The US Army has found that Iraqi detainees were subjected to "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" by American military police at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad in a secret investigation, the New Yorker reported Saturday.

As stunning images of leering US military police taunting Iraqi prisoners caused a global furor, the New Yorker magazine published an investigative report on its web site, saying abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine among some US military police unit.

The magazine obtained an Army report completed in late February, saying its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system in Iraq were "devastating." Specifically, the Army report found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib.

Those abuses included pouring cold water on naked detainees, beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair, threatening male detainees with rape, and sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, the New Yorker quoted the Army report as saying.

Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in the Army report because of their "extremely sensitive nature," the New Yorker said.

CBS broadcast some photographs on its "60 Minute II" program on Wednesday. One picture shows an apparent Iraqi prisoner standing on a box with his head covered and wires attached to his hands.

Another photograph showed a cluster of naked prisoners piled in a pyramid, with a man and a woman soldier standing beside, smiling.

President George W. Bush said Friday he was disgusted by the photographs, vowing to punish those responsible.

Six US military police were charged in March with conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty, maltreatment, assault and indecent acts. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of military prisons in Iraq, has been suspended from her duty and faced an investigation.

The New Yorker quoted Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, one of the six military policemen charged of abusing, as writing home in January that the US military intelligence "wants it done."

Military intelligence officers had congratulated Frederick and other soldiers on the "great job" done with prisoners because "they were now getting positive results and information," Frederick wrote.

Captain Robert Shuck, Frederick's military attorney, closed his defense last month by saying that the Army was "attempting to have these six soldiers atone for its sins," the New Yorker said.