US report cites 'degrading' Guantanamo treatment

WASHINGTON - US Guantanamo Bay interrogators degraded and abused a key prisoner but did not torture him when they told him he was gay, forced him to dance with another man and made him wear a bra and perform dog tricks, military investigators said on Wednesday.

The general who heads US Southern Command, responsible for the jail for foreign terrorism suspects at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, also said he declined to heed his investigators' recommendation to punish a former commander of the prison camp.

A military report presented before the Senate Armed Services Committee stated the Saudi man, described as the "20th hijacker" slated to have participated in the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, was forced by interrogators to wear a bra and had women's thong underwear placed on his head.

US interrogators also told him he was a homosexual, forced him to dance with a male interrogator, told him his mother and sister were whores, forced him to wear a leash and perform dog tricks, menaced him with a dog and subjected him to interrogations up to 20 hours a day for about two months, the report said.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt, who headed the probe into FBI accounts of abuse of Guantanamo prisoners by Defence Department personnel, concluded that the man was subjected to "abusive and degrading treatment" due to "the cumulative effect of creative, persistent and lengthy interrogations." The techniques used were authorised by the Pentagon, he said.

The man was not named during the hearing, but the Pentagon identified him as Mohamed al-Qahtani.

"As the bottom line, though, we found no torture. Detention and interrogation operations were safe, secure and humane," Schmidt said of the prison for foreign terrorism suspects at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, himself abused by the North Vietnamese as a POW during the Vietnam War, noted, "Humane treatment might be in the eye of the beholder."

Army Gen. Bantz Craddock, who as head of Southern Command oversees Guantanamo, said he rejected the recommendation by Schmidt and his fellow investigator Army Brig. Gen. John Furlow that Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the prison's commander at the time, be formally admonished for failing to properly monitor and limit the interrogation of that prisoner.

Craddock said the interrogation "did not result in any violation of a US law or policy," and thus "there's nothing for which to hold him accountable." Miller would have been the highest-ranking US officer punished in connection with the abuse of prisoners in the custody of the US military.

Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said terrorism suspects "are not to be coddled" and added, "We have nothing to be ashamed of. What other country, attacked as we were, would exercise the same degree of self-criticism and restraint?"

"What damage are we doing to our war effort by parading these relatively minor infractions before the press and the world again and again and again while our soldiers risk their lives daily and are given no mercy by the enemy," Inhofe said.

But McCain said, "I hold no brief for the prisoners. I do hold a brief for the reputation of the United States of America as to adhering to certain standards of treatment of people no matter how evil or terrible they might be."

The investigation, announced in January, followed the release by the American Civil Liberties Union of FBI documents describing alleged prisoner abuses by Defence Department personnel at Guantanamo. The documents were obtained by court order under the Freedom of Information Act.

The FBI documents described prisoners at Guantanamo being shackled hand and foot in a fetal position on a floor for 18 to 24 hours, and left to urinate and defaecate on themselves. Others said Pentagon interrogators impersonated FBI agents at the base and used "torture techniques" on a prisoner.

About 520 men are imprisoned at the prison, which opened in January 2002. Many were detained in Afghanistan and have been held for more than three years. Only four have been charged.

The United States has classified the detainees as "enemy combatants" and denied them rights accorded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

- REUTERS