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.”[1][2]
The physiological timeline
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.[2] Kiriakou has cited that seven-day/nine-day timeline repeatedly and consistently across interviews, in one telling extending it to a third threshold: by day eleven, organ systems begin shutting down.[3]
The authorized ceiling he gives sometimes as 12 days and elsewhere as 14 — in one account, “14 days beyond the point of death” some prisoners were already suffering.[4][5][6][7] A May 2026 account restates the physiological threshold consistently with the long-standing figure, set against how long the technique takes to work: sleep deprivation breaks a prisoner far more slowly than the cold cell does, because “you need to go 8, 9 days without sleep. Then he goes into organ failure.”[8]
Authorization and documented use
The CIA was authorized to keep prisoners awake for up to 12 days — well past the seven-day onset of clinical insanity established by the APA literature.[3] “People died from sleep deprivation.”[9] The technique killed at least one prisoner outright.[6][10]
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.[11]
Mechanics
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.[12][13][14][15] In a separate description of the same setup, the explicit purpose was to drive the prisoner insane: “That’s exactly what happened. We made them crazy.”[16]
Effects on prisoners
In some cases the insanity became permanent, leaving prisoners unable to participate in their own legal defense.[17] 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.[18][19]
Kiriakou’s assessment
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.[20][21]
Holding a prisoner to the point of organ failure, on his reading, collapses the distinction between interrogation and killing — “you might as well just kill the guy at that point” — and when an interviewer took that as hyperbole, he did not soften it: that was “kind of the end result half the time.”[8]
Against that, Donald Rumsfeld — who worked at a standup desk and would go 24 to 36 hours without sitting down — famously claimed he did not 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 where people begin losing their minds at day seven and dying of organ failure by day nine.[22][23][24]