LATEST: The WikiLeaks website has begun publishing what it said were more than 100 US Defence Department files detailing military detention policies in camps in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay in the years after the September 11 attacks on US targets.

In a statement, WikiLeaks criticised regulations it said had led to abuse and impunity and urged human rights activists to use the documents, to be released over the next month, to research what it called "policies of unaccountability".

The statement quoted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as saying: "The 'Detainee Policies' show the anatomy of the beast that is post-9/11 detention, the carving out of a dark space where law and rights do not apply, where persons can be detained without a trace at the convenience of the US Department of Defence."

"It shows the excesses of the early days of war against an unknown 'enemy' and how these policies matured and evolved," it said, and led to "the permanent state of exception that the United States now finds itself in, a decade later."

A spokeswoman for the US Embassy in London said it had no immediate comment.

In January, UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said the United States was still flouting international law at Guantanamo Bay by arbitrarily and indefinitely detaining individuals.

Almost 3000 people were killed in 2001 when militants from Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

Then President George W Bush set up a detention camp at a US naval base at Guantanamo in Cuba after US-led forces invaded Afghanistan to expel al Qaeda following the September 11 raids. Of the 779 men held there, 167 remained as of mid-September 2012.

INTERROGATION

WikiLeaks said a number of documents it was releasing related to interrogation of detainees, and these showed direct physical violence was prohibited.

But it added the documents showed "a formal policy of terrorising detainees during interrogations, combined with a policy of destroying interrogation recordings, has led to abuse and impunity".

A number of what can only be described as "policies of unaccountability" would also be released, it said.

One such document was a 2005 document "Policy on Assigning Detainee Internment Serial Numbers", it said.

"This document is concerned with discreetly 'disappearing' detainees into the custody of other US government agencies while keeping their names out of US military central records - by systematically holding off from assigning a prisoner record number," the WikiLeaks statement said.

WikiLeaks did not elaborate. But human rights activists say that after the September 11 attacks, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used "black sites" in friendly countries to interrogate and sometimes torture suspected militants beyond the reach of normal legal protections.

"LOVE" AND "FEAR"

While Bush acknowledged the existence of a CIA programme for detaining and questioning militants outside of the United States in speech in September 2006, the government has never publicly confirmed the location of the sites.

Some of the policies applied to other countries' personnel, Wikileaks said, citing what it said was a 13-page interrogation policy document from 2005 for US-led multinational forces in Iraq.

It said the document detailed techniques such as the "Emotional Love Approach: Playing on the love a detained person has for family, homeland or comrades". In contrast, in the "Fear Up (Harsh)" approach, it said "the interrogator behaves in an overpowering manner with a loud and threatening voice in order to convince the source he does indeed have something to fear; that he has no option but to co-operate".

The documents released overnight (NZ time) date from 2001 to 2004.

Assange, whose website previously angered the United States by releasing thousands of US diplomatic cables, has been holed up inside Ecuador's embassy in central London since June to avoid extradition to Sweden to face rape and sexual assault allegations. He denies wrongdoing.

- Reuters