US soldiers employed 'brutal' tactics to extract confessions

American soldiers had severely beaten up a captured Iraqi major general and stuffed him in a sleeping bag where he choked to death, classified documents detailing brutal tactics used to extract confessions from captured prisoners have revealed.

On November 26, 2003, a US army interrogator and a military guard stuffed Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who was being stubborn with the American captors, inside a green sleeping bag, wrapped him in an electrical cord and laid him on floor.

"It was inside the sleeping bag that the 56-year-old detainee took his last breath through broken ribs, lying on the floor beneath a US soldier in Interrogation Room 6," the Washington Post reported on Wednesday citing classified documents.

Two days before this incident, 'Scorpions', a secret Central Intelligence Agency -sponsored group of Iraqi paramilitaries, working with army interrogators, had beaten Mowhoush nearly senseless, using fists, a club and a rubber hose, the document said.

Senior officers in charge of the facility near the Syrian border believe such 'claustrophobic techniques' were approved ways to gain information from detainees, part of what military regulations refer to as a 'fear up' tactic.

The circumstances that led up to Mowhoush's death, says The Post, point a vivid example of how the pressure to produce intelligence for anti-terrorism efforts and the war in Iraq led US military interrogators to improvise and develop abusive measures, not just at Abu Ghraib but at other detention facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.