VIOLENT abuse of prisoners by US forces in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay was widespread as recently as four months ago, according to documents released yesterday.

Secret FBI memorandums, which the Bush Administration was forced to release by a court order won by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), reveal the disgust of FBI officials who witnessed the abuse.

They also show that violence against prisoners, including the use of snarling dogs and forcing detainees to defecate on themselves, was still an interrogation tactic months after the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal caused outrage in April.

The White House denied an allegation in one memo that President Bush had signed a “new executive order” authorising “sleep management”, stress positions, use of dogs, sensory deprivation and “yelling at subjects and prisoners with hoods on their heads”, methods forbidden for FBI agents.

A White House official said: “What the FBI agent wrote is wrong. There is no executive order on interrogation techniques.”

One of the most damning memos, dated June 24 and addressed to Robert Mueller, the FBI director, and other senior bureau officials, gave the account of someone “who observed serious physical abuses of civilian detainees” in Iraq.

It “described that such abuses included strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees’ ear openings and unauthorised interrogations ”.

The documents — mostly by FBI agents present at interrogations in Iraq and the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and sent to their superiors — indicate that such tactics must have been known to government officials in Washington.

They make the official government line — that abuses were the action of a few low-ranking mavericks — increasingly hard to sustain.

“Top government officials can no longer hide from public scrutiny by pointing the finger at a few low-ranking soldiers,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU.

In one memo, FBI agents allege that military interrogators impersonated FBI officials, apparently to avoid possible blame in subsequent inquiries.

One FBI agent wrote that the impersonation technique was approved by “DepSecDef”, a reference to Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary. That allegation was denied by a Pentagon spokesman.

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