US: Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantanamo Bay reached the highest levels of George Bush's administration as early as autumn 2002, but Mr Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation to be published today writes Oliver Burkeman in Washington.
The investigation, by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, quotes a former marine at the camp recalling sessions in which guards would "f..k with [detainees] as much as we could" by inflicting pain on them.
The Bush administration repeatedly assured critics that inmates were granted recreation periods, but one Pentagon adviser told Hersh how, for some prisoners, these consisted of being left in straitjackets in intense sunlight.
Hersh provides details of how President Bush approved the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate "high-value" suspects - considered by many to be in defiance of international law - an officially "unacknowledged" programme that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Hersh, who broke the story of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war, makes his revelations in a new book, Chain of Command, which leaves senior figures in the Bush administration far more seriously implicated in the torture scandal than had been previously apparent.
A CIA analyst visited Guantanamo in summer 2002 and returned "convinced that we were committing war crimes" and that "more than half the people there didn't belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces," a CIA source told Hersh. The analyst submitted a report to Gen John Gordon, an aide to Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush's national security adviser.
Gen Gordon was troubled, and, one former administration official told Hersh "that if the actions at Guantanamo ever became public, it'd be damaging to the president".
Ms Rice saw the document by autumn of the same year, and called a high-level meeting at which she asked Mr Rumsfeld to deal with the problem.
But after he vowed to act, "the Pentagon went into a full-court stall", a former White House official is quoted as saying. "Why didn't Condi do more? She made the same mistake I made. She got the secretary of defence to say he's going to take care of it."
The investigation further suggests that CIA and FBI staff had already witnessed incidents at Guantanamo just as extreme as those that would subsequently be alleged by freed inmates.
A senior intelligence official told Hersh: "I was told [by FBI agents] that the military guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them and making them stand until they got hypothermia." Hersh reports that a secret document signed by Mr Bush in February 2002 stated: "I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world."
In a statement, the Pentagon said Hersh's investigation "apparently contains many of the numerous unsubstantiated allegations and inaccuracies which he has made in the past based upon unnamed sources ..."
Mr Rumsfeld told reporters on Friday he had approved the use of harsh interrogation measures, but that they had only been meant for Guantanamo. He said the measures ought to be contrasted with those of terrorists. "Does it rank up there with chopping someone's head off on television?" he asked. "It doesn't."