American Psychological Association
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The American Psychological Association (APA) is the world's largest professional body of psychologists, and the scientific authority John Kiriakou reaches for whenever he argues that the torture program's quieter techniques were its worst.

The sleep-deprivation datum

Kiriakou's standing claim, repeated across years of interviews: waterboarding was supposed to be the ultimate technique, but several others were clearly worse, above all sleep deprivation. "We know from the American Psychological Association, which has studied this extensively, that people begin to lose their minds at around day seven with no sleep", and begin to die at day nine, because the organs start shutting down from lack of sleep. Mitchell and Jessen were authorized to keep prisoners awake for up to twelve days, well past that line.

What "no sleep" meant in practice, he specifies: the prisoner stripped naked and chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling so he could neither sit nor kneel nor lie down nor get comfortable in any way, with industrial-strength lights burning twenty-four hours a day and the same song blasted over and over, around the clock, a technique the APA has deemed a form of torture.

Kiriakou puts the datum directly against the program's public defence. In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld said he did not believe sleep deprivation was a real thing, because he could go forty-eight hours at his standup desk; against the twelve-day authorization the question Kiriakou asks is how that could be legal, moral or ethical.

Prisoners died. Kiriakou states plainly that the CIA killed people with sleep deprivation, and killed two more with the cold cell, the same eye bolt, the cell chilled to fifty degrees Fahrenheit, a bucket of ice water thrown over a naked prisoner every hour. Nothing in the Justice Department's opinion said anyone could be murdered; it happened anyway.

Broader use

Kiriakou also invokes the psychological literature, the American Psychiatric Association, the APA, even Psychology Today, for his running observation that psychopathy concentrates at the top: studies finding that virtually every major CEO in America shows the profile.

The APA's own role, testimony not Kiriakou's

At a November 2015 anti-torture event where Kiriakou also spoke, the psychologist Brad Olson gave an account of the association's own conduct. It is recorded here as his testimony, not Kiriakou's, and does not form part of the single-source canon.

Where the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association held that there was no role for physicians or psychiatrists in national security interrogations, the APA convened a task force composed mostly of Department of Defense personnel, some of whom, Olson says, were later found to have been in the chain of command where torture was occurring, which concluded that psychologists would play an important role in the process. Behavioural science consultant teams then guided interrogations, located vulnerabilities and designed detention and punishment regimes down to the removal of toilet paper. One CIA document the group obtained indicated a psychologist was present at every instance of CIA waterboarding, present in order to call a halt before permanent disorder set in.

Olson's group came to believe the task force's guidelines had been written by intelligence and the military before the task force convened at all, information that reached them through a whistleblower on the task force itself. They formed the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, pressed the association through open letters and committees amid thousands of resignations, and when the internal council would not act, put the question to the membership in a referendum, which passed: psychologists may not work at any national security site violating the U.S. Constitution or international law. The correspondence of a deceased colleague, passed to Physicians for Human Rights and on to Jim Risen of the New York Times, forced the association to commission an independent 500-page report from the Chicago attorney David Hoffman, which broadly vindicated the critics' account.

See also

- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Waterboarding
- Sleep deprivation
- Cold cell
- Mitchell and Jessen
- PTSD
