Iraq abuses widespread: Red Cross

The US and British governments struggled yesterday to contain the fallout from allegations of military abuse in Iraq in the face of a Red Cross report that such behaviour was routine, widespread and tantamount to torture. At the Pentagon, Mr Bush sought to shore up his embattled Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with lavish public praise, and continued to claim the abuses were the work of "a small number" at one prison, Abu Ghraib, outside Baghdad.

But the International Committee of the Red Cross, in a confidential report produced after extensive prison visits throughout Iraq last year, said the abuses were systemic and included 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 persons who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offences or deemed to have an 'intelligence value'," the report said.

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"Since June 2003, over a hundred 'high-value detainees' have been held for nearly 23 hours a day in strict solitary confinement in small concrete cells devoid of daylight," says the report. "Their continued internment several months after their arrest in strict solitary confinement constituted a serious violation of the third and fourth Geneva Conventions."

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