WASHINGTON - A U.S. officer warned Pentagon officials that an American detainee was being driven nearly insane by months of isolation and sensory deprivation in a U.S. brig, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press.

While the treatment of prisoners at detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq have long been the subject of rights complaints, the documents shed light on how two American citizens and a legal U.S. resident were treated in military jails inside the United States.

The Bush administration ordered the men to be held as "enemy combatants" for years of interrogations without charges, which would not have been allowed in civilian jails.

The men were interrogated by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, repeatedly denied access to attorneys and mail from home and contact with anyone other than guards and their interrogators.

"I will continue to do what I can to help this individual maintain his sanity, but in my opinion we're working with borrowed time," an unidentified Navy official wrote of Yaser Esam Hamdi in 2002.

Yale Law School's Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic received the documents through a Freedom of Information Act. The Lowenstein group and the American Civil Liberties Union said the papers were evidence that the Bush administration violated the 5th Amendment's protections against cruel treatment. The U.S. military was ordered to treat the American prisoners the same way prisoners at Guantanamo were treated, according to the documents.

However, the Guantanamo jail was created by the administration specifically to avoid allowing detainees any constitutional rights. Administration lawyers contended the Constitution did not apply outside the country.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON - A U.S. officer warned Pentagon officials that an American detainee was being driven nearly insane by months of isolation and sensory deprivation in a U.S. brig, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press. While the treatment of prisoners at detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq have long been the subject of rights complaints, the documents shed light on how two American citizens and a legal U.S. resident were treated in military jails inside the United States. The Bush administration ordered the men to be held as "enemy combatants" for years of interrogations without charges, which would not have been allowed in civilian jails. The men were interrogated by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, repeatedly denied access to attorneys and mail from home and contact with anyone other than guards and their interrogators. "I will continue to do what I can to help this individual maintain his sanity, but in my opinion we're working with borrowed time," an unidentified Navy official wrote of Yaser Esam Hamdi in 2002. Yale Law School's Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic received the documents through a Freedom of Information Act. The Lowenstein group and the American Civil Liberties Union said the papers were evidence that the Bush administration violated the 5th Amendment's protections against cruel treatment. The U.S. military was ordered to treat the American prisoners the same way prisoners at Guantanamo were treated, according to the documents. However, the Guantanamo jail was created by the administration specifically to avoid allowing detainees any constitutional rights. Administration lawyers contended the Constitution did not apply outside the country. associated press