Guantanamo guards receiving a Behavioral Science briefing.
The Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs, pronounced "biscuits") are groups of psychiatrists, other medical doctors and psychologists who study detainees in American extrajudicial detention.[1]
Additional detention conditions they believed would further assist intelligence-gathering operations. These included using fans and generators to create white noise as a form of psychological pressure; restricting "resistant" detainees to no more than four hours of sleep a day; depriving them of "comfort items" such as sheets, blankets, mattresses, and washcloths; and controlling their access to the koran. "All aspects of the [detention] environment," they argued, "should enhance capture shock, dislocate expectations, foster dependence, and support exploitation to the fullest extent possible."[2]
When Darrel Vandeveld, one of the lawyers assigned to serve as one of military commission prosecutors looked into the case against Mohammed Jawad, one of the individuals he was assigned to prosecute, he realized that the record showed that Jawad, then still a minor, had been subjected to long periods of sleep deprivation, a torture technique that had already been de-authorized, on the advice of Army psychologist Lieutenant Colonel Diane M. Zierhoffer.[4][5]
^Jeffrey Kaye (2011-04-19). "Guantanamo Psychologist Led Rendition and Imprisonment of Afghan Boys, Complaint Charges". Truthout. Retrieved 2016-10-11. Zierhoffer (who was identified separately in an article [16] at Daily Kos), working with interrogators, "encouraged them to continue to dial up the emotional pressure on Jawad: 'He appears to be rather frightened and it looks as if he could break easily if he were isolated from his support network and made to rely solely on the interrogator,' according to an excerpt of the report read to Newsweek.
^"GITMO: Psychologists and torture". Newsweek magazine. 2008-10-17. Retrieved 2016-10-11. Since 2002 psychologists have observed interrogations and suggested specific ways to exploit the weaknesses of detainees, including Mohammed Jawad, whose disturbing case is now being heard by a military tribunal in Guantánamo.
