Looking at more psychological than physiological symptoms, one well-known 2001 study in the August 2001 edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry looked at dissociative symptoms, e.g., depersonalization, derealization, psychic or emotional numbing, general cognitive confusion (emphasis added):

The current study was designed to assess the nature and prevalence of dissociative symptoms in healthy humans experiencing acute, uncontrollable stress during U.S. Army survival training. METHOD: In study 1, 94 subjects completed the Clinician-Administered Dissociative States Scale after exposure to the stress of survival training. In study 2, 59 subjects completed the Brief Trauma Questionnaire before acute stress and the dissociative states scale before and after acute stress. A randomly selected group of subjects in study 2 completed a health problems questionnaire after acute stress. RESULTS: In study 1, 96% of subjects reported dissociative symptoms in response to acute stress. Total scores, as well as individual item scores, on the dissociation scale were significantly lower in Special Forces soldiers compared to general infantry troops. In study 2, 42% of subjects reported dissociative symptoms before stress and 96% reported them after acute stress.

96 percent! Well, these statistics are very different from those that appeared to say that less than 2% of SERE subjects had any significant psychological symptoms. It’s all in how you frame it in the research world, and apparently in the legal world as well.

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Producing dissociative states was desired in MKULTRA and other mind control programs. Dissociative Identity Disorder replaced the name, Multiple Personality Disorder in the DSM-III in 1980.

Creating alter personality states and programming those alters to do unspeakable things has been done by the CIA since the advent of Project Paperclip. Project Paperclip was a US program to bring Nazis to universities, hospitals, mental institutions, prisons NASA and the military to experiment with mind control. (They also worked on rockets and did “research” on children with radiation.)

The value in creating dissociative states – multiple personalities – is that these altered states can carry out unspeakable things and then be walled off from the consciousness of the person BY TORTURE.

Many false confessions have been created. Many awful things have been done by people whose personalities have altered by extreme stress. On a command, a person with DID can move from one state to another and have no memory of it.

Think of it. SERE training produced dissociative symptoms in 96 per cent of soldiers who went through it. Imagine if their training was NOT done by trusted personnel who would give them time to fully recover from those dissociated states.

Hallucinations are relatively common after 48 hours of sleep deprivation, so any intelligence extracted from a detainee kept awake for more than 48 hours would be beyond questionable.

According to the General Counsel, in late December 2003, the period for sleep deprivation was reduced to 48 hours.

This is somewhat inconsistent with the 10 May 2005 memo. Your post “264 Hours of Sleep Deprivation” discusses related issues.

Somewhat off topic: I haven’t had any time to read any of today’s document dump, but your comment reminded me that, contrary to Operation Paperclip’s bestowing honors on Nazi doctors, the medical profession has begun some retroactive (proactive?) renaming of eponymous diseases previously known by the Nazi doctors who discovered them including Reiter’s syndrome, Wegener’s granulomatosis, and Hallervorden’s Hallervorden-Spatz disease.

see the March 2009 article at Irish Medical Times’ Diseases Should Not Bear Nazi Criminals’ Names http://www.imt.ie/opinion/2009….._nazi.html

And this comment at Chest (an authoritative medical journal for pulmonologists and not a scatalogical mens’ magazine)

The stress of military survival training produced dramatic alterations in cortisol, percent free cortisol, testosterone, and thyroid indices.

This was under voluntary conditions, of short duration, unrepeated, by healthy and athletic young men, with helpful and encouraging comrades. Imagine its effect on a 40 year old, out of shape, beat-up, hungry, deaf, depressed man, with no friends in the room. I wonder if KSM or AZ set new records for the levels of the stress hormones?

Measuring the levels of stress hormones might be an “objective” or “scientific” or at least independent basis for the claim that KSM or others had techniques to resist torture. But I thought the basis for the hypothesis of waterboard resistance was that Chalabi had already told Cheney what they would know – is that right? That doesn’t seem right. Where does the hypothesis of waterboard resistance come from? Don’t tell me it came from the subjective impressions of those doing the waterboarding? Like, they say to themselves, this is really awful and he still isn’t spilling the beans? Surely the subjective opinions of the people doing the waterboarding cannot be scientifically valid…?

I think Abu Zubaydeh has reported that some sort of device was placed on his fingertips while he was being water boarded, and removed and examined by someone in a white coat. I’m wondering if this was some sort of blood titer analytical device…similar to diabetic tests.

This would likely have been a pulse-oximeter (”pulse-ox”) that measures heart-rate and oxygen takeup in the blood. They are used all the time, and if you’re ever in the hospital overnight for even the most minor reasons you will become familiar with the fingerclip. The use of this in waterboarding would be to indicate how much he is suffocating. Say, if the oxygen ratio in his blood went down below a certain percentage, or his pulse went higher than X beats per minute. Now those are some numbers that would shed light on the level of cruelty.