THEY were written for kids - but distorted versions of bouncy Sesame Street songs have been used to torture Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

The claim was made in an Al Jazeera documentary and followed previous allegations in 2008 that heavier tunes such as Metallica's Enter Sandman were played incessantly to prisoners at the Cuba naval base.

According to the report, innocent children's songs were abused for inhumane purposes, as music from the popular US children's program was blasted repeatedly into prisoners' ears.

Christopher Cerf, the man behind the Sesame Street theme and a further 200 songs used in the show over the years, said he was shocked to discover his music was being used as torture.

Speaking in the documentary he said: "My first reaction was this can't possibly be true, this is just too crazy.

"I didn't really like the idea that I was helping to break down prisoners, but it was much worse when I heard later that they were actually using the music in Guantanamo to do deep interrogations to inflict long-term pain on prisoners so that they would talk."

It's not the first time Sesame Street music has reportedly been used to break the will of prisoners. In 2003 the US military allegedly used the soundtracks to soften up Iraqi POWs.

Cerf, an award-wining composer who has worked for the famous children's television show for four decades, said: "This is fascinating to me because of the horror of music being perverted to serve evil purposes, but I'm also interested in how that's done and what is it about music that would make it work for that purpose.

"The idea that we would be doing torture ourselves to save our own freedom is very ironic."

A document from the CIA medical services department titled "Guidelines for Interrogation Methods", seen in the documentary, stated that the permitted levels and durations for which music can be played to prisoners is the equivalent to being as loud as a jackhammer for two hours.

In the documentary, Thomas Keenan from The Human Rights Project at Bard College in New York claimed prisoners were sometimes left for hours or even days listening to music.

Originally published as It's a Sesame Street of pain