Washington ? A CIA handbook on coercive interrogation methods, produced 40 years ago during the Vietnam War, shows that techniques such as those used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a long history with U.S. intelligence and were based on research.

Declassified 10 years ago, the training manual carries in its title the code word used for the CIA in Vietnam, “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation — July 1963.” Used to train new interrogators, the handbook presents “basic information about coercive techniques available for use in the interrogation situation.”

The specific coercive methods it describes echo today’s news stories about Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The KUBARK manual suggests that, for “resistant” prisoners, the “circumstances of detention are arranged to enhance within the subject his feelings of being cut off from the known and the reassuring and of being plunged into the strange.”

The 1963 handbook describes the benefits and disadvantages of techniques similar to those authorized for use at Abu Ghraib, such as forcing detainees to stand or sit in “stress positions,” cutting off sources of light, disrupting their sleep and manipulating their diet.

Like the lists of interrogation methods approved for Iraq and Guantanamo, the KUBARK manual offers a menu of options for confusing and weakening detainees. A neat or proud individual was to be given an outfit one or two sizes too large without a belt “so that he must hold his pants up,” the manual said. Forced changes in diet and sleep patterns should be done “so that the subject becomes disorientated (and) is very likely to create feelings of fear and helplessness.”

Tactics involving deprivation of accustomed sights, sounds, taste, smells and tactile sensations were presented as primary methods for producing stress, and mirror the techniques seen at Abu Ghraib. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. military officer in Iraq, approved in September a list of methods that included “sensory deprivation,” “minimum bread and water,” “light control,” enforced silence and yelling at prisoners. Those methods have since been barred in Iraq.

An experiment referred to in the handbook was done in the 1950s and involved conditions designed to produce stress before an interrogation — similar to those applied to John Walker Lindh after his capture in Afghanistan. Lindh was tied to a stretcher naked and later held for long periods in a large metal container.

Reports from Iraq and Afghanistan indicate that detainees have been told to stand at attention for long periods or sit in “stress positions.” In one of the photographs from Abu Ghraib, a hooded detainee is shown being forced to stand on a box with wires attached to his body. He was told he would get an electric shock if he moved. Seven military police soldiers have been charged in connection with the abuse shown in that and other photographs.