WASHINGTON – Soldiers used an unusual tactic to torment a top al Qaeda prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay – pop hits by sex siren Christina Aguilera.

In addition to blaring her tunes, troops poured water on al Qaeda operative Mohammad al-Qahtani – among a handful of terrorists suspected of being the 20th 9/11 hijacker – during midnight interrogation sessions, Time magazine reported yesterday.

Troops trying to get Qahtani to spill the beans on upcoming terror plots forced him to urinate in his pants and wear pictures of half-naked women strung around his neck.

They also delivered a “sissy slap” with an inflated latex glove, forced Qahtani to “bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog,” and rejected a request that he be allowed to pray.

At one point, Qahtani asked permission to kill himself. The request was denied.

Soldiers had all the motivation they needed to torment the al Qaeda punk – they decorated the walls of his holding room with pictures of 9/11 victims, the magazine reports, citing an interrogation log.

U.S. grilling of Qahtani resulted in “valuable information helping the U.S. to understand the recruitment of terrorist operatives, logistics and other planning aspects of the 9/11 terrorist attack,” the Pentagon said.

It described the document cited in Time as a “compromised classified interrogation log.”

The log spanned 50 days in the winter of 2002 and 2003, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved more coercive interrogation techniques.

The revelations of Qahtani’s treatment at the hands of U.S. personnel in Guantanamo comes in the wake of Amnesty International’s recent declaration that the facility operates like a Soviet-era gulag.

But Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News in an interview set to air today that there is “no plan to close” Guantanamo, citing President Bush as saying options were under review “on a continuous basis.”

“The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantanamo are bad people,” he said.

But Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), the head of the House Armed Services Committee, said some inside the White House want to see the military prison at Guantanamo closed for p.r. purposes.