The controversy over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners deepened last night when photographs were released apparently showing the torture of a PoW by a British soldier.

The Ministry of Defence launched an immediate investigation into the circumstances surrounding the photographs, in which a prisoner appears to be battered with rifle butts, threatened with execution and urinated on by his captors.

The MoD investigation came as it was announced that the US military had launched an overarching investigation into interrogation procedures and the role of private contractors in military prisons across Iraq after revelations of torture and sexual abuse at an army-run jail near Baghdad.

With the scandal gathering momentum as photographs of the abuse were broadcast across the Arab world, President George Bush and Tony Blair declared themselves appalled by the conduct of US guards at Abu Ghraib prison.

And last night Mr Blair condemned the treatment of the prisoner by a British soldier in the latest photographs as "shameful".

The army's most senior officer, chief of general staff General Sir Michael Jackson, said at a hastily arranged press conference: "I am aware of the allegations which have been made today of the abuse of prisoners by British soldiers in Iraq.

"If proven, not only is such appalling conduct clearly unlawful, it also contravenes the British army's high standards."

The photographs were given to the Mirror newspaper by serving soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, who told the paper that such acts of brutality against prisoners in Iraq were widespread.

The soldiers said the man, thought to be an alleged thief, was thrown off the back of a moving wagon after his eight-hour ordeal, and it is not known whether he lived or died.

A HOODED Iraqi captive is beaten by British soldiers before being thrown from a moving truck and left to die.

The prisoner, aged 18-20, begged for mercy as he was battered with rifle butts and batons in the head and groin, was kicked, stamped and urinated on, and had a gun barrel forced into his mouth.

After an EIGHT-HOUR ordeal, he was left barely conscious and close to death. Bleeding and vomiting and with a broken jaw and missing teeth, he was driven from a Basra camp and hurled off the truck. No one knows if he lived or died. . . .

The shocking pictures on this page were handed to us by one of the attackers and a colleague. We have agreed to protect their identities as they fear reprisals.

Last night, their damning testimony was in the hands of appalled ministers and Army chiefs who pledged an urgent investigation.

Chief of the General Staff General Sir Michael Jackson said: "If this is proven, the perpetrators are not fit to wear the Queen's uniform. They have besmirched the good name of the Army and its honour."

No 10 said: "The Prime Minister fully endorses the general's statement." . . .

Army chiefs believe it was an isolated incident involving a few rogue troops. But, it is claimed, officers turned a blind eye. One of the soldiers said: "Basically this guy was dying as he couldn't take any more. An officer came down. It was 'Get rid of him - I haven't seen him'. The paperwork gets ripped. So they threw him out, still with a bag on his head."

Weeks after the pictures were taken, a captive was allegedly beaten to death in custody by men from the same Queen's Lancashire Regiment. It is also alleged a video was found of prisoners being thrown off a bridge.

Soldier A told how the young victim was hauled in suspected of stealing from the docks.

He said: "You pick on a man and go for him. Straightaway he gets a beating, a couple of punches and kicks to put him down. Then he was dragged to the back of the vehicle."

Immediately a sandbag was placed over the man's head and his hands tied behind his back.

Soldier A said:

As we took him back he was getting a beating. He was hit with batons on the knees, fingers, toes, elbows, and head.

You normally try to leave off the face until you're in camp. If you pull up with black eyes and bleeding faces you could be in s**t.

"So it's body shots - scaring him, saying 'We're going to kill you'. A lot of them cry and p*** themselves.

Because it was so hot we put him in the back of a four- tonner truck which has a canopy over it. That's where the photos were taken. Lads were taking turns giving him a right going over, smashing him in the face with weapons and stamping on him. We had him for about eight hours.

You could see blood coming out early from the first 'digs'. He was p****d on and there was spew.

"We took his mask off to give him some water and let him have a rest for 10 minutes. He could only speak a few words, pleading 'No, mister' . No, mister'.

I did less than the others. But I joined in. Me and my mate calmed down. Then two lads come on and it starts again.

"He was missing teeth. All his mouth was bleeding and his nose was all over the place. He couldn't talk, his jaw was out. He's had a good few hours of a kicking. He was on his way to being killed. There's only so much you can take.

After the officer allegedly told the attackers to get rid of the suspect he was driven off.

Soldier A said: "The lads said they took him back to the dock and threw him off the back of a moving vehicle. They'd have freed his hands, but he'd still be hooded. He'd done nothing, really. I felt sorry for him. I'm not emotional about it, but I knew it was wrong."

Referring to the second alleged beating in custody - said to have taken place in September - Soldier B said: "It was only a matter of time.

"We had one who fought back. I thought 'Don't do that', it's the worst thing you can do. He got such a kicking. You could hear your mate's boots hitting this lad's spine.

"One of the lads broke his wrist on a prisoner's head. Another nearly broke his foot, kicking him. We're not helping ourselves out here. We're never going to get the Iraqis on our side. We're fighting a losing war."

Soldier B claimed after the alleged September beating troops were told to destroy incriminating evidence.

He said: "We got a warning, saying the Military Police had found a video of people throwing prisoners off a bridge. It wasn't 'Don't do it' or 'Stop it'. It was 'Get rid of it.' "

The death is being probed. At least one soldier is expected to be charged with manslaughter.

The two infantrymen claim abuse has started because Iraqi police are powerless to process suspects.

Soldier B said: "There's no point taking them to the police station because they're released within 20 minutes. The coppers don't want any comeback and let them go. All we do is teach them a lesson our way.

"You're knackered and you don't want to be going to a police station and doing statements, just for them to be released. Give them a kicking, then it's done and dusted.

"A lot of the younger ones are worse. It's as though they've something to prove. You've got a gun and you're the law. You can make people do whatever you want."

Both men fear the situation is worsening , with UK troops now seen as the enemy, rather than liberators.

One said: "I can't believe it has taken the Iraqis so long to fight back. If it had been me or my family, I'd have retaliated straightaway.

"They've just got f****d around so much. You can't go in now, and say 'Right, let's forget about what has happened and start again'.

"We're struggling now. There are too many people against us."

IT is now clear that the photographs the Mirror published of British soldiers abusing an Iraqi prisoner were fakes.

The evidence against them is not strong enough to convict in a court but that is not the burden of proof the Daily Mirror demands of itself.

Our mission is to tell the truth.

That is something this newspaper has been doing for more than 100 years and will always strive to do. If ever we fail, we are letting down the people who mean most to us. Our readers.

So to you today we apologise for publishing pictures which we now believe were not genuine.

We also say sorry to the Queen's Lancashire Regiment and our Army in Iraq for publishing those pictures.

DAILY Mirror editor Piers Morgan last night stepped down as the paper "unreservedly apologised" for publishing the Iraqi abuse photographs.

After days of intense speculation about the authenticity of the pictures, the paper said it had been the victim of a "calculated and malicious hoax".

Mr Morgan, 39, left hours after the regiment at the centre of the controversy demanded an apology.

The storm erupted on May 1 when the Daily Mirror - after rigorous checks - published photographs purporting to show men from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment beating an Iraqi prisoner. They had been handed to the paper by two soldiers, identified as Soldier A and Soldier B.

Bush styles himself a "CEO president," but the world is full to bursting with CEOs who have goals they would dearly love to attain but who lack either the skill or the fortitude to make them happen. They assign tasks to subordinates without making sure the subordinates are capable of doing them ? but then consider the job done anyway because they've "delegated" it. They insist they want a realistic plan, but they're unwilling to do the hard work of creating one ? all those market research reports are just a bunch of ivory tower nonsense anyway. They work hard ? but only on subjects in their comfort zone. If they like dealing with people they can't bring themselves to read all those tedious analyst's reports, and if they like numbers they can't bring themselves to spend time chattering with distributors about their latest prospect.

And most important of all, weak CEOs are unwilling to recognize bad news and perform unpleasant tasks to fix it ? tasks like like confronting poorly performing subordinates or firing people. Good CEOs suck in their guts and do it anyway.

George Bush is, fundamentally, a mediocre CEO, the kind of insulated leader who's convinced that his instincts are all he needs. Unfortunately, like many failed CEOs before him, he's about to learn that being sure you're right isn't the same thing as actually being right.

So sure: George Bush is genuinely committed to winning in Iraq. He just doesn't know how to do it and doesn't have the skills, experience, or personality to look beyond his own instincts in order to figure it out. America is about to pay a heavy price for that.

WASHINGTON, May 3 ? The Congressional Research Service says the Bush administration apparently violated federal law by ordering the chief Medicare actuary to withhold information from Congress indicating that the new Medicare law could cost far more than White House officials had said.

In a report on Monday, the research service said that Congress's "right to receive truthful information from federal agencies to assist in its legislative functions is clear and unassailable." Since 1912, it said, federal laws have protected the rights of federal employees to communicate with Congress, and recent laws have "reaffirmed and strengthened" those protections.

The actuary, Richard S. Foster, has testified that he was ordered to withhold the cost estimates last year, when Congress was considering legislation to add a drug benefit to Medicare. The order, he said, came from Thomas A. Scully, who was then the administrator of Medicare.

Mr. Foster said Mr. Scully threatened to discipline him for insubordination if he gave Congress the data.

The research service, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, said Mr. Scully's order "would appear to violate a specific and express prohibition of federal law." The actuary, it said, has a duty to "make professional and reliable cost estimates, unfettered by any particular partisan agenda."

In March, Bush administration officials suggested that they would provide the actuary's cost estimates to Congress. "We have nothing to hide, so I want to make darn sure that everything comes out," Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, said on March 16. But a month later, in a letter to Congress, the administration refused to provide the documents.

Mr. Scully has confirmed telling Mr. Foster that "I, as his supervisor, would decide when he would communicate with Congress."

William A. Pierce, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said on Monday that the propriety of Mr. Scully's action was being investigated by the agency's inspector general. In any event, Mr. Pierce said, "we are looking to the future, not the past."

Last November the top economist at the Heritage Foundation was very optimistic about Iraq, saying Paul Bremer had just replaced "Saddam's soak-the-rich tax system" with a flat tax. "Few Americans would want to trade places with the people of Iraq," wrote the economist, Daniel Mitchell. "But come tax time next April, they may begin to wonder who's better off." Even when he wrote that, the insurgency in Iraq was visibly boiling over; by "tax time" last month, the situation was truly desperate.

Much has been written about the damage done by foreign policy ideologues who ignored the realities of Iraq, imagining that they could use the country to prove the truth of their military and political doctrines. Less has been said about how dreams of making Iraq a showpiece for free trade, supply-side tax policy and privatization ? dreams that were equally oblivious to the country's realities ? undermined the chances for a successful transition to democracy.

A number of people, including Jay Garner, the first U.S. administrator of Iraq, think that the Bush administration shunned early elections, which might have given legitimacy to a transitional government, so it could impose economic policies that no elected Iraqi government would have approved. Indeed, over the past year the Coalition Provisional Authority has slashed tariffs, flattened taxes and thrown Iraqi industry wide open to foreign investors ? reinforcing the sense of many Iraqis that we came as occupiers, not liberators.

But it's the reliance on private contractors to carry out tasks usually performed by government workers that has really come back to haunt us.

Conservatives make a fetish out of privatization of government functions; after the 2002 elections, George Bush announced plans to privatize up to 850,000 federal jobs. At home, wary of a public backlash, he has moved slowly on that goal. But in Iraq, where there is little public or Congressional oversight, the administration has privatized everything in sight.

For example, the Pentagon has a well-established procurement office for gasoline. In Iraq, however, that job was subcontracted to Halliburton. The U.S. government has many experts in economic development and reform. But in Iraq, economic planning has been subcontracted ? after a highly questionable bidding procedure ? to BearingPoint, a consulting firm with close ties to Jeb Bush.

What's truly shocking in Iraq, however, is the privatization of purely military functions. . . .

You may ask whether our leaders' drive to privatize reflects a sincere conservative ideology, or a desire to enrich their friends. Probably both. But before Iraq, privatization that rewarded campaign contributors was a politically smart move, even if it was a net loss for the taxpayers.

In Iraq, however, reality does matter. And thanks to the ideologues who dictated our policy over the past year, reality looks pretty grim.

Yesterday in a Q & A with editors from Detroit area newspapers President Bush said he was "shaken" by reports of abuse of prisoners in US military custody in Iraq. Yet, according to his press secretary this morning, he hasn't even looked at the Taguba Report, the one people around the world are buzzing about in disappointment and outrage and half of Washington seems already to be reading.

In fact, in this exchange from that Q & A yesterday it wasn't even clear the president knew what the report was ...

Q: Are you concerned that there was a report completed in February that apparently --

THE PRESIDENT: I haven't seen --

Q: -- Myers didn't know about yesterday --

THE PRESIDENT: Well, if Myers didn't know about it, I didn't know about it. In other words, he's part of the chain -- actually, he's not in the chain of command, but he's a high ranking official. We'll find out.

Q: The question is, should something causing --

THE PRESIDENT: I just need to know --

Q: -- concern, raised eyebrows --

THE PRESIDENT: Exactly. I think you'll find the investigation started quickly when they found out what was going on. What I need to know is what the investigators concluded.

From this exchange, the president seemed unaware of what the report even was and claimed to believe that he somehow couldn't get a hold of it until it came up through the chain of command.

The point here isn't that the president is stupid, but that he seems blithely indifferent to what is a huge setback to American goals and standing in the Middle East and indeed throughout the world.

There's an echo here of his response to the pre-9/11 warnings streaming up through the government bureaucracy. It hasn't landed on his desk yet, with an action plan, so what is he supposed to do? He talked to Rumsfeld who says he's on top of it. So what more can be done?

This isn't a matter of the aesthetics of leadership. It is another example of how this president is a passive commander-in-chief, how he demands no accountability and, because of that, allows problems to fester and grow. Though this may not be a direct example of it, he also creates a climate tolerant of rule-breaking that seeps down into the ranks of his subordinates, mixing with and reinforcing those other shortcomings.

The disasters now facing the country in Iraq -- some in slow motion, others by quick violence -- aren't just happening on the president's watch. They are happening in a real sense, really in the deepest sense, because of him -- because of his attention to the simulacra of leadership rather than the real thing, which is more difficult and demanding, both personally and morally.

Joining us from Washington is investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who became famous during the Vietnam war; you may remember his expose of the My Lai atrocities. He has written a major article about the Iraq torture situation in this week's issue of "The New Yorker magazine."

All right, you just heard General Karpinski. Do you believe what she is saying?

SEYMOUR HERSH, "THE NEW YORKER": Well, I could just tell you what Gen Antonio Taguba said in his report, which is complicated because he said basically among other things she ran one of the worst brigades he's ever seen. People didn't salute, people dressed casually. Officers were moved around without orders. They didn't keep records. They -- she said that this was not a prison full of hardened, you know, soldiers caught in war. These are full of civilians.

He said upwards of 60 percent of the people in the prison had nothing to do with, no bad feelings toward America whatsoever. They simply were caught in a random roadside check or they were snatched off the street. They should have been processed under the Geneva Convention. -- Taguba said they should have been processed. We should have gotten rid of the good guys from the bad guys. There was no control, no paperwork. They had all sorts of problems that she would -- he really gave her [a bad review].

O'REILLY: All right. But there's a difference between being a poor administrator, as this -- your -- and knowing about torture and looking the other way.

Now, I grant you and I challenged the general. I said look, in these pictures, these soldiers didn't look like they had any fear of anybody coming down on them. I mean, they looked like they were having a rollicking good time. And that tells me there was a problem in management, whether it's middle management or upper management, I don't know.

Now I also know that the general, as you do, was not a trained jail warden. She's a reservist and got thrown in there into this position. But I think for the country's sake, we need to know if this scandal is going to get any worse because we're taking a beating worldwide, And if so, who is the evildoer here?

HERSH: First of all, it's going to get much worse. This kind of stuff was much more widespread. I can tell you just from the phone calls I've had in the last 24 hours, even more, there are other photos out there. There are many more photos even inside that unit. There are videotapes of stuff that you wouldn't want to mention on national television that was done. There was a lot of problems.

There was a special women's section. There were young boys in there. There were things done to young boys that were videotaped. It's much worse. And the Maj. Gen. Taguba was very tough about it. He said this place was riddled with violent, awful actions against prisoners.

O'REILLY: All right. So we're going to see in the weeks to come more pictures and videotapes of atrocities against Iraqis? Is that what we can look forward to seeing?

HERSH: Mr. O'Reilly, this is a generation -- you know back -- you and I in our days, if we had something, you know, we came back from war. We would take our pictures and hide them behind the socks in the drawer and look at them once in a while.

This is a generation that sends stuff on CDs, sends it around. ome kid right now is negotiating with some European magazine. -- You know, I can't say that for sure, but it's there. -- It's out there. And the Army knows it.

O'REILLY: Boy.

HERSH: They have tried to recover some of the CD discs from computers, individual computers. But obviously, you can't stop this...

O'REILLY: All right. Well, the damage to the country obviously is just immeasurable. But reading your article in "The New Yorker." I just get the feeling that the Army, when they heard about it, started action almost immediately. It wasn't a cover-up situation. Or did I read your article wrong?

HERSH: This guy Taguba is brilliant. He could have made a living doing -- it's a credit to the Army that somebody with that kind of integrity would write this kind of -- it's 53-page report.

O'REILLY: OK, but Sanchez the commander put him in charge fairly quickly. They mobilized fairly quickly.

HERSH: No, look, I don't want to ruin your evening, but the fact of the matter is it was the third investigation. There had been two other investigations.

One of them was done by a major general who was involved in Guantánamo, General Miller. And it's very classified, but I can tell you that he was recommending exactly doing the kind of things that happened in that prison, basically. He wanted to cut the lines. He wanted to put the military intelligence in control of the prison.

O'REILLY: All right. We'll have more with Seymour Hersh in a moment. . . .

O'REILLY: Continuing now with investigative reporter Seymour Hersh from Washington, who has the cover story in "The New Yorker" magazine about the Iraq torture situation.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I see unfolding here from what you told me and then General Karpinski told me is that there is a tension between the interrogators who wanted to find out by you know, using means that are dubious information, and the military police who basically who objected to some of these techniques.

But you can understand that like Vietnam, you have people shooting at Americans, blowing them up, and then running into mosques and hiding behind children and all of that. So how far do we go to get the information that protects our own troops?

That I guess is the essential question that led to this scandal, correct?

HERSH: Yes, but one of the things, the problem you have, of course you have to go if you're dealing with hardened Al Qaeda. There's not much mercy. And none of us would have much mercy.

The problem here is they were picking on people that they hadn't made any differentiation on. They didn't know. And you know, and the kind of stuff that was going on, Mr. O'Reilly, when you take an Arab man and you make him walk naked in front of other men, this is the greatest shame they can have. And then you have them simulate homosexual activities. You have young women and young men, the women in particular, videotaping and photographing them doing this. This is actually a form of torture and coercion.

O'REILLY: No, there's no question about it. And there's no question. There's no justification for it. But how do you wind up in a prison if you're just innocent and didn't do anything? See, our commanders and our embedded reporters tell me that they're way too busy to be rounding up guys in the marketplace and throwing them into prison.

So I'm going to dispute your contention that we had a lot of people in there with just no rap sheets at all, who were just picked up for no reason at all. The people who were in the prison were suspected of being either Al Qaeda or terrorists who were killing Americans and knew something about it.

HERSH: The problem is that it isn't my contention. It's the contention of Maj. Gen. Taguba, who was appointed by General Sanchez to do the investigation.

It's his contention, in his report, that more than 60 percent of the people in that prison, detainees, civilians, had nothing to do with the war effort.

O'REILLY: How did they get there then? Because I...

HERSH: Because how do they get into the prison?

I'll tell you how they get there. You bust the guy that doesn't have anything to do. You humiliate him. You break him down. You interrogate him. He gives up the name of you want to know who is an insurgent, who is Al Qaeda? He gives up any name he knows.

O'REILLY: Do you really believe that U.S. forces were sweeping Baghdad, and the others -- you're just picking people up off the street for no reason?

HERSH: Well, inevitably you get people in a sweep that have nothing to with what you're looking for.

O'REILLY: All right, now that's true. But to the number of...

HERSH: Of course.

O'REILLY: ...50 percent, I'm not buying that. I mean, I could be wrong. But I'm going on the basis of our reporters in the field. And I'm asking them, have you ever seen any of these -- no. These guys are way to busy. They got stuff to do all day long. They're not sweeping people up.

HERSH: We're talking about last fall, when things weren't as acute as they are now, certainly it's a terrible situation right now. And everybody -- nobody is sweeping anything. They're in forced protection.

O'REILLY: Right.

HERSH: But last fall, things were much calmer. People were being swept. This did happen.

O'REILLY: All right.

HERSH: And I could tell you something else. Let me just say this. I believe the services have a -- look, the kids did bad things. But the notion that it's all just these kids [doing these things]... The officers are "in loco parentis" with these children. We send our children to war. And we have officers like that general, whose job is to be mother and father to these kids, to keep them out of trouble. The idea of watching these pictures, it's not only a failure of the kids, it's a failure of everybody in the command structure.

O'REILLY: Well, yes, it's the failure of the supervisors of those soldiers to create an environment of fear so they wouldn't do that. See, it's just appalling to me that they would take this so casually.

One more question and I will let you go here. Maj. Gen. Don Rider is the chief law enforcement officer of the Army. All right? He went in and also looked at this situation. And in a report said yes, we have a lot of trouble, but didn't red flag the kind of trouble that you reported on. Why?

HERSH: I just don't know because Don Rider has a great reputation among investigators in the CID, the criminal investigative division. They adore him. He's got a great reputation, but General Taguba again in his report really went after him in a way that one...

O'REILLY: Yes, he just said he wasn't tough enough on the initial report.

HERSH: He blew it.

Washington -- The deadlocked battle against Iraqi insurgents in such cities as Fallujah and Najaf has made it clear to military thinkers in Washington that, more than a year after Saddam Hussein was brought down, the United States faces a determined rebellion in Iraq, one that some analysts say can't be defeated by force.

The question that divides strategists is whether the United States should gird itself for the long haul or make a deal now, probably under United Nations auspices, and hope for the best in a country where almost 800 American military personnel have been killed, more than 3,800 wounded and uncounted thousands of Iraqis killed or injured.

All the analysts agree there are few military options for a quick and successful end to the war.

"Any military solution is now likely to be the kind of 'victory' that creates a new firestorm over excessive force, civilian casualties and collateral damage," wrote Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The U.S. cannot hope to kill or arrest all of the Sunni and foreign insurgents that exist now and is almost certain to create far more than it destroys.''

Instead, even critics of the current effort such as Cordesman say the elements to eventually create peace in Iraq include increasing the number of American troops, better preparing those soldiers for a guerrilla-style conflict, trying to establish more limited areas where the Iraqi people will be safe and continuing to try to win over the Iraqi people, in large part by showing the United States has the resolve to weather the difficult periods.

Cordesman, just back from 11 days in the Middle East, said it seems clear that support for the United States is dropping among Iraqis, while Iraqi leaders associated with the United States have lost credibility.

Iraq, he wrote in a new report, "is virtually a no-win situation for the U.S.'' . . .

An essential element of success in Iraq, analyst Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution said, is to improve security. That would allow stalled reconstruction efforts to pick up and give Iraqis a sense the United States isn't about to pull out.

Support for the U.S. occupation is being damaged because fear leads people to question whether the American-led invasion that ousted Hussein was worth it. And insecurity erodes support for any Iraqi who tells people to cooperate with the occupation's authorities.

"Our failure to provide Iraq with security is costing us the two most important positive factors we have had going for us,'' Pollack said in Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony in April.

But Krepinevich said that unless the American force in Iraq is increased sharply, it probably isn't feasible to try to secure the whole country.

"We were overambitious at first trying to supply security everywhere with the force we had,'' he said.

Cordesman suggested that the U.S. bypass cities full of insurgents "and focus on creating a legitimate Iraqi government that can unify Iraqis and allow nation-building to work. This means relying on containment in the case of truly troubled and high insurgent areas, and focusing on security in friendly areas,'' he wrote.

The administration must turn over much of the political, security and development efforts to moderate Iraqis, "and pray that the United Nations can create some kind of climate for political legitimacy,'' he wrote.

The US says it is shelving plans to reduce troop numbers in Iraq and will keep 135,000 deployed there until 2006.

The US had earlier said it would cut forces in Iraq this month to 115,000.

The latest announcement follows the bloodiest month for US troops in Iraq, with 129 combat deaths - more than all losses during the whole 2003 invasion.

The Pentagon also ordered 10,000 combat troops and 37,000 reservists and national guardsmen to replace units serving extended tours of duty. . . .

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said US forces could expect to face an upsurge of violence in the run-up to 30 June, when the US will transfer sovereignty to Iraqis.

"This is a difficult period, but our folks are there and are going to stay there," Mr Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing on Tuesday.

US forces have been at full stretch in Iraq As the fighting raged in April, US officials said the May target for reducing the number of troops to 115,000 had been delayed for another 90 days, to cover the handover period.

Now that reduction will not happen until at least the end of 2005, the Pentagon said.

Many of the prisoners abused at the Abu Ghraib prison were innocent Iraqis picked up at random by US troops, and incarcerated by under-qualified intelligence officers, a former US interrogator from the notorious jail told the Guardian.

Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guantánamo Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year, blamed the abuses on a failure of command in US military intelligence and an over-reliance on private firms. He alleged that those companies were so anxious to meet the demand for their services that they sent "cooks and truck drivers" to work as interrogators.

"Military intelligence operations need to drastically change in order for something like this not to happen again," Mr Nelson said. He spoke to the Guardian in a series of interviews by phone and email.

He claimed that "many of the detainees at the prison are actually innocent of any acts against the coalition and are being held until the bureaucracy there can go through their cases and verify their need to be released."

"One case in point is a detainee whom I recommended for release and months later was still sitting in the same tent with no change in his status."

Mr Nelson said that the same systemic problems were also responsible for large numbers of Afghans being mistakenly swept into Guantánamo Bay. He estimated that "30-40%" of the inmates at the controversial prison camp had no connection to terrorism.

"There are people who should never have been sent over there. I was involved in the process of reviewing people for possible release and I can say definitely that they should have been released and released a lot sooner," he said.

The former commander of the Guantánamo Bay Camp, Major General Geoffrey Miller, was transferred to Iraq a month ago to overhaul the prison system there, although he has been criticised for his recommendations last year that US prison guards in Iraq help "set the conditions" for interrogations by softening up detainees.

Such allegations have been made before by victims' families and human rights groups but Mr Nelson's story represents the first insider's account by an American interrogator. It amounts to an indictment of a system gone awry, and contradicts claims by the White House and the Pentagon that Abu Ghraib does not represent a systemic problem.

Mr Nelson denies any involvement in the physical and sexual abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, and is listed in the official military report into the scandal as a witness rather than a suspect. He says he resigned from his job in February in fear for his life, because Abu Ghraib was coming under increasing attack by Iraqi insurgents, and because of his disillusion in the military leadership there. He is now working for a private contractor - but not as an interrogator - in another country that is part of the US "global war on terrorism". He did not want his whereabouts published.

Mr Nelson said he had come forward to speak now because he believed that military intelligence was seeking to blame the Abu Ghraib scandal on a handful of soldiers to divert attention away from ingrained problems in the military detention and interrogation system.

As a witness in an ongoing investigation, Mr Nelson said he could not talk about the abuses of specific prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but he said the nature of the detention system makes the imprisonment and abuse of innocent people all but inevitable.

"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home. They take it out on the nearest person they can't understand."

"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, "the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him," he said.

According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds.

"Now, whether the detainees are put into the general intelligence holding area, where they rot for a few months until final release, or if they are placed in solitary confinement because their story seems unbelievable is completely in the hands of the interrogator's opinion," he said. "It is in solitary that the abuses can be committed. So, in theory it is in fact very possible that purely innocent Iraqis could be placed in an environment where they could be brutalised, abused, "softened up" or even killed."

"At Abu Ghraib there were plenty of detainees talking or wanting to talk, but the leadership was focused on the "hard" targets of high-value," Mr Nelson said. "This was mainly because the leadership was almost completely focused on getting the highest ranking Ba'ath party members still in hiding. And many of the interrogators were anxious to "go after" the difficult eggs. They wanted to be the one interrogator who broke the linking detainee and found such and such high value target. They weren't interested in going through the less glamorous work of sifting through the chaff to get to the kernels of truth from the willing detainees, they were interested in "breaking" the tough targets."

Much of the problem lay in the quality of US interrogators, Mr Nelson said, explaining that only the youngest and least experienced intelligence officers actually question detainees.

"Once you get up to a level of NCO [non commissioned officer] or warrant officer you generally get moved into administration. You are taken out of working as an interrogator," he said.

As the number of suspects sucked into the system exploded, the Pentagon came to rely increasingly on interrogators from private contractors to question them. Mr Nelson was one of a team of roughly 30 in Abu Ghraib employed by a Virginia-based firm, CACI International. He believes his decade of experience in military intelligence made him well-qualified to do the job, but he had growing doubts about his colleagues.

"I'd say about of the contractors that it's kind of a hit or miss. They're under so much pressure to fill slots quickly... They penalise contracting companies if they can't fill slots on time and it looks bad on companies' records," Mr Nelson said. "If you're in such a hurry to get bodies, you end up with cooks and truck drivers doing intelligence work."

"There was someone was hired as an interrogator or screener whose previous job was a truck driver. That was pretty close to when I was leaving," Mr Nelson recalled. "My eyes went really wide at that point - really scraping the bottom of the barrel."

CACI International did not respond to a request for comment on Mr Nelson's account. The firm has told other reporters that it has not been contacted by military investigators about the work of its employees at Abu Ghraib. Its recruitment notices seeking interrogators state that the job "requires a top secret clearance" and note that the successful applicant would operate "under minimal supervision."

It's not exactly every day that the Pentagon warns military personnel to stay away from Fox News. But that's exactly what some hopeful soul at the Department of Defense instructed, in a memo intended to forbid Pentagon staff reading a copy of the Taguba report detailing abuse of detainees at prisons in Iraq that had been posted at the Fox News web site.

An email to Pentagon staff marked "URGENT IT (Information Technology) BULLETIN: Taguba Report" orders employees not to read or download the Taguba report at Fox News, on the grounds that the document is classified. It also orders them not to discuss the matter with friends or family members. The emailed memo was leaked to TIME by a senior U.S. civilian official in Baghdad, who did not hide his disdain for the "factotums" in the Pentagon. "I do wonder how incredibly stupid some people in the Pentagon are," he emailed TIME. "Not only are they drawing everyone's attention to the report ? and where it can be seen ? but attempting to muzzle people never works."

Perhaps realizing that, the email's author in "Information Services Customer Liaison" said: "This leakage will be investigated for criminal prosecution. If you don't have the document and have never had legitimate access, please do not complicate the investigative processes by seeking information." As the type-face switched to high-alarm red, the 180-word email continues: "THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS REPORT IS CLASSIFIED; DO NOT GO TO FOX NEWS TO READ OR OBTAIN A COPY."

The memo also contained four tips on how to plug the leaks of explosive prison-abuse tales. The first is "NOT to go to Fox News to read or obtain a copy" of the Taguba report. The American official in Baghdad received the email on Friday from the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Policy team, marked to "MAL POL ALL POLICY," with a note telling employees that those who have read the Taguba report on the web should "CALL POLICY IT SECURITY IMMEDIATELY!"

Pictures of abuse and humiliation of Iraqi detainees may have shocked the West, but in Iraq they came as no surprise. Stories of cruelty have been steadily coming out of prisons run by the occupation forces -- giving the lie to American claims that the maltreatment is the work of a handful of "bad apples".

If anything, the story of these photographs is the story of the West's inability to believe the darkness at the heart of the occupation until it was staring them in the face. The Iraqis already knew, because most have a relative, a friend or an acquaintance who has been detained by the occupation forces at some time and has seen at first hand what goes on inside the prisons and detention centres. . . .

"It is systematic," said Stewart Vriesinga, from the Christian Peacemakers Team (CPT), a volunteer organisation which has been chronicling abuse in occupation forces' prisons since last August, and has interviewed 72 detainees. "We documented one case of a cattle prod being used on a man's genitals. There were cases of young boys having their buttocks forced apart and being kicked in the anus."

According to the CPT, between 10,000 and 20,000 Iraqis are currently detained, with many others already released for lack of evidence. With so many witnesses, the occupation forces were never going to keep abuses secret from Iraqis. But they didn't need to: the few accounts of mistreatment that were published made little impact in the West until the appearance of photographic proof. Even if Iraqis were not surprised that the abuses were going on, however, that has not diminished the impact of the photographs themselves. The sight of female soldiers posing and grinning next to naked and humiliated Iraqi men has engendered raw fury.

Reports that the pictures have lost the US support among Iraqis are wide of the mark: there was no support left after the débâcle of their heavy-handed onslaught on Fallujah. But these pictures have heaped fuel on the fire -- a fact not lost on the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who took advantage of the media attention following a US attack on his Mehdi Army to attack President George Bush over Abu Ghraib in his Friday sermon.

"Journalists ask me if these pictures are the tip of the iceberg," Mr Vriesinga says. "This iceberg has got so big there's no water left for it to float in."

What has also become clear is that concern over what was happening to Iraqi detainees had been circulating for months, both within the coalition and within the Red Cross and human rights' organisations monitoring Iraq.

Suddenly an administration that seemed immune to bad news from Iraq has been forced on the defensive as the images of Harman and her colleagues cheerfully abusing prisoners in their charge have emerged as a metaphor for the coalition's failures in Iraq.

That it has been a catastrophe for US foreign policy is asserted by usually robust senior Pentagon officials who claim privately that Iraq policy is now '97 per cent disaster' and the war is no longer being planned but crisis-managed from day-to-day. And catastrophe was the word used by the beleaguered Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during his humiliating appearance before Congress. . . .

Last summer - a few days before the Red Cross evacuated its staff from Baghdad - Nada Doumani, the Lebanese spokeswoman for the ICRC's delegation to Iraq, was sitting in her sandbagged office complaining of the huge difficulties in tracking detainees within the US-administered prison system in Iraq.

Already, as is now clear, her officials were privately concerned over what they were hearing was happening inside the prisons that they were visiting.

These days Doumani and the Iraq delegation is based in neighbouring Jordan, the security situation meaning it still too dangerous for the ICRC to have a permanent, large-scale presence in Iraq. And with the leaking of her organisation's damning confidential report into the conditions of detainees, she can say a little more.

It is a report that paints the most damning picture of conditions in US-run facilities, and that challenges the assertions of the White House and Pentagon that the torture cases in Abu Ghraib were 'exceptional'.

According to other Red Cross officials, concern had been mounting throughout the year over persistent allegations of abuse. 'Between 31 March and 24 October we made 29 separate visits,' says Doumani. These culminated in a visit to Abu Ghraib in October, during which the most egregious abuses were uncovered.

'Right after that visit we gave a findings presentation to the director of the prison, [Brigadier-General] Janis Karpinski.' said Doumani. That critical presentation was followed by the production of a working paper for discussion, also to Karpinski.

At the same time, Red Cross officials were also concerned about allegations of alleged beatings meted out to Iraqis by British soldiers in their sector which was also raised with senior British officers at around the same time - in October and November.

As conversations continued between Red Cross officials and officers on the ground, a damning summary report on treatment of detainees was forwarded by the Iraq delegation to the organisation's headquarters in Geneva.

By New Year it had landed on the desk of the Red Cross's president, Jakob Kellenberger. A former Swiss diplomat, largely to European missions, it would present of the greatest challenges of his career.

For Kellenberger and other senior officials in Geneva, that summary report confirmed worrying reports that were coming from across the US-administered prison system set up to deal with suspects detained in the war in terror. From Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay to Iraq and to friendly third-party countries with poor human rights records which were willing to open up their facilities to the US, a picture was emerging of routine and arbitrary ill treatment. Of men picked up, sometimes on the smallest pretext, disappearing into a chilling closed world.

Determined to raise the organisation's concerns, Kellenberger had scheduled a trip to Washington to talk to the most senior US officials in the Bush administration.

On 13 and 14 January he attended a series of meetings in Washington. In two days he would meet US Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. In each meeting, say Red Cross sources, Kellenberger would deliver the same message: his organisation's belief that coalition soldiers were torturing and mistreating Iraqi detainees.

Within hours that message would be on the desks of Donald Rumsfeld and the most senior officers in the US military. But if Rumsfeld is to be believed, even as a discreet inquiry was launched into the allegations, none of the President's most senior officials thought to tell George Bush.

But Kellenberger was not alone in being concerned. According to the timeline leaked by investigators to the US media, army investigators had also been tipped about the abuses and, after months of inaction, were taking the issue seriously.

Joseph Darby, a 24-year-old reservist at Abu Ghraib, had plucked up his courage and slipped an anonymous note underneath the door of one of his superior officers. It described brutal incidents of abuse of Iraqi prisoners and the existence of graphic photographs taken by Darby's own colleagues.

That move triggered the crisis which has emerged from the brutal hallways of Abu Ghraib to echo through Washington's corridors of power. Darby eventually turned over a computer disk of pictures to a sergeant in his unit on 13 January. A few hours later, army investigators seized other computers and disks from members of the unit. By 14 January - according to this version of events - General John Abizaid was on the phone to Rumsfeld, as Kellenberger was also raising his concern.

On 16 January, the US army curtly announced it had ordered an investigation into abuses at the prison - a five-sentence press release said that an inquiry into 'reported' incidents of detainee abuse had begun. It did not even name the prison. . . .

When Rumsfeld, Bush's acerbic, 73-year-old Secretary of Defence, entered the Oval Office for a scheduled meeting on a spring morning last Wednesday, his mind was on a request to Congress for an extra $25 billion to help fund the war in Iraq.

Instead, he found that Bush had other matters to deal with. What followed was an astonishing dressing-down by Bush of one of his closest advisers and personal friends in the presence of Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Bush was deeply upset at the storm of bad publicity swirling out from the Abu Ghraib scandal. If the story that has been carefully leaked from the White House is true, the first time the President saw the pictures that have dominated the world's media was when they were broadcast on CBS's Sixty Minutes news show.

According to that account, Bush was also unaware of a detailed secret military report into the Abu Ghraib abuses that had also leaked to the press, and the Red Cross's devastating presentation.

WASHINGTON ? The Bush administration's hopes for a major NATO military presence in Iraq this year appear doomed, interviews with allied defense officials and diplomats show.

The Western military alliance had expected to announce at a June summit that it would accept a role in the country, perhaps by leading the international division now patrolling south-central Iraq. But amid continuing bloodshed and strong public opposition to the occupation in many nations, allies want to delay any major commitment until after the U.S. presidential election in November, officials say.

The clear shift in NATO's stance deals another blow to U.S. efforts to spread the military burden as it grapples with a deadly insurgency in Iraq, fury in the region over its endorsement of Israeli plans for Palestinian territories and the unfolding abuse scandal at the American-run Abu Ghraib prison.

The Pentagon's announcement last week that it intends to keep 135,000 U.S. troops in the country was a sign that the administration does not expect to be able to shift more of the burden to other nations anytime soon.

One U.S. hope had rested with NATO. Within the alliance, there seemed to be "a sense of inevitability about the mission" as recently as a few weeks ago, said one NATO official. "But it's just not there anymore?. Any enthusiasm there was has drained away."

Compounding the allies' wariness is the fact that some countries with troops already in Iraq are unhappy with the U.S. war strategy. Some British leaders and officials of other countries in the occupying coalition have felt that the Americans have been too quick to resort to overwhelming force against insurgents, according to NATO and European defense officials. Some countries also have complained that the U.S. military has been slow to consult with coalition partners on planned moves, including some that have put coalition troops under fire, the officials said.

Although the friction does not amount to a major rupture, said one European defense official, "it's hard to talk other people into joining a mission when those who are there already aren't 100% happy."

U.S. officials have been courting NATO as a potential partner in Iraq since launching the war last March. Some U.S. lawmakers, as well as the likely Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, continue to push the administration to draw in NATO, hoping a partnership with the well-equipped 26-nation alliance would give the effort enhanced military capability and international legitimacy.

Kerry called on President Bush this month to work harder on the necessary diplomacy "to share the burden and make progress" in Iraq. He said NATO member nations must be treated with respect and said their involvement and other steps to internationalize the reconstruction could be "the last chance to get it right." . . .

Now, instead of being able to push for an expansion of the European role in Iraq, American officials have their hands full simply trying to maintain the participation of those who are there. International outrage over disclosure of mistreatment of Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison have added to allied discomfort.

"The tide is still ebbing," said one European official, describing the regional enthusiasm for sending troops.

In addition, NATO has struggled to provide enough troops and equipment for its mission in Afghanistan, which holds a considerably higher priority with most members than any future assignment in Iraq. NATO officials have been trying to cajole members for months to contribute more to the Afghan effort, but continue to be rebuffed by officials of governments who say they are overstretched in other peacekeeping missions and do not have equipment designed for southwest Asia.

Even so, most members take the view that "Afghanistan is where NATO's credibility is on the line," said a NATO official. "In Iraq, it's the U.S.' credibility that's on the line."

Deep divisions are emerging at the top of the U.S. military over the course of the occupation of Iraq, with some senior officers beginning to say that the United States faces the prospect of casualties for years without achieving its goal of establishing a free and democratic Iraq.

Their major worry is that the United States is prevailing militarily but failing to win the support of the Iraqi people. That view is far from universal, but it is spreading and being voiced publicly for the first time.

Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, said he believes that at the tactical level at which fighting occurs, the U.S. military is still winning. But when asked whether he believes the United States is losing, he said, "I think strategically, we are."

Army Col. Paul Hughes, who last year was the first director of strategic planning for the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, said he agrees with that view and noted that a pattern of winning battles while losing a war characterized the U.S. failure in Vietnam. "Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically," he said in an interview Friday.

"I lost my brother in Vietnam," added Hughes, a veteran Army strategist who is involved in formulating Iraq policy. "I promised myself, when I came on active duty, that I would do everything in my power to prevent that [sort of strategic loss] from happening again. Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don't understand the war we're in."

The emergence of sharp differences over U.S. strategy has set off a debate, a year after the United States ostensibly won a war in Iraq, about how to preserve that victory. The core question is how to end a festering insurrection that has stymied some reconstruction efforts, made many Iraqis feel less safe and created uncertainty about who actually will run the country after the scheduled turnover of sovereignty June 30.

Inside and outside the armed forces, experts generally argue that the U.S. military should remain there but should change its approach. Some argue for more troops, others for less, but they generally agree on revising the stated U.S. goals to make them less ambitious. They are worried by evidence that the United States is losing ground with the Iraqi public.

Some officers say the place to begin restructuring U.S. policy is by ousting Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whom they see as responsible for a series of strategic and tactical blunders over the past year. Several of those interviewed said a profound anger is building within the Army at Rumsfeld and those around him.

A senior general at the Pentagon said he believes the United States is already on the road to defeat. "It is doubtful we can go on much longer like this," he said. "The American people may not stand for it -- and they should not."

Asked who was to blame, this general pointed directly at Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. "I do not believe we had a clearly defined war strategy, end state and exit strategy before we commenced our invasion," he said. "Had someone like Colin Powell been the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], he would not have agreed to send troops without a clear exit strategy. The current OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] refused to listen or adhere to military advice."

Like several other officers interviewed for this report, this general spoke only on the condition that his name not be used. One reason for this is that some of these officers deal frequently with the senior Pentagon civilian officials they are criticizing, and some remain dependent on top officials to approve their current efforts and future promotions. Also, some say they believe that Rumsfeld and other top civilians punish public dissent. Senior officers frequently cite what they believe was the vindictive treatment of then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki after he said early in 2003 that the administration was underestimating the number of U.S. troops that would be required to occupy postwar Iraq. . . .

One Pentagon consultant said that officials with whom he works on Iraq policy continue to put on a happy face publicly, but privately are grim about the situation in Baghdad. When it comes to discussions of the administration's Iraq policy, he said, "It's 'Dead Man Walking.' "

The worried generals and colonels are simply beginning to say what experts outside the military have been saying for weeks.

In mid-April, even before the prison detainee scandal, Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, wrote in the New York Review of Books that "patience with foreign occupation is running out, and violent opposition is spreading. Civil war and the breakup of Iraq are more likely outcomes than a successful transition to a pluralistic Western-style democracy." The New York Review of Books is not widely read in the U.S. military, but the article, titled "How to Get Out of Iraq," was carried online and began circulating among some military intellectuals.

Likewise, Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), a former Marine who is one of most hawkish Democrats in Congress, said last week: "We cannot prevail in this war as it is going today," and said that the Bush administration should either boost its troop numbers or withdraw.

Larry Diamond, who until recently was a senior political adviser of the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, argued that the United States is not losing the war but is in danger of doing so. "I think that we have fallen into a period of real political difficulty where we are no longer clearly winning the peace, and where the prospect of a successful transition to democracy is in doubt.

"Basically, it's up in the air now," Diamond continued. "That's what is at stake. . . . We can't keep making tactical and strategic mistakes."

He and others are recommending a series of related revisions to the U.S. approach.

Like many in the Special Forces, defense consultant Michael Vickers advocates radically trimming the U.S. presence in Iraq, making it much more like the one in Afghanistan, where there are 20,000 troops and almost none in the capital, Kabul. The U.S. military has a small presence in the daily life of Afghans. Basically, it ignores them and focuses its attention on fighting pockets of Taliban and al Qaeda holdouts. Nor has it tried to disarm the militias that control much of the country.

In addition to trimming the U.S. troop presence, a young Army general said, the United States also should curtail its ambitions in Iraq. "That strategic objective, of a free, democratic, de-Baathified Iraq, is grandiose and unattainable," he said. "It's just a matter of time before we revise downward . . . and abandon these ridiculous objectives."

Instead, he predicted that if the Bush administration wins reelection, it simply will settle for a stable Iraq, probably run by former Iraqi generals. This is more or less, he said, what the Marines Corps did in Fallujah -- which he described as a glimpse of future U.S. policy.