Posted on Fri, Jun. 27, 2008

Detainees at the Guantánamo Bay naval base were turned into ''nomads'' in order to keep them in a state of agitation and to punish those who broke rules, a Sudanese journalist recently released from the U.S.-run prison said Friday.

Sami al Hajj, 38, said moving detainees between different camps and from cell to cell was part of an official policy to destabilize them.

''They were made into nomads,'' the Al-Jazeera journalist said, adding that detainees were moved around for three reasons.

''There was a policy of the camp administration to stop the detainees from feeling they were in a stable state, and therefore they kept the detainees in movement all the time, moving them from one camp to the other every week, every two weeks,'' Hajj told The Associated Press.

By moving detainees around, variously isolating them and then putting them back within talking distance of other inmates, authorities also attempted to gather information from conversations between detainees, he said.

''The aim of this movement was to learn things about the detainees by listening to different prisoners speak to each other,'' Hajj said.

''In certain camps there was the possibility to speak to each other. It wasn't allowed, but it was possible. It was very much a police tactic to listen to us,'' he said. ``They knew that when one is deprived of contact and then one has the possibility to speak to others, one might say things.''

Hajj claimed that a second reason for moving detainees was to prepare them for interrogation.

Inmates would be rotated between cells every two hours for up to a month, he said, depriving them of sleep ahead of interrogations. Hajj said he himself was subjected to this so-called ''Frequent Flyer'' program by guards acting on orders from the interrogators.

Finally, detainees were moved to separate cells when they breached prison rules.

Hajj described a cellblock named Romeo where inmates were placed in a cold room and stripped of all clothes except a pair of shorts.

Guards would frequently check on the detainees, making them move their limbs ''to know you are alive,'' Hajj said. ``They have the right to check you all the time. So they use this to disturb you, because they need all the people to follow the rules.''

U.S. officials in Geneva could not immediately respond to the claims. Requests for comment sent to the U.S. Defense Department in Washington received no reply.

On Tuesday, the current commander of the prison, Navy Rear Adm. David Thomas, said ''there is no unnecessary movement in and out of cells by detainees,'' but would not comment on allegations that detainees were subjected to sleep deprivation before he took command on May 27.

Hajj now works as a producer for Qatar-based Al-Jazeera. He was released from Guantánamo in May after more than six years in U.S. detention.

The military alleged he was a courier for a militant Muslim organization in the 1990s, a claim his lawyers has denied. Hajj was never prosecuted, and it is unclear how the allegation relates to his arrest on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan in December 2001.

The only journalist from a major international news organization held at Guantánamo, he has said his arrest was because of U.S. hostility toward Al-Jazeera and because the media was reporting on U.S. rights violations in Afghanistan.

Hajj, who has used a walking stick since his detention, was in Geneva this week to meet with officials at the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The U.S. began taking prisoners to Guantánamo in January 2002 and now holds about 270 men suspected of terrorism or links to al Qaeda or the Taliban. The detainees include Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators who have been charged with direct involvement in the attacks.