Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said today that he did not believe that the United States wanted to be burdened with a permanent Soviet-style Gulag at Guantanamo Bay.

But Mr Straw, who is in Iraq trying to push forward negotiations on the creation of a broad-based national goverment, said that it was a decision for Washington whether and when the controversial detention camps should be closed.

A panel of UN human rights experts called last week for the camps, at a US naval base on Cuba, to be closed as soon as possible. The experts said that almost 500 terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay were being denied justice and subjected to inhumane treatment that sometimes amounted to torture.

Their call was backed by Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland Secretary, while Tony Blair described the detention centre as an "anomaly". Reflecting a Cabinet split, John Reid, the Defence Secretary, said the future of the camp was a matter for the Americans to decide.

Asked about the issue, Mr Straw told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I am absolutely clear that the US has no intention of maintaining a Gulag in Guantanamo Bay. They want to see the situation resolved and they would like it other than it is. However, that is the situation that they have.

"A large number of people have already been released or taken to trial. The problem is what to do with those that are left, and that is a matter which the US administration are going to have to take their own decisions on, and frankly I’m not going to second-guess the decisions they make.

"I am clear that the position that the Prime Minister, John Reid and I have taken in respect of Guantanamo Bay and other issues is the appropriate one.

"Of course, I understand the concern that people in Britain, Europe and the US have about Guantanamo Bay. It’s also important to recognise that there is another side to this, which is called September 11 and which is not an invention of the CIA. It was a decision by al-Qaeda, with a complicit failing state in Afghanistan, to go in for the worst terrorist outrages the world has ever seen.

"That would have continued unless there had been the military action which was taken against the Taliban with the consequences that some hundreds of very bad terrorists were then picked up. They had to be detained in circumstances which the previous system of international law had never anticipated. That’s the problem."

Gulag - an acronym for Main Camp Administration - was the name given to the system of slave labour camps built up under the rule of Josef Stalin and used to crush political dissent in the Soviet Union. At the height of the Great Terror, in the late 1930s, more than one million Russians were held in a network of camps.

Mr Straw's visit to Baghdad, where he arrived yesterday, is the first to Iraq by a senior UK minister since the release of a video showing British troops assaulting young protesters at al-Amarah, in the south of the country. Apart from trying to limit the damage from that scandal, the Foreign Secretary is meeting Iraq’s President and Prime Minister to urge the swift creation of a government following recent parliamentary elections.

He insisted today that the alleged abuse involved only a "tiny minority" of the UK troops in Iraq, the vast majority of whom were doing a good job. He also played down the significance of the decision by two provincial councils to cease co-operation with British forces in response to the video, which was passed to the News of the World.

"Overall, there is a high regard for the way in which the British forces have operated in the south, and quite right too," Mr Straw said. "The senior politicians I have been talking to in Baghdad understand fully the very good record that the British Army as a whole has got."

Mr Straw said that reports from military commanders suggested that the situation on the ground in southern Iraq was not reflected by the boycotts imposed by two provincial councils.

"We have had similar positions taken by councils in the south before," he said. "I think that’s significant because the previous protests have been about what has been thought to be a too heavy-handed approach by the British military in picking up criminals and bad elements within the police.

"On behalf of the Iraqi central government, the British forces down in the south are seeking, bluntly, to clean up some politics and elements of the police service in the south and that’s not popular with all politicians. There’s a lot of politics and a lot of smoke and mirrors as well. Our military people tell me that the situation on the ground is not as it appears from these boycotts."

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