Bush team knew Guantanamo abuse as early as 2002: report

Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at the US naval base Guantanamo Bay reached the highest levels of the administration of US President George W.Bush as early as autumn 2002, the British Guardian newspaper reported Monday.

According to a new investigation by the US journalist Seymour Hersh published exclusively in the paper, a Central Intelligence Agency analyst visited Guantanamo in summer 2002 and returned with conviction that "we were committing war crimes and more than half the people there didn't belong there."

Bush's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice saw the analyst's report by autumn 2002 and called a high-level meeting at which she asked the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to deal with the problem, but Rumsfeld chose to do nothing about it, the paper said.

Although the Bush administration repeatedly assured critics that inmates were granted recreation periods, the paper said, one Pentagon adviser told Hersh how, for some prisoners, they consisted of being left in strait-jackets in intense sunlight with hoods over their heads.

The paper quoted Hersh's investigation as saying that one former marine at the camp even recalled sessions in which guards would "fuck with (detainees) as much as we could" by inflicting pain on them.

Hersh made his revelations in a new book "Chain of Command", which the paper said leaves senior figures in the Bush administration far more seriously implicated in the torture scandal than had been previously apparent.