Guantanamo prisoners 'subjected to mock grillings'

Fictitious interrogations were staged for VIP visitors at Guantanamo Bay, a former US Army translator has claimed.

Former Sergeant Erik Saar said detainees were grilled about known information to give visiting politicians and generals the impression that valuable intelligence was being gleaned on a regular basis.

He told US network CBS that in reality he believed “only a few dozen” of the 600 detainees were real terrorists, and that little information was obtained from them.

“Interrogations were set up so the VIPs could come and witness an interrogation... a mock interrogation, basically,” he said.

“They would find a detainee that they knew to have been cooperative. They would ask the interrogator to go back over the same information... and they would sit across a table and talk. (It was) a fictitious world they would create for these VIPs.”

Saar, who worked at Guantanamo from December 2002 to June 2003, also said prisoners ere sexually taunted by female interrogators.

One forced a devout Muslim to touch her breasts and then smeared fake menstrual blood on his face, he claimed.

A spokesman for the US military’s Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo Bay operations, dismissed the allegations.

“We deny that we stage interrogations for visitors,” he said.

Saar has written a book about his alleged experiences, Inside the Wire, due to be published on Monday.