In the annals of interrogation, one primary source serves again and again to describe the experience of forced sleep deprivation.
"In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep," the account says. "Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it."
The source of this much-quoted passage is the memoir White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia. Its author is Menachem Begin, a former Polish prisoner of the KGB who went on to become prime minister of Israel from 1977 to 1983.
One evening in the summer of 2006, just before the start of the Israel-Lebanon war, a political geographer named Ghazi-Walid Falah was arrested near the Lebanese border by the Israel Security Agency, or Shin Bet. Earlier that day, he had visited a popular tourist site where the border meets the coast, taking a mix of sightseer's snapshots and other photographs, framed with a geographer's eye, of the topography.
Mr. Falah, a dual citizen of Canada and Israel who holds a tenured professorship at the University of Akron, was told that a search of his camera had turned up "suspicious" images of a nearby Israeli military antenna. The security agents accused him of spying against Israel.
From that evening until his unconditional release, 23 days later, Mr. Falah was imprisoned and questioned by the Shin Bet, known internationally as one of the most sophisticated human-intelligence-gathering organizations in the world.
In the era of Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and "extraordinary rendition,", interrogation techniques — sleep deprivation among them — have become an object of growing fascination and concern among American scholars.
Mr. Falah, one of the few scholars who has experienced some of those techniques firsthand, has shared accounts of his ordeal in a journal article and in a lengthy interview with The Chronicle.
Last September, Israel's Ministry of Justice issued a statement about Mr. Falah's arrest and detention. The statement described none of the techniques used in Mr. Falah's interrogation, declaring simply that the investigation was conducted "according to law."
But the professor's account of his experience does track closely with what experts on interrogation have written about techniques commonly used with prisoners.
Time Fractured
For Mr. Falah, a rhythm of interrogation was established right away. Beginning on the night of his arrest and continuing through the first week and a half of his detention in the Kishon prison, near Jenin, he was interrogated every night, all night long.
During the days, he was returned to a series of small underground cells.
"The bed was a sheetless pad of two inches," Mr. Falah writes in his first published account of the detention, an essay for the online journal Environment and Planning D. "Held underground in thin prisoner clothing, I was freezing most of the time."
Even worse than the cells' inhospitality, Mr. Falah says, was that he was left alone for only short intervals. Every hour or so, he says, someone would rouse him for a few minutes of questioning.
The same technique was described in interviews that The New York Times conducted with former prison workers at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. "As soon as the guards determined the inmate had fallen into a deep sleep," the workers said, "he was awakened again for interrogation."
After about 12 days of fractured sleep cycles, the rhythm of Mr. Falah's interrogation changed. Now there was no sleep at all. Five interrogators questioned him around the clock. It went on like that for 60 hours.
The interrogators who took turns with Mr. Falah each took on a persona in his mind: Eddie, the "chauvinist;" Saif, the "racist;" Ehud, the rough one; Lavi, the serious one; and Elias, the friendly one. Four bad cops and one good.
The room where they questioned him was a nondescript square in shape. Mr. Falah sat with his arms chained to the back of a wooden, armless chair, which was itself fastened to the floor.
If he slouched and stretched out his legs, he says, the interrogators shouted at him and kicked his feet back into a sitting position. If he nodded off, they rebuked him.
Mr. Falah's 60 hours of sitting upright in a small chair qualifies as a "stress position," says Alfred W. McCoy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies interrogation and torture techniques.
"Being immobile in any position, depending on the period of time, becomes a stress position," says Mr. McCoy. "It would have been harsher if he'd been standing, but still."
Establishing Omniscience
During question, the agents frequently caught Mr. Falah off-guard by confronting him with information they already knew. They were familiar, for example, with his past scholarly rivalries in Israel. They also brandished a thick dossier full of information — all about Mr. Falah, they said.
U.S. Army interrogation manuals call this the "File and Dossier Approach" or the "'We Know All' Approach."
"The interrogator confronts the source with the dossiers at the beginning of the interrogation and explains to him that intelligence has provided a complete record of every happening in the source's life; therefore it would be useless to resist interrogation," says an Army field manual.
Mr. Falah's interrogators often repeated the same questions over and over again. Most concerned his academic travel around the Middle East. The antenna photograph in his camera would surface in questions every now and then, but not often.
He recalls a few questions that were bizarrely off-base. One of the interrogators asked whether there was a nice beach at Kent State University, which sits amid the farmlands of Ohio. Another asked Mr. Falah why he had spoken only with Iranian geographers at a Beirut meeting of the Association of American Geographers, which meets only in North America.
Mr. McCoy says that was probably a skillful tactic in itself: "You're trying to get the person to clarify. You throw something like that out, and they'll respond. They'll correct, and they'll start talking."
At one point late in the 60-hour session, Mr. Falah was left alone in the room with only one hand chained to the wooden chair. When he tried to stretch out on the floor as best he could, the interrogator Ehud stormed in, berating him for his lack of dignity.
"The security of Israel is more important than your sleep!" Mr. Falah remembers Ehud yelling.
Cooped Up With 'Birdies'
Every few days during his detention, Mr. Falah would go to court. Each time the Shin Bet presented its thick, secret file to the presiding judge. The judge would peruse it briefly and then grant the Shin Bet another four or five days with Mr. Falah.
At the end of the 60-hour session, the interrogators finally let Mr. Falah sleep for a night before one of those court appearances — "so I would not look miserable," he says.
When Mr. Falah was then returned to the prison from court, he was given a Palestinian cellmate. The man, who said his name was Abul Amin, said he had been interrogated by the Israelis before.
He began telling Mr. Falah what to expect: In a few days, he said, the guards will take your fingerprints. Once that has happened, your interrogation will be over. You will then be taken to another prison — one with Palestinian food, where the inmates lived in common areas.
After his 60-hour interrogation session, Mr. Falah says he was desperate to hear about the new prison that awaited him. He pressed the man for details.
Two or three days later, just as the man had said, Mr. Falah's fingerprints were taken. Then a windowless jeep took him three hours south, to a prison near Beersheba, he believes.
There he was shown to a three-room complex with a courtyard yard where prisoners were playing volleyball. A prisoner introduced Mr. Falah around to the other inmates, who roamed freely through the rooms. Korans sat on tables; the Arabic-language television network Al-Jazeera was playing on the television. (To his astonishment, Mr. Falah discovered that a war had broken out since his arrest.)
On his second day there, a Palestinian prisoner whom other inmates described as the "chief" asked Mr. Falah where he wanted to eat.
There were various canteens at the prison, the man explained. Each was associated with a group: Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad. The chief said Mr. Falah should choose which one he preferred.
The geographer ducked the question. "I'm a Canadian," he said.
Then the chief began asking Mr. Falah questions — about his family, about the reasons for his arrest, about his travels in the Middle East. Mr. Falah recalls.
In an interview with The Atlantic, Michael Koubi, former head of the Shin Bet's interrogation wing, calls men like the chief "birdies" — Palestinians who have been enticed into gathering information for the Israeli agency.
Mr. Falah's cellmate, Abul Amin: also a birdie.
The Shin Bet has found that many Palestinian prisoners who resist interrogation will open up among other Palestinians, even though the practice of using "birdies" is well known.
After a few days, Mr. Falah was sent back to Kishon prison, where he was reunited with his five interrogators. They told him everything at the other prison had been "theater."
Mr. Falah endured only one more all-night interrogation after that. A couple of days after his time with the "birdies," a central court ordered the Shin Bet to either indict Mr. Falah or release him.
He walked out of prison on July 30, 2006.
A Question of Degree
Mr. Falah uses the word "torture" when describing his experience. But scholars disagree over whether sleep deprivation and seated stress positions fit the definition.
In their book Protecting Liberty in an Age of Terror, Philip B. Heymann, a professor of law at Harvard University, and Juliette N. Kayyem, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, say the boundaries between torture and legally permissible practices are "not marked with bright lines."
Mr. McCoy, of Wisconsin, says the geographer's account suggests a serious and rational "extraction of information" using sophisticated techniques, and not merely a punitive exercise.
As to whether he personally considers Mr. Falah's experience torture, Mr. McCoy does not hesitate. "No question," he says. "Sixty hours of sleep deprivation in and of itself is torture."
"They're playing very cruel games with your mind in these situations," he says. "The damage can be enormous."