WASHINGTON, May 18: The number of detainees who tried to kill themselves inside the US prison in Cuba is much higher than what prison officials admit, says a new book on life at Guantanamo Bay. Sgt Erik Saar, who volunteered for Guantanamo in 2002, says what he saw at Guantanamo had changed his attitude towards the camp and his country.

The sergeant, a former member of the US military intelligence who worked at the prison for six months, writes in the book that official statistics showed there had been only 32 suicide attempts at the camp, but the actual figure was much higher.

“The device of labelling most attempted suicides as ‘manipulative self-injurious behaviour’ kept the numbers low.”

His book, Inside The Wire, is a damning expose of what he describes as the brutal, degrading treatment meted out to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The book comes at a time when the US military’s treatment of prisoners is already in the spotlight due to the Newsweek report on desecration of the holy Quran at Guantanamo Bay and court hearings over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

“Few issues were as weighty or generated as much agitation within the cellblocks and among camp personnel as the handling of the Quran,” writes Sgt Saar. “The detainees fervently objected to non-Muslims handling the Quran. This presented a huge quandary since the guards needed to inspect the cells regularly for security reasons … sometimes an MP (military police) inspected a Quran himself, which would stir the detainees into a near riot, complete with spitting at the guard and loud choruses of Allaho Akbar.”

Sgt Saar recalls that when one of the MPs dropped a copy of the holy Quran, ‘he detainees went nuts’. “They were throwing so much water at the guards that they decided to shut it off for the afternoon. Their chow holes were open, and they all bunched up their mattresses and pushed them through into the wet hallway.”

The sergeant argues that despite attempts to right wrongs at Guantanamo, the camp still defiles the values the US is fighting for in the ‘war on terror’. He said stormtrooper-like IRF (initial reaction force) teams were involved in numerous beatings of captives.

And of the 600 or so prisoners there, no more than a few dozen were ‘hardcore terrorists’, says Erik Saar, adding that there were many among the interrogators and translators who believed a large number of prisoners were ordinary civilians.

He notes that after the ouster of the Taliban government in 2001, Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance handed over a large number of civilians to the US military, labelling them as terrorists because they (Alliance) were paid $5,000 for each Al Qaeda suspect they caught.

“The US government portrays Guantanamo as a place where we are sending the worst of the worst, but this is not true.

“Guantanamo was the beginning of a mistake. It set a precedent in labelling people as enemy combatants, blurring the line between right and wrong.

“You can see it as the seed that may well have led to the naked human pyramids in Abu Ghraib.”

Sgt Saar says that often interrogations at Guantanamo were ‘staged’ for visiting inspectors.

“Guantanamo has become a symbol of everything wrong with America’s image. If we are trying to build a bridge to the Muslim world, what sort of face are we portraying,” asks Erik Saar.

He also observes in the book that the treatment meted out to the prisoners only increases the hatred some of them have for America and strengthens their faith in ‘extremist beliefs’.