Officials at the highest levels of the US defense and justice departments approved interrogation techniques such as sleep disruption and temperature extremes for detainees at its base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, The Washington Post reported yesterday.
The newspaper cited defense officials, some of whom had helped draw up the guidelines.
"We wanted to find a legal way to jack up the pressure," one lawyer and drafter of the guidelines told the newspaper on the condition of anonymity. "We wanted a little more freedom than in a US prison, but not torture."
The techniques were designed to put stress on detainees and disorient them. Stripping detainees was permitted if they were alone in their cells, officials told the Post. Some of the other 20 techniques included "sensory assault," such as subjecting the detainees to loud music and bright lights, or making them stand for hours at a time, but physical contact was not permitted, the officials told the Post.
They said a similar policy was in force for detainees in Iraq believed to have information on terrorist or insurgency operations, but whether those guidelines were in force at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Bagdad, where US soldiers had abused Iraqi prisoners, was not known.
The abuse at Abu Ghraib, which included sexual humiliation, recently came to light with the release of photographs taken by US soldiers there, prompting investigations to be launched over treatment of detainees there and other similar US facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.
The Post said that Guantanamo interrogators must win the approval of senior officials at the Pentagon, and sometimes even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to use such techniques by justifying it as "militarily necessary," and detainees subjected to such treatment must be watched by medical personnel.
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