WASHINGTON, Feb 8: A Washington-based lawyer said on Monday that several Kuwaitis being held at the US Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba for suspicion of terrorist activities were tortured into making false confessions.

The Kuwaitis said they were hit with chains, given electric shocks and sodomized by US troops shortly after they were captured in Afghanistan in 2001, said attorney Thomas Wilmer, who represents 11 Kuwaitis imprisoned at the US Navy facility in Cuba.

"Guantanamo is a stain on the honour of our nation," Mr Wilmer said.

"The American soldiers kept saying, 'Are you Taliban or are you Al Qaeda?' They kept hitting me, so eventually I said I was a member of the Taliban," Mr Wilmer quoted one of his clients as saying.

According to the Kuwaitis, the torture continued after they were sent to Guantanamo in 2001, Mr Wilmer said.

Now, "the physical abuse - at least for the Kuwaitis - has stopped, but there has been a switch to mental torture," he said.

Mr Wilmer, who visited Guantanamo in mid-January, described their conditions as worse than those given to notorious serial killers in the United States.

The mostly young Kuwaitis, who have not been charged, are confined to cramped, permanently lit cells with only 45 minutes of exercise permitted each week.

The men also complained of being denied any reading material but the holy Quran. They are "all very thin, almost emaciated", and some were depressed, Mr Wilmer told a press conference here.

"Even the chief interrogator says they have no intelligence value, except for a few," Mr Wilmer said. The US government has repeatedly denied using torture at Guantanamo.

Recently, two British citizens out of four released from Guantanamo in January also accused the US of abuse and humiliation.

The New Yorker magazine reported on Monday that the CIA has increasingly sent captured terrorism suspects to other countries for torture under a program it calls 'rendition'.-AFP