SCANTILY-CLAD female interrogators taunted devout Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay by touching themselves and using sexually humiliating methods, according to an account by a former translator at the camp released yesterday by the Associated Press.

The report was based on nine draft pages from a manuscript for a planned book on how the US military used women to get terrorist suspects to talk, AP said.

The Pentagon has classified the manuscript as secret but the news agency said that it had confirmed the authenticity of the pages it obtained with their author, former Sergeant Erik R. Saar. The reporter who covered the story, Paisley Dodds, has followed events at the detention centre since it was opened in 2002.

The accounts, if true, could explain claims by Britons held in the camp that prostitutes were sent to taunt them.

Sergeant Saar said that he saw about 20 interrogations, including “disturbing” practices. He recounted seeing a female civilian contractor wearing a miniskirt, thong and bra during late-night interrogations of Muslim prisoners. From April 2003, he wrote, a “short skirt and thong underwear” hung on the back of the door of one interrogation team’s office. He discovered that this was meant to be used to get Saudi prisoners to talk.

He also recounted seeing one woman interrogating Hani Hanjour, a 21-year-old Saudi man under suspicion because he took flying lessons in Arizona before the September 11 attacks. In an attempt to break his silence, after he started to pray during the session, she stripped off her uniform to reveal a tight T-shirt, started touching her breasts and rubbed them against his back. The man spat in her face, according to the manuscript.

According to Sergeant Saar, a Muslim linguist then told the woman interrogator that she could break the prisoner’s faith by making him believe that she had smeared menstrual blood on him and cutting the water off to his cell so that he could not wash. The translator’s manuscript gives explicit details of the way in which the suspect was interrogated.

Some devout Muslim men will not touch women other than their wives, particularly if they are menstruating. The theme has come up repeatedly in the US media since September 11. It was widely reported that Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, left written instructions no woman should attend his funeral or visit his grave.

According to the draft, the idea was to make the detainee feel unclean and “unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength”.

Sergeant Saar, 29, told AP that he had struggled over revealing what he saw, 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”.

Sergeant Saar is not of Arab descent but he worked as an Arabic translator at Guantanamo Bay from December 2002 to June 2003, when it was under the command of Major-General Geoffrey Miller.

His job was to extract intelligence from prisoners, including alleged al-Qaeda members caught in Afghanistan.

AP said that the military had confirmed a similar incident in April 2003 when a female interrogator exposed her brown T-shirt, ran her fingers through a detainee’s hair and sat on his lap. But it said that the interrogation was stopped and the soldier reprimanded.

In another incident confirmed by the military in early 2003, another female interrogator “wiped dye from (a) red magic marker” on the shirt of a detainee who had spat on her.

The news agency also noted that the FBI had criticised sexual tactics used by female interrogators after it was reported that one woman had grabbed a detainee’s genitals.

Brent Mickum, the US attorney representing Martin Mubanga, the Briton who was recently released, and two British residents who are still being held, said the AP report had merit because “every single other allegation” of maltreatment had been corroborated by so many detainees and reports, including the use of extreme temperatures and beatings.

He added: “The remarkable similarity in all the accounts, from Afghans to French to Swedish detainees, has been established.”

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