The international Red Cross saw US military intelligence officers routinely mistreating prisoners under interrogation during a visit to Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison last October, according to a report by the agency disclosed in Geneva.
US President George W. Bush said the mistreatment "was the wrongdoing of a few," but the report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) backs up with detail the neutral agency's contention that US prisoner abuse was broad and part of a system and "not individual acts".
"ICRC delegates directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the co-operation of the persons deprived of their liberty with their interrogators," said the confidential report.
The delegates saw how detainees were kept "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness," the report said.
It said it found evidence supporting prisoners' allegations of other forms of abuse during arrest, initial detention and interrogation. Among the evidence were burns, bruises and other injuries consistent with the abuse prisoners alleged, it said.
The 24-page document, confirmed by the ICRC as authentic after it was published by the Wall Street Journaltoday, said the abuses were primarily during the interrogation stage by military intelligence. Once the detainees were moved to regular prison facilities the abuses typically stopped, it said.
The report cites abuses - some "tantamount to torture" - including brutality, hooding, humiliation and threats of "imminent execution".
"These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information and other forms of co-operation from person who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offences or deemed to have an 'intelligence
value'."
Mr Pierre Kraehenbuehl, ICRC director of operations, said last Friday the report had been given to US officials last February, but that it only summarised what the agency had been telling US officials in detail between March and November 2003 "either in direct face-to-face conversations or in written
interventions".
Mr Kraehenbuehl said: "We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system" but declined to give further details.
Mr Kraehenbuehl said the ICRC regretted the publication and said it would have preferred sticking to its policy of confidential discussions with coalition authorities because the United States had been making progress toward meeting its demands.
PA