WASHINGTON – A year after the Bush administration abandoned its harshest interrogation methods, CIA operatives used severe sleep deprivation tactics against a terror detainee in late 2007, keeping him awake for six straight days with permission from government lawyers.
Interrogators kept the unidentified detainee awake by chaining him to the walls and floor of a cell, according to government officials and memos issued with an internal CIA report. The Obama administration released the internal report this week.
Though the detainee's name and critical details are blacked out in the memos, there is only one detainee known to have been in CIA custody at that time: Mohammed Rahim al-Afghani, an alleged al-Qaida operator and translator for Osama bin Laden.
The documents show that even as the Bush administration was scaling back its use of severe interrogation techniques, the CIA was still pushing the boundaries of what the administration's own legal counsel considered acceptable treatment.
The documents describe two instances in 2007 in which the CIA was allowed to exceed the guidelines set by Bush administration lawyers allowing prisoners to be kept awake for up to four days.
The first episode occurred in August 2007, when interrogators were given permission from the Office of Legal Counsel to keep an unidentified detainee awake for five days, a U.S. government official confirmed. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the report's details.
According to the documents, the sleep-deprived prisoner was kept awake by being forced to stand with his arms chained above heart level. He wore diapers, allowing interrogators to keep him chained continuously without bathroom breaks.
The second incident occurred in November 2007. After again asking permission from Justice lawyers to keep a detainee awake an extra day, interrogators pressed to extend the treatment for another 24 hours, depriving the prisoner of sleep for six straight days.
It is unclear from the documents whether the two incidents involved the same detainee. CIA spokesman George Little would not provide the identity of the prisoner referred to in the document.
Afghani, the alleged bin Laden translator, was captured in Pakistan in the summer of 2007 — around the time the Justice Department issued new guidance for the harsh techniques that could still be used on CIA prisoners. He stayed in CIA custody until early 2008, when he was transferred to the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Officials noted in the documents that the sleepless prisoner remained "alert and oriented" and seemed to be "adhering to a well-developed, robust and capable resistance strategy."
According to the documents, the prisoner was monitored by closed-circuit television. If he started to fall asleep, the chains jerking on his arms would wake him up. If a prisoner's leg swelled — a condition known as edema, which can cause blood clots and stroke — interrogators could chain him to a low, unbalanced stool or on the floor with arms outstretched.
Sleep deprivation beyond 48 hours is known to produce hallucinations. It can reduce resistance to pain, and it makes people suggestible.
The State Department regularly lists sleep deprivation as a form of torture in its annual report on human rights abuses. Recent reports have noted Iran, Syria and Indonesia as engaging in the practice.
Andrea Northwood, director of client services at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, said her organization considers 96 hours of sleep deprivation to be torture.
"It's a primary method that is used around the world because it is effective in breaking people. It is effective because it induces severe harm," she said. "It causes people to feel absolutely crazy."
She said that in many cases there are lingering effects. "My experience in working with survivors, they are still struggling with questions whether they are normal, whether they should have acted as they did when they talked under this kind of pressure," she said.
Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the use of such a severe tactic in 2007 shows that the U.S. was not abiding by its own law.

"The documents are particularly disturbing because they were issued even after the Supreme Court held that these prisoners were entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions and after Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act to specifically prohibit cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment," Singh said.

Before scaling back its "enhanced interrogation program," the CIA used 10 harsh methods, including waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. It later used six techniques, including sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation and slapping.

The Obama administration has since rescinded authority for any of the severe methods. Under the rules of the U.S. Army Field Manual, which now governs all interrogations, prisoners must be allowed to sleep at least four hours during every 24-hour period.

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Associated Press writer Matt Apuzzo contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON – Government health officials are urging people not to panic over estimates of 90,000 people dying from swine flu this fall. "Everything we've seen in the U.S. and everything we've seen around the world suggests we won't see that kind of number if the virus doesn't change," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He made the comment in a C-SPAN interview taped Wednesday.
While the swine flu seems quite easy to catch, it so far hasn't been more deadly than the flu strains seen every fall and winter — many people have only mild illness. And close genetic tracking of the new virus as it circled the globe over the last five months so far has shown no sign that it's mutating to become more virulent.
Still, the CDC has been preparing for a worst-case flu season as a precaution — in July working from an estimate slightly more grim than one that made headlines this week — to make sure that if the virus suddenly worsened or vaccination plans fell through, health authorities would know how to react.
On Monday the White House released a report from a group of presidential advisers that included a scenario where anywhere from 30 percent to half of the population could catch what doctors call the "2009 H1N1" flu, and death possibilities ranged from 30,000 to 90,000. In a regular flu season, up to 20 percent of the population is infected and 36,000 die.
"We don't think that's the most likely scenario," CDC flu specialist Dr. Anne Schuchat said of the presidential advisers' high-end tally.
What's really expected this year? CDC won't speculate, finding a numbers game pointless as it tries to balance getting a largely complacent public to listen to its flu instructions without hyping the threat.
Along with how the virus itself continues to act, the ultimate toll depends on such things as vaccinations beginning as planned — currently set for mid-October — and whether the people who need them most get them. CDC also is working to help hospitals keep the not-so-sick from crowding emergency rooms and to properly target anti-flu drugs to the most vulnerable.
What is likely: A busy flu season that starts earlier than usual, Schuchat told The Associated Press. This new H1N1 strain never went away over the summer, infecting children at summer camps in particular. Already clusters of illnesses are being reported at some schools and colleges around the country.

COLUMBIA, S.C. – South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford rebuffed his lieutenant governor's call to resign Wednesday, two months after he admitted an affair, saying he will not be "railroaded" out of office.
Sanford returned from a nearly weeklong disappearance in June to reveal he had been in Argentina to visit his mistress, a disclosure that led to questions about the legality of his travel on state, private and commercial planes.
At a news conference hours after fellow Republican Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer called for him to step down, Sanford said the people of South Carolina want to move past the scandals and that he will finish the last 16 months of his term.
"I'm not going to be railroaded out of this office by political opponents or folks who were never fans of mine in the first place," Sanford said. "A lot of what is going on now is pure politics, plain and simple."
Bauer and Sanford have served two terms together but were elected separately and have never been friends.
Some Republicans have been reluctant to seek Sanford's resignation or impeachment because they do not want to give Bauer what would amount to a long-term tryout for the job.
If Sanford steps down before his term ends in January 2011, Bauer said he will promise not to run in 2010 so that is not an issue. Bauer considered making the same offer in June but never officially did.
"The serious misconduct that has been revealed along with lingering questions and continuing distractions make it virtually impossible for our state to solve the critical problems we're facing without a change in leadership," he said Wednesday.
House Republicans are expected to discuss impeachment this weekend. The House will likely launch those proceedings when lawmakers return for their regular session in January, though they could also hold a special session before then. Any House member can file a bill to impeach.
Sanford said heeding Bauer's call to resign would be like "heaven on earth" because it would get him out of the public eye, but it would not be right.
"Me hanging up the spurs 16 months out, as comfortable as that would be, as much as I might like to do that on a personal basis, it is wrong," he said.
Bauer said he tried to give Sanford the benefit of the doubt after he admitted his affair, but the state has been paralyzed by questions raised afterward about the legality of his official travel. Bauer said he is concerned that calls for Sanford's impeachment will dominate next year's legislative session instead of issues like the economy and job creation.
Bauer said he will go ahead with his candidacy if Sanford does not resign or lawmakers do not return to Columbia to force him out within 30 days. Term limits prevent Sanford from running for a third term.
Sacrificing the run for governor next year could boost Bauer's status in the state GOP but still allow the 40-year-old plenty of time for another election.
Republican Sen. David Thomas, a 2002 Bauer opponent whose Senate subcommittee is investigating Sanford's travels, said Bauer's decision would likely spur the House to action. Several Republicans have said they support impeachment.
"If he can have a successful time in the year as governor, then he sets himself up for a future race," Thomas said. "He's young. He can re-create himself to some degree as a successful governor."
Francis Marion University political scientist Neal Thigpen said the offer could be disingenuous.
"My guess is, somehow the Bauer people have thought it through and figured this offer itself could be something — knowing Sanford would turn it down — would benefit him in some way in 2010," he said.

Sanford, who led his staff to believe he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, told The Associated Press his mistress was his soul mate. He said he visited her in Argentina during a 2008 trade mission planned by the state's Commerce Department and, after the publicity in June, reimbursed the state $3,300 for part of the trip.

AP investigations since have found Sanford used state planes for personal and political trips, which state law prohibits. He failed to disclose trips on private planes that ethics officials say should have been made public in campaign and ethics filings.

He also took pricey flights on commercial airlines for overseas trips despite a law requiring state employees to use lowest-cost travel.

The governor says he has done nothing wrong and he said Wednesday that his administration should be looked at in comparison with others. He gave no details but accused others of misdeeds including "folks" flying on the Concorde supersonic jet "in days past." The Concorde was taken out of service in 2003.

Sanford left without answering questions.

His wife, Jenny, has moved out of the governor's mansion with the couple's four sons but says she and her husband are working on their marriage.

HYANNIS PORT, Mass. – The greatest heights eluded Ted Kennedy over a lifetime of achievement and pain. No presidency. No universal health care, chief among his causes.
Instead, Kennedy built his Washington monument stone by stone, his imprint distinct on the Senate's most important works over nearly half a century. He toiled across the Potomac River from the graveyard of his fallen brothers.
The last of the Kennedys who fascinated the nation with their ambition, style, idealism, tragedies — and sometimes sheer recklessness — Edward Moore Kennedy died late Tuesday night at 77. A black shroud and vase of white roses sat Wednesday on his Senate desk, which John Kennedy had used before him.
So dropped the final curtain on "Camelot," the already distant era of the Kennedy dynasty.
The Massachusetts senator's extended political family of fellow Democrats and rival Republicans, steeled for his death since his brain-tumor diagnosis a year ago yet still jarred by it, joined in mourning. Kennedy was the Senate's dominant liberal and one of its legendary dealmakers.
Just last year he jumped into a fractious Democratic presidential nomination fight to side with Barack Obama, giving the Illinois senator a boost that had the air of a family anointment.
"For his family, he was a guardian," Obama said Wednesday. "For America, he was a defender of a dream."
The president, vacationing in Martha's Vineyard, was awakened after 2 a.m. and told of Kennedy's death. He spoke soon after with the senator's widow, Victoria, and ordered flags flown at half-staff on all federal buildings.
Kennedy will be buried Saturday at Arlington National Cemetery after a funeral Mass in Boston, where Obama is to deliver a eulogy.
Kennedy will lie in repose at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston before that.
Also buried at Arlington, the military cemetery overlooking the capital city, are John and Robert Kennedy; John Kennedy's wife, Jacqueline; their baby son, Patrick, who died after two days, and their stillborn child.
To Americans and much of the world, Kennedy was best known as the last surviving son of the nation's most glamorous political family. Of nine children born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy, Jean Kennedy Smith is the only one alive.
To senators of both parties, he was one of their own.
"Even when you expect it, even when you know it's coming, in this case it hurts a great deal," said Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont.
Politicians also calculated the consequences for Obama's push for expanded health coverage. For several months, at least, Kennedy's death will deprive the Democrats of a vote that could prove crucial for his signature cause of health reform.
His illness had sidelined him from an intense debate that would have found him at the core any other time. Conservative Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, his improbable Republican partner on children's health insurance, volunteerism, student aid and more, said the Senate probably would have had a health care deal by now if Kennedy had been healthy enough to work with him.
"Iconic, larger than life," Hatch said of his friend. "We were like fighting brothers."
He was the last of the famous Kennedy brothers: John the assassinated president, Robert the assassinated senator and presidential candidate, Joseph the aviator killed in action in World War II when Ted was 12.

He lost his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, less than two weeks ago, saw the bright promise of nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. end in a plane crash in 1999 and struggled with excesses of his own until he became a settled elder statesman.

Like Obama, Kennedy was a master orator. But the words that live for the ages seem to be those he uttered in tragedy or defeat.

Older Americans remember his eulogy of Robert Kennedy, when he asked history not to idealize his brother but remember him "simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

Remembered, too, is his speech conceding the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination to the incumbent Jimmy Carter. "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die," he said.

By then, his hopes of reaching the White House had been damaged by his behavior a decade earlier in the scandal known as Chappaquiddick.

On the night of July 18, 1969, Kennedy drove his car off a bridge and into a pond on Chappaquiddick Island, on Martha's Vineyard, and swam to safety while companion Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in the car. He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident; a judge said his actions probably contributed to the young woman's death. He received a suspended sentence and probation.

Kennedy's legislative legacy includes health insurance for children of the working poor, the landmark 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, family leave and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He was also key to passage of the No Child Left Behind Education law and a Medicare drug benefit for the elderly, both championed by Republican President George W. Bush.

In the Senate, Republicans respected and often befriended him. But his essential liberalism marked him as a lightning rod, too. He proved a handy fundraising foil motivating Republicans to open their wallets to fight anything he stood for.

In 1980, Kennedy's task of dislodging a president of his own party was compounded by his fumbling answer to a question posed by CBS' Roger Mudd: Why do you want to be president?

"Well, I'm, uh, were I to, to make the, the announcement, to run, the reasons that I would run is because I have a great belief in this country," he began.

It's a question that all savvy politicians ever since make sure won't catch them unprepared.

In his later years, Kennedy cut a barrel-chested profile, with a swath of white hair, a booming voice and a thick, widely imitated Boston accent. He coupled fist-pumping floor speeches with charm and formidable negotiating skills.

"I think that once he realized he was never going to be president — that that was not the legacy he had to follow — he really worked at becoming the best senator he possibly could," Leahy said. "And he did."

He was first elected to the Senate in 1962, taking the seat that his brother John had occupied before winning the White House, and he served longer than all but two senators in history.

Kennedy was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor in May 2008 and underwent surgery and a grueling regimen of radiation and chemotherapy.

He made a surprise return to the Capitol last summer to cast a decisive vote for the Democrats on Medicare. He made sure he was there again in January to see his former Senate colleague sworn in as president but suffered a seizure at a celebratory luncheon afterward.

His survivors include a daughter, Kara Kennedy Allen; two sons, Edward Jr. and Patrick, a congressman from Rhode Island, and two stepchildren, Caroline and Curran Raclin.

Edward Jr. lost a leg to bone cancer in 1973 at age 12. Kara had a cancerous tumor removed from her lung in 2003. In 1988, Patrick had a non-cancerous tumor pressing on his spine removed. He also has struggled with depression and addiction and recently spent time at an addiction treatment center.

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Woodward reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman in Washington, Philip Elliott in Oak Bluffs, Mass., and Bob Salsberg contributed to this report.

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On the Net:

Kennedy's office: http://kennedy.senate.gov