Donald Rumsfeld was U.S. Secretary of Defense during the post-9/11 torture program. John Kiriakou recounts that Rumsfeld famously doubted sleep deprivation was a real technique, pointing to his own standup desk — he used to brag about having no chair in his office — and his habit of sometimes working 24 hours without sleep.[1] That, Kiriakou says, was not what the program did: prisoners were stripped naked and chained to an eyebolt so they could not get comfortable, kept awake for up to 12 days — past the point, per American Psychological Association studies, at which people begin losing their minds (day seven) and dying of organ failure (day nine).[2][3]
The 1983 Saddam handshake
Kiriakou describes Rumsfeld’s famous 1983 photograph shaking hands with Saddam Hussein as a presidentially directed visit: Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad on the president’s instruction to meet Saddam and privately promise U.S. intelligence on Iran, while Washington was simultaneously and secretly promising Iran intelligence on Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War.[4]