Sat, Jan 29, 2005 page1

• Women employ touching, `blood' to break inmates

  TOUGH TACTICS A former army translator said female interrogators relied on Islamic taboos during sexually related interrogation sessions

  • AP
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  Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider's written account.

  The draft manuscript is classified as secret pending a Pentagon review for a planned book that details ways the US military used women as part of tougher physical and psychological interrogation tactics to get terror suspects to talk.

  Sergeant Erik Saar, 29, who is neither Muslim nor of Arab descent, worked as an Arabic translator at the US camp in eastern Cuba from December 2002 to June 2003. At the time, it was under the command of Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had a mandate to get better intelligence from prisoners.

  Saar said he witnessed about 20 interrogations, and about three months after his arrival at the remote US base he started noticing "disturbing" practices.

  Beginning in April 2003, "there hung a short skirt and thong underwear on the hook on the back of the door" of one interrogation team's office, he writes. "Later I learned that this outfit was used for interrogations by one of the female civilian contractors ... on a team which conducted interrogations in the middle of the night on Saudi men who were refusing to talk."

  Some Guantanamo prisoners who have been released say they were tormented by "prostitutes."

  In another case, Saar describes a female military interrogator questioning an uncooperative 21-year-old Saudi detainee who had allegedly taken flying lessons in Arizona before the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

  "His female interrogator decided that she needed to turn up the heat," Saar writes, saying she repeatedly asked the detainee who had sent him to Arizona, telling him he could "cooperate" or "have no hope whatsoever of ever leaving this place or talking to a lawyer."

  The man closed his eyes and began to pray, Saar writes.

  The female interrogator wanted to "break him," Saar adds, describing how she removed her uniform top to expose a tight-fitting T-shirt and began taunting the detainee, touching her breasts, rubbing them against the prisoner's back and commenting on his apparent erection.

  The detainee looked up and spat in her face, the manuscript recounts.

  The interrogator left the room to ask a Muslim linguist how she could break the prisoner's reliance on God. The linguist told her to tell the detainee that she was menstruating, touch him, then make sure to turn off the water in his cell so he couldn't wash.

  The interrogator used ink from a red pen to fool the detainee, Saar writes.

  "She then started to place her hands in her pants as she walked behind the detainee," he says. "As she circled around him he could see that she was taking her hand out of her pants. When it became visible the detainee saw what appeared to be red blood on her hand. She said, `Who sent you to Arizona?' He then glared at her with a piercing look of hatred.

  "She then wiped the red ink on his face. He shouted at the top of his lungs, spat at her and lunged forward," so fiercely that he broke loose from one ankle shackle.

  "He began to cry like a baby," the draft says, noting the interrogator left saying, "Have a fun night in your cell without any water to clean yourself."

  Saar said, "Interrogators were given a lot of latitude under Miller," the commander who went from the prison in Cuba to overseeing prisons in Iraq, where the Abu Ghraib scandal shocked the world with pictures revealing sexual humiliation of naked prisoners.
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