Name: Dietary manipulation

Source: CIA KUBARK manual; DOD Working Group memo

Description: In the military lexicon, "MRE" stands for "Meal, Ready to Eat." (Soldiers often call this three lies for the price of one.) MREs are the U.S. military's field ration. The Army's lab designs them to be nutritionally balanced, shelf-stable, and chock full of calories. Still, they're not exactly gourmet cuisine, and most soldiers would sooner go hungry than eat them continuously. With the secretary of defense's blessing, interrogators withdrew hot meals from detainees in favor of an all-MRE diet as a form of punishment. It is unclear how well this worked.

Interrogators have also altered the timing of meals, along with a detainee's sleep cycle, to induce a sense of disorientation that accelerates the psychological breakdown of the detainee. Adjusting the sleep and food cycles can also be used to foster dependence by harnessing the detainee's innate desire for rest and nutrition. According to the CIA's interrogation manual: "The point is that man's sense of identity depends upon a continuity in his surroundings, habits, appearance, actions, relations with others, etc. Detention permits the interrogator to cut through these links and throw the interrogatee back upon his own unaided internal resources."

Physical, Psychological, or Other Effects: Feeding detainees an MRE diet is unlikely to harm them. It may even help them by providing them with solid nutrition. Sleep and diet modification, however, can induce psychological effects of the kind described in the CIA manual.

Locations Used: Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan

Legal Opinion: Feeding detainees MREs is almost certainly legal. It conforms to the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, which generally require that prisoners' treatment be roughly equal to that of the soldiers guarding them.

Extreme forms of food deprivation, on the other handmalnutrition or starvationclearly violate Geneva and the Convention Against Torture, because starvation meets the standard for severe pain and suffering.