US: New documents showing widespread US abuse of prisoners overseas did not provoke the intense backlash of the Abu Ghraib photos, but could prove more damaging at confirmation hearings for President George W. Bush's attorney general nominee, human rights activists say.
In recent days, the American Civil Liberties Union has released several thousand pages of documents in which FBI agents complained about prisoner abuse starting in 2002 and continuing into this year.
The documents indicate abuse by US personnel occurred at various detention centres in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba and was not confined to Abu Ghraib prison, where reports and disturbing photos of such abuse first surfaced.
Bush nominee Mr Alberto Gonzalez will be in the spotlight because of memos he wrote as White House legal counsel, in which he laid down a new definition of torture that did not include some forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
He called some Geneva Conventions provisions "quaint" and said its protections did not apply to detainees in the "war on terror". Sen John Corzine, a New Jersey Democrat who visited the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba this week, told reporters Mr Gonzalez should face searching questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee at hearings early next year.
"There are serious questions about accountability, about how we are managing these prisoners. There seems to be a systematic element of abuse," he said.
New York human rights lawyer Mr Scott Horton said: "Gonzalez is the one who opened this Pandora's Box and there will be tough questions from Republicans as well as Democrats."
In fact, said Horton, the latest documents were potentially much more serious than Abu Ghraib because they strongly suggested that top administration officials not only knew about the abuse, but approved it.
"These memos completely demolish the administration's argument that abuses were carried out by a few low-level 'rotten apples'," he said. "The memos suggest they were deliberate policy."
In some of the internal memos, FBI agents referred to what they described as a new executive order on prisoner treatment from Bush, apparently allowing interrogation tactics that were forbidden for FBI agents. That memo has not been made public, and administration officials have declined any comment on it.
One agent reported in August that he had seen detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba chained in a foetal position and left on the floor for long periods without food or water."
Sometimes, the room was chilled to the point that detainees shook from the cold. At other times, the air-conditioning was turned off and the room became unbearably hot.
When the first reports of abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison surfaced earlier this year with the publication of graphic photographs taken by soldiers, Bush said he was outraged, both houses of Congress convened hearings and the issue dominated the headlines.
Meanwhile, President Bush said yesterday he would renominate a group of controversial judicial nominees who were blocked by Senate Democrats, signalling the start of a second-term battle over the make-up of the nation's top courts.
Emboldened by his re-election victory and gains by Republicans in the Senate, Bush plans to renominate a total of 20 nominees to the nation's court of appeals and district courts, the White House said. During the presidential campaign, Bush sought to brand Senate Democrats, who blocked 10 of his judicial nominees, as obstructionists. Democrats accused Bush of trying to fill the courts with "right-wing extremists."