The international Red Cross saw U.S. military intelligence officers routinely mistreating prisoners under interrogation during a visit to Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in October, according to a report by the agency disclosed today.

President Bush has said the mistreatment "was the wrongdoing of a few," but the report by the International Committee of the Red Cross offers details to support the agency's contention that prisoner abuse was broad and part of a system, "not individual acts."

The confidential Red Cross report on prisoner abuse, confirmed today by the ICRC as authentic, says "ICRC delegates directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the cooperation of the persons deprived of their liberty with their interrogators."

The delegates saw how detainees were kept "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness," the report said. The report said evidence was found supporting prisoners' allegations of other forms of abuse during arrest, initial detention and interrogation.

Among the evidence were burns, bruises and other injuries consistent with the abuse prisoners alleged, it said.

The 24-page document said the abuse occurred mainly during interrogation by military intelligence.

It typically stopped once the detainees were moved to regular prison facilities, the report said.

The report said the abuses - some "tantamount to torture" - include 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 cooperation from persons who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an `intelligence value.' "

The report also said some coalition military intelligence officers estimated "between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake. They also attributed the brutality of some arrests to the lack of proper supervision of battle group units."

Pierre Kraehenbuehl, ICRC director of operations in Geneva, Switzerland, said that the report had been given to U.S. officials in February, but that it only summarized what the agency had been telling U.S. officials in detail between March 2003 and November 2003 "either in direct face-to-face conversations or in written interventions."

Kraehenbuehl said the abuse of prisoners represented more than isolated acts, and that the problems were not limited to the Abu Ghraib prison.

"We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," he said, declining to give further details.

The report described how male prisoners were forced to parade around in women's underwear.

It said the information obtained "suggested the use of ill-treatment against persons deprived of their liberty went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered a practice tolerated by" coalition forces.

Kraehenbuehl said the ICRC regretted the publication of the report and would have preferred sticking to its policy of confidential discussions with coalition authorities because the United States had been making progress toward meeting its demands.

ICRC chief spokeswoman Antonella Notari said Kellenberger spoke about prison conditions in January with Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

"He raised concerns regarding detention in Iraq, along with Guantanamo and other locations," Notari told The Associated Press in Geneva.

She declined to discuss the full report further today. "It is our report," Notari told The Associated Press. "That's all I can say."

Several of those charged in the abuse have said they were directed or encouraged by military intelligence officers heading interrogations to "soften up" detainees before questioning.

In September, an expert team sent by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller - head of the Guantanamo Bay prison facility - visited Abu Ghraib and recommended that guards help gather intelligence about detainees.

On Nov. 19, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top operational commander in Iraq, issued an order taking tactical control of Abu Ghraib away from the MPs and turning it over to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, The New Yorker magazine reported Sunday.

That policy went into effect over the objections of Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, another military prison expert, who said the change was "not doctrinally sound due to the different missions and agendas assigned to each of these respective specialties," the story says.

Miller, who in April was brought in to head Abu Ghraib in the wake of the scandal, defended his team's recommendations, saying last week that MPs' role in intelligence gathering was supposed to be only from "passive" observation, and he blamed Abu Ghraib's leadership for not following military guidelines.

On Friday, the ICRC said it had repeatedly demanded last year that U.S. authorities correct problems at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers. The Americans took action on some issues but not others, it said.

Iraqis freed from U.S. custody since the war began in March 2003 have long told of abusive treatment including lying bound in the sun for hours; being attacked by dogs; being deprived of water; and left hooded for days.

U.S. lawmakers have warned that the most repulsive photos have yet to be released and have insisted that the Army investigation should have repercussions for higher-ups, not just the military police accused of abusing detainees.

"I think command responsibility has to be looked at just as seriously as the abusers," Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said Saturday.

© The Albuquerque Tribune.