Pentagon probe clears Guantanamo interrogation techniques

WASHINGTON - A new Pentagon investigation has provided the clearest proof yet that the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib which shocked the world was in large measure 'road-tested' at the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The probe, delivered to the Senate Armed Services Committee this week, found that techniques used at Guantanamo Bay which had drawn complaints from FBI agents working at the facility, did not constitute torture.

Moreover, Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the prison in 2002 and 2003, who later went to Iraq to oversee detainee operations, escaped reprimand because his superiors ruled that prisoner interrogations during his tenure at Guantanamo Bay did not breach US laws and regulations.

But the similarities between the treatment of at least one prisoner at Guantanamo Bay and what happened more than a year later in Iraq, proved that "these techniques were not invented in the backwoods of West Virginia," said one human rights official here, referring to the low ranking reservists who have borne the brunt of the punishment for what happened at Abu Ghraib.

The detainee in question is Mohamed al-Qahtani, said to be the missing '20th hijacker' of September 11 2001.

According to the report, he gave no information under standard interrogation, so in 2002 his questioners adopted harsher tactics. These included forcing al-Qahtani to stand naked in front of women, making him wear a bra and telling him he was homosexual and that other prisoners knew it, and threatening him with dogs, and then placing him on a leash and forcing him to act like a dog.

Such techniques, and even more degrading variants of them, were at the centre of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

The Pentagon officials told Senators that the methods, temporarily approved by Donald Rumsfeld but subsequently banned, were "creative" and "aggressive" but did not amount to torture.

Some Republican Senators questioned the very need for the investigation - the latest of half a dozen into alleged abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq.

"It's hard to see why we're so wrapped up in this," James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican said.

"We've nothing to be ashamed of."

- INDEPENDENT