Original Article Details emerge of Guantanamo torture Neil A. Lewis New York Times Jan. 1, 2005 12:00 AM WASHINGTON - Sometime after Mohammed al-Kahtani was imprisoned at Guantanamo around the beginning of 2003, military officials believed they had a prize on their hands: someone who was perhaps intended to have been a hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot. But his interrogation was not yielding much, so they decided in the middle of 2003 to try a new tactic. Kahtani, a Saudi, was given a tranquilizer, put in sensory deprivation garb with blackened goggles, and hustled aboard a plane that was supposedly taking him to the Middle East. After hours in the air, the plane landed back at Guantanamo, where he was not returned to the regular prison compound but put in an isolation cell in the naval base's brig. There, he was subjected to harsh interrogation procedures that he was encouraged to believe were being conducted by Egyptian national security operatives. The account of Kahtani's treatment given to the New York Times recently by military intelligence officials and interrogators is the latest of several developments that have severely damaged the credibility of the military's longstanding public version of the way the detention and interrogation center at Guantanamo operated. Interviews with former intelligence officers and interrogators by the Times provided new details and confirmed earlier accounts of inmates' being shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or cats squealing. In addition, some may have been forcibly given enemas as punishment. While all the detainees were threatened with harsh tactics if they did not cooperate, about one inmate in six was eventually subjected to those procedures, one former interrogator estimated. The interrogator said that when new interrogators arrived, they were told they had great flexibility in extracting information from detainees because the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the base. Military officials have gone to great lengths to portray Guantanamo as a largely humane facility for several hundred prisoners, where the harshest sanctioned punishments consisted of isolation or taking away items like blankets, toothpaste, dessert or reading material. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was the commander of the Guantanamo operation from November 2002 to March 2004, regularly told visiting members of Congress and journalists that the approach was designed to build trust between the detainee and his questioner. "We are detaining these enemy combatants in a humane manner," he told reporters in March 2004. "Should our men or women be held in similar circumstances I would hope they would be treated in this manner." In addition to the account of Kahtani's treatment, the new interviews provide details and confirm some of the accounts in other recent disclosures about procedures at Guantanamo: the November report that the International Committee of the Red Cross complained privately last summer to the U.S. government that the procedures at Guantanamo were "tantamount to torture" and memorandums from FBI officials, most of them released in December as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. Military officials who participated in the practices were quoted in the Times in October saying that prisoners were tormented by being chained to a low chair for hours with bright flashing lights in their eyes and audio tapes played loudly next to their ears, including songs by Lil' Kim and Rage Against the Machine and rap performances by Eminem. The people who spoke about what they witnessed or whose duties made them aware of what was occurring said they had different reasons for granting interviews.