'We were tortured too'

Britons held by American forces at Guantanamo Bay were subject to a brutal regime of abuse, two released detainees claimed today.

Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal said they were threatened with dogs, forced to squat in chains for hours on end and subjected to loud rap music during two years at the camp.

The pair, freed in March and now back in Britain, set out their allegations in a letter to President Bush, released by a New York-based human rights group.

The claims emerged as the International Committee of the Red Cross sent the US government a new dossier of complaints about conditions at Guantanamo Bay where 600 detainees, most captured in Afghanistan, are still being held without charge.

And the first US soldier to be court-martialled over the Iraq prison scandal gave a graphic account of a reign of terror against inmates in Baghdad.

Specialist Jeremy Sivits described how prisoners were hooded, jumped on, forced to strip and perform sex acts, and had their fingers stamped on. The US was releasing more than 300 detainees from Abu Ghraib prison in an attempt to bring the situation there under control.

Pentagon officials are deciding whether to release yet more photographs and video clips said to be more horrific than those seen so far.

Mr Rasul and Mr Iqbal, both from Tipton in the West Midlands, claimed the worst abuses they suffered at the US base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba came when guards pumped them for information.

They said they had to squat with their hands chained between their legs for up to 12 hours while they were subjected to strobe lights, dogs and music from rapper Eminem. They were not allowed to use the lavatory during interrogations.

In their letter to President Bush the men wrote: "Soldiers told us, 'We can do anything we want'."

They said detainees were often forced to go naked as punishment for minor offences, even when female guards were present. They claimed they were driven into a false confession that they appeared with Osama bin Laden in an al Qaeda video.

Describing the beating of a detainee in 2002, the two men wrote: "They stamped on his neck, kicked him in the stomach even though he had metal rods there as a result of an operation, and they picked up his head and smashed his face into the floor.

"One female officer was ordered to go into the cell and kick him and beat him - which she did."

Many of the abuses were carried out while the camp was run by Major General Geoffrey Miller, who has since been moved to take charge of US prisons in Iraq.

Mr Rasul and Mr Iqbal claimed that when the officer took charge of Guantanamo Bay in November 2002 he introduced new "short-shackling" procedures where detainees were attached to a hook in the floor during interrogations, to limit movement. The US army denied the men's allegations. A spokesman, said: "We have never applied any of those techniques."

The court-martial of Specialist Sivits, of the 372nd Military Police Company, threatens to bring out damaging new details of the way prisoners were mistreated by US forces at Abu Ghraib. In a statement ahead of the hearing, scheduled to take place in Baghdad next week, he described the role of Private Lynndie England, seen in several photographs and pulling a naked Iraqi on a lead in another.

He claimed she "was laughing at the different stuff they were having the detainees do".