US accused of using sex to break Guantanamo prisoners
Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by touching them sexually, wearing miniskirts and thongs, according to an insider’s written account.
In one case a woman smeared a Saudi man’s face with fake menstrual blood, he claims.
A rough manuscript obtained by The Associated Press 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.
It’s the most revealing account so far of interrogations at the secretive detention camp, where officials say they have halted some controversial techniques.
“I have really struggled with this because the detainees, their families and much of the world will think this is a religious war based on some of the techniques used, even though it is not the case,” the author, former US Army Sergeant Erik Saar, 29, told AP.
Saar, 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, including alleged al-Qaida members caught in Afghanistan.
Saar said he witnessed about 20 interrogations and about three months after his arrival at the base he started noticing “disturbing” practices.
One female civilian contractor wore a miniskirt, thong underwear and a bra during late-night interrogations with prisoners, mostly Muslim men who consider it taboo to have close contact with women who aren’t their wives.
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 allegedly had taken flying lessons in Arizona before the 9/11 terror attacks.
Suspected 9/11 hijacker Hani Hanjour received pilot instruction for three months in 1996 and in December 1997 at a flight school in Scottsdale, Arizona.
“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.
Islam forbids physical contact with women other than a man’s wife or family, and with any menstruating women, who are considered unclean.
“The concept was to make the detainee feel that after talking to her he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength,” says the draft, stamped “Secret”.
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.”
Events Saar describes resemble two previous reports of abusive female interrogation tactics, although it wasn’t possible to independently verify his account.
In November, in response to an AP request, the military described an April 2003 incident in which a female interrogator took off her uniform top, exposed her brown T-shirt, ran her fingers through a detainee’s hair and sat on his lap.
That session was immediately ended by a supervisor and that interrogator received a written reprimand and additional training, the military said.
In another incident, the military reported that in early 2003 a different female interrogator “wiped dye from red magic marker on detainees’ shirt after detainee spat on her”, telling the detainee it was blood. She was verbally reprimanded, the military said.
Sexual tactics used by female interrogators have been criticised by the FBI, which complained in a letter obtained by AP last month that US defence officials hadn’t acted on complaints by FBI observers of “highly aggressive” interrogation techniques, including one in which a female interrogator grabbed a detainee’s genitals.
About 20% of the guards at Guantanamo are women, said Lieutenant Colonel James Marshall, a spokesman for US Southern Command. He wouldn’t say how many of the interrogators were female.
Marshall wouldn’t address whether the US military had a specific strategy to use women.
