Military doctors at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba have used their medical expertise to help interrogators put maximum pressure on detainees, according to an article in The New York Times.

The article, published today, claims that military doctors have routinely advised interrogators on techniques to increase the psychological suffering of detainees and force them to co-operate with American military authorities.

The newspaper interviewed former interrogators who described the role of doctors at the camp.

"The accounts shed light on how interrogations were conducted and raise new questions about the boundaries of medical ethics in the nation's fight against terrorism," said the article.

According to the article, doctors even used the medical histories of individual prisoners to come up with ways to cause them maximum fear and distress. In one instance, doctors told interrogators to play on a detainee's intense fear of the dark.

The Pentagon refused to discuss the article but a senior spokesman, Bryan Whitman, suggested to The New York Times that doctors at the base are not subject to the ethical strictures of the profession because the prisoners are not their patients.

Instead, Mr Whitman suggested that the doctors were performing the role of behavioural scientists.

Today's article comes just two days after The New England Journal of Medicine reported that American military interrogators have repeatedly used confidential medical information to customise they way they question prisoners.

According to the medical journal, doctors at Guantanamo work as consultants in Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) and have designed a complex system of interrogation techniques that induce "extreme stress".

"One approach emphasizes fear and anxiety as counter-resistance tools; another favors rapport with detainees. The former approach... builds on the premise that acute, uncontrollable stress erodes established behavior, creating opportunities to reshape behavior," said the article, by Dr Gregg Bloche, a professor of law at Georgetown University.

"Complex reward systems.. promote co-operation. Stressors tailored to the psychological and cultural vulnerabilities of individual detainees (eg, phobias, personality features, and religious beliefs) are key to this approach and can be devised on the basis of detainee profiles."

The implication of doctors in the design of interrogation techniques at Guantanamo adds to the mystery and international suspicion of what takes place at the camp.

Yesterday UN human rights investigators accused the US of refusing to allow them to visit the camp. The panel of experts said requests to investigate claims of abuse at the camp have been blocked.

"Such requests were based on serious allegations of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees, arbitrary detention and violations of detainees’ right to health and due process at Guantanamo."

"The lack of a definitive answer despite repeated requests suggests that the United States is not willing to cooperate with the United Nations human rights machinery on this issue," they said in a statement.

Last week, former President Clinton said the camp should "be closed down or cleaned up."

"It is time that there are no more stories coming out of there about people being abused," said President Clinton, joining human rights activists and former President Jimmy Carter in calling for the camp to be closed down.

About 520 detainees thought to have links to Afghanistan’s ousted Taleban regime or al-Qaeda terror are currently held at the camp on the U.S. Navy base in eastern Cuba. British prisoners released from the camp have told of repeated mistreatment at the hands of their captors, and the Pentagon recently admitted that guards had desecrated the Koran on several occasions to taunt detainees.

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