TORTURE: GUANTANAMO GUIDEBOOK 2 OF 3

CHANNEL 4 PRESENTS TORTURE: GUANTANAMO GUIDEBOOK PART 2 OF 3

"What you are about to see is both shocking and upsetting." And so it was. Channel 4's torturers were a squad of former US army guards and interrogators, and definitely not to be messed with. These men seemed to know what they were doing. They had all the moves, the taunts, the carefully targeted sadism. They knew about short shackling, about stress positions, about subjecting detainees to white noise and uncomfortably hot and cold extremes (known, euphemistically, as "environmental manipulation"), and about what is termed "scenery up, scenery down"—making detainees move cells to disorient them and stop them making friends with their adjacent cellmates. They forced volunteers to urinate in their boiler suits. And they knew well what physical effects to expect from all this.

The temperature in the cells was kept at 6°C. One volunteer, a 49 year old, who at the start of the programme had said that he approved of what was happening at Guantanamo, soon had to be withdrawn as he was suffering from hypothermia.

Could such methods ever be justified in a world post September 11, Snow asked. The programme did not answer this directly, but let the volunteers—who were visibly distressed, even though they knew it was all an experiment—give their own verdicts. Two pulled out before the end, including an Oxford student of dual American and British citizenship who had originally said that the ends could justify the Guantanamo means but who, after his "Guantanamo" ordeal (which at one stage made him vomit in his cage), felt that such methods were unacceptable. His fellow detainees were equally critical of "torture lite," including one other who had previously thought there was a case for it.