Two of the Britons released from detention at Guantanamo Bay have written an open letter to President Bush detailing abuse which they allege were inflicted upon them at the American camp for suspected terrorists in Cuba.

Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal, from Tipton in the West Midlands, detailed a string of abuses which they claim were inflicted upon them by United States interrogators. Their detailed allegations bear strong similarities to the allegations now being levelled at American personnel in Iraq.

"From the moment of our arrival in Guantanamo Bay (and indeed from long before) we were deliberately humiliated and degraded by the use of methods that we now read US officials denying," the two wrote in the letter to Mr Bush and members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Rasul and Iqbal wrote that during their detention, they were "short-shackled," that is, forced to squat with their hands chained between their legs and fastened to the floor for hours while they were questioned.

Other interrogation techniques included the use of dogs to frighten prisoners, strobe lights, loud music and freezing air to add to their discomfort, they said.

Sometimes detainees were left naked in the interrogation room and "women (were) brought into the room who would inappropriately provoke and indeed molest them," the two wrote.

"It was completely clear to all the detainees that this was happening to particularly vulnerable prisoners, especially those who had come from the strictest of Islamic backgrounds."

The two men described beatings by guards known as the ERF - Extreme Reaction Force - and a particular kind of beating and kicking known as "ERFing."

Rasul and Iqbal said they were driven to falsely confess they were two figures in an August 2000 videotape that also showed Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta, a suicide pilot in the 9/11 attacks. The pair, who were released on March 8, said they had documentation showing they were in England at the time.

The men’s lawyer, Barbara Olshansky, of the American Centre for Constitutional Rights, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "Really what they are trying to do is to make sure that it is clear to the world that what happened to them didn’t happen in a vacuum and this is very much part of the policy of the American military in handling all these various situations around the world. "They were very clear that they were shackled for hours on end, and made to stand in stressed positions when being questioned by the military interrogators.

"They were subjected to threatening dogs, freezing cold temperatures, being made to stand naked, the same type of humiliation and stress techniques that were used in Iraq.

"I think that they are quite clear that this was the policy in place at Guantanamo Bay. They have made clear from the outset that, right from the moment of their arrival, they were subjected to these types of interrogation and intimidation methods. It appeared to them that this was the routine and the method of extracting information from people there."

The lawyer said her organisation hoped to extract concrete evidence from the American authorities about techniques used at Guantanamo Bay.

"As an initial first step we would be filing habeas petitions. Ultimately we would hope to find out much more about what happened there. Mr Iqbal and Mr Rasul made clear that they were videotaped and photographed for the duration of their detention.

"Of course we will seek everything that relates to their detention and the detention of others with the idea towards revealing for the public what happened there and perhaps taking action based on the information that we find."

There is a direct link between Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which is at the centre of the current abuse and torture scandal.

Major-General Geoffrey Miller, who now heads US-run detention centres in Iraq, was credited with increasing the flow of intelligence received from inmates in Cuba.

He was sent to Iraq in the autumn of last year and made two changes that had a significant impact on the later abuses. He gave Military Intelligence officers greater authority in the prison to the extent that the commanding officer, Janis Karpinski, a reservist Brigadier-General, said that she no longer had control.