John Kiriakou

The second one was a slap on the belly called the belly slap.

It makes a cracking sound.

It's a little bit humiliating.

It leaves a handprint.

It's probably not torture.

The third one was a slap across the face.

That's humiliating.

But again, reasonable people can agree to disagree about whether it's torture.

But then they got

progressively worse.

The next one was called walling, where you roll a towel and put the towel around the prisoner's neck, and then you slam him repeatedly into a plywood wall.

The plywood has a little bit of give, and the towel ensures that the prisoner doesn't get whiplash.

But,

The CIA never used a towel and the wall was made out of concrete block.

And so they did such damage to prisoners that several of them have permanent traumatic brain injury and are unable to participate in their own defenses.

The Justice Department never said you could smash somebody's head against a concrete wall until his brain was jelly, but that's exactly what the CIA did.

There were others that were even worse.

One was called the cold cell, where a prisoner is stripped naked.

He's chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling so he can't get comfortable.

He can't sit or kneel or lay.