US/IRAQ: Iraqi detainees were subjected to "serious violations", with abuse so widespread it may have been condoned by US-led coalition forces, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said yesterday.
Breaking with its usual vow of silence, the Geneva-based humanitarian organisation said visits to coalition detention centres in Iraq, carried out between March and November 2003, had shown infringements of international treaties on the treatment of prisoners of war.
In some cases, the ill-treatment was "tantamount to torture," particularly when interrogators were seeking information or confessions, the ICRC said in a report, parts of which were published in the Wall Street Journal.
Mr Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of ICRC operations, said the report referred mainly to the actions of US forces at Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere, although the ICRC had also expressed concerns over the past year to British commanders. He gave no further details.
"Our findings do not allow us to conclude that what we were dealing with at Abu Ghraib were isolated acts of individual members of coalition forces. What we have described is a pattern and a broad system," he said.
The excerpts published by the Wall Street Journal spoke of the use of ill-treatment that "went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered a practice tolerated" by coalition forces.
That differs sharply from the view of senior officials in the Bush administration that senior military figures had not condoned abuse, the newspaper said.
In the report, the ICRC said prisoners at Abu Ghraib were held naked in empty cells and beaten by soldiers.
Three former military policemen at the prison said on Thursday that abuse was commonplace.
The humanitarian group also said coalition forces fired on unarmed prisoners from watchtowers and killed some of them, as well as committing "serious violations" of the Geneva Conventions governing treatment of war prisoners.
The US government should let human rights groups monitor detention facilities in Iraq and elsewhere in an effort to stop the type of abuse suffered by Iraqi prisoners, Human Rights Watch said on yesterday.
In an open letter to the US Secretary of Defence, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, the New York-based group called on the Bush administration to reveal the locations of such facilities and permit independent investigations of all places where security or terrorist suspects are being held.
"Torture flourishes in the dark," its executive director, Mr Kenneth Roth, said in response to pictures of US troops torturing Iraqis.
"If the Bush administration really wants to put a stop to torture in US detention facilities, it has to open them up to outside scrutiny," Mr Roth added.
Human Rights Watch said it had repeatedly sought to visit US military detention facilities, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without success.
The group also called on Mr Rumsfeld to ban all "stress and duress" interrogation techniques such as extended sleep and sensory deprivation in all US detention facilities anywhere in the world.