Former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior US officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay, according to portions of a report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The report's executive summary, made public by the committee's Democratic chairman Senator
Carl Levin of Michigan and its top Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, said Mr Rumsfeld contributed to the abuse by authorising aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay on December 2nd, 2002.
He rescinded the authorisation six weeks later, but the report said word of his approval continued to spread within US military circles and encouraged the use of harsh techniques as far away as Iraq and Afghanistan.
The report concluded that Mr Rumsfeld's actions were "a direct cause of detainee abuse" at Guantanamo and "influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques . . . in Afghanistan and Iraq."
"The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own," the executive summary said.
"Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at [Guantanamo]."
The detainee scandal at Abu Ghraib and later revelations of aggressive US interrogations such as "waterboarding" led to an international outcry and charges that the United States allowed prisoners to be tortured, a claim denied by the Bush administration.
The White House has since recanted the policies under pressure from Congress, while President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to close the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Reuters