Attached a leash to a detainee, an infamous Abu Ghraib practices, was used almost a year before the US invasion of Iraq at Guantanamo.

CAIRO, July 14, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – A recent three-month probe by US military investigators showed that the torture and abuse tactics used against Iraqis in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison were first used nearly a year earlier against a "non-cooperative" detainee at Guantanamo, the Washington Post reported on Thursday, July 14.

Mohamed Qahtani – a Saudi detainee alleged to be the "20th hijacker" in the 9/11 attacks, was forced to wear women's underwear on his head and confronted him with snarling military working dogs, investigators told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

According to the investigative report, the detainee was once attached to a leash and made to walk around the room and "perform a series of dog tricks."

It also documented the use of "gender coercion," in which women straddle a detainee or get too close to them, violating prohibitions for devout Muslim men on contact with foreign women, said the daily.

The interrogators also told him Qahtani he was a homosexual and threatened to tell that to other detainees.

They forced him to dance with a male interrogator and told him his mother and sister were whores.

The abusive interrogation techniques were approved by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as part of a special interrogation plan aimed at breaking down the silent detainee.

FBI counterterrorism official Thomas Harrington confirmed in letter in July 2004, to Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, the Army's provost marshal, that FBI agents saw interrogators use abusive tactics on prisoners at Guantanamo.

The New York Times revealed October 17, 2004 that uncooperative detainees in Guantanamo were regularly tortured by US guards and subject to coercive treatment.

"There are some striking similarities between the actions at Guantanamo and what occurred at Abu Ghraib," the Post quoted Capt. Jonathan Crisp, England's military defense attorney, as saying.

"I feel that warrants further investigation."

The American mass-circulation daily described the new report as "the strongest indication yet that the abusive practices seen in photographs at Abu Ghraib were not the invention of a small group of thrill-seeking military police officers."

The investigation also supports the idea that soldiers believed that placing hoods on detainees, forcing them to appear nude in front of women and sexually humiliating them were approved interrogation techniques for use on detainees, added the Post.

The abuse of Iraqi prisoners exploded onto the world stage on April 29 after the CBS news network published several graphic photos  of Iraqi detainees tortured and sexually abused by American soldiers at the Baghdad-based prison.

Several photographs taken in late 2003 at the prison outside Baghdad show detainees wearing women's underwear on their heads, detainees shackled to their cell doors or beds in awkward positions, and naked detainees standing before female soldiers.

Detainees at Abu Ghraib were also posed in mock homosexual positions and photographed.

The has been deepening, exposing more elements and factors about interrogation techniques approved by Rumsfeld, who has been under domestic and international pressure to step down.

The report recommended reprimanding Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and later helped set up US operations at Abu Ghraib.

He traveled to Iraq in September 2003 to assist in Abu Ghraib's startup, and he later sent in "Tiger Teams" of Guantanamo interrogators and analysts as advisers and trainers.

Within weeks of his departure, military working dogs were being used in interrogations, and naked detainees were humiliated and abused by military police soldiers working the night shift.

Miller would have been the highest-ranking officer to face discipline for detainee abuses so far, but Gen. Bantz Craddock, head of the US Southern Command, declined to follow the recommendation.

"Reasonable people always suspected these techniques weren't invented in the backwoods of West Virginia," said Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch.

"It's never been more clear than in this investigation."