's standup desk

John Kiriakou says Donald Rumsfeld, who worked at a standup desk and would go 24 to 36 hours without sitting down, famously claimed he didn't believe sleep deprivation was even a real form of punishment, missing what the program actually did: keeping prisoners chained upright and awake for up to 12 days, past the point, per American Psychological Association studies, where people begin losing their minds at day seven and dying of organ failure by day nine.

"You might as well just kill the guy"

A May 2026 account gives the physiological threshold consistently with his long-standing figure, and draws the conclusion more bluntly than usual. Sleep deprivation, he says, takes far longer to break a prisoner than the cold cell does: "you need to go 8, 9 days without sleep. Then he goes into organ failure."

His gloss on holding someone to that point was that it collapses the distinction between interrogation and killing, "you might as well just kill the guy at that point", and when the interviewer took that as hyperbole, Kiriakou did not soften it: that was "kind of the end result half the time."

The earliest ranking

Kiriakou''s placement of sleep deprivation above waterboarding dates at least to January 2013. Listing the roughly ten techniques in the program, he moved from waterboarding to "what I think is worse, sleep deprivation, or the cold cell ... I actually think those last two are worse than waterboarding." The judgement is offered as his own assessment of severity rather than as a legal distinction; all of them, he said in the same breath, belonged to a class of conduct the United States had spent a century calling crimes against humanity when other governments used it.

See also

- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Ramzi bin al-Shibh
- Walling
- Cold cell
- Senate Torture Report
