, the Department ordered General Geoffrey Miller – then in charge at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay – to go to Iraq to find ways to improve the flow of intelligence from detainees, an investigation by Britain's Mail on Sunday newspaper has found.

The general recommended creating a single central interrogation unit at Abu Ghraib. It was in this unit where the degradation of Iraqi prisoners – now graphically exposed by more than 1000 photographs – took place.

Unit members, acting to the orders of Military Intelligence officers, carried out the sexual sadism and other abuses which have shamed the US – and there is still worse to come. AMERICAN soldiers beating an Iraqi to a bloody pulp.

A MALE US soldier having sex with a female Iraqi inmate.

SOLDIERS acting inappropriately with a dead body.

A VIDEO allegedly showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.

Mr Rumsfeld has apologised for the abuses at Abu Ghraib "on my watch" but has taken no responsibility for having started the process.

The decision to use General Miller came after he reported on Camp X-Ray, saying three quarters of the 600 Taliban and Al-Qaida suspects held there were becoming compliant and offering intelligence tips.

The Washington Post reported that the Defence Department approved interrogation techniques for Guantanamo Bay which included forcing inmates to strip naked and subjecting them to loud music, bright lights and sleep deprivation.

The techniques, approved in April 2003, required approval from senior Pentagon officials and in some cases Mr Rumsfeld, the paper reported.

The Pentagon declined to comment on the report but US Southern Command spokesman Colonel David McWilliams confirmed a sliding scale of techniques was approved. He denied this included stripping detainees. "We do not do it," he said.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, sent General Miller from Cuba to Baghdad in August last year to suggest changes to prisoner interrogations.

General Miller recommended that detention operations must act as an "enabler" for interrogation.

One of the soldiers in the jail photos and now facing charges, Spc Sabrina Harman, 26, of the 372nd Military Police Company, said she was told to break down the prisoners.

"They would bring in one to several prisoners at a time already hooded and cuffed," she said. "The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk."

General Miller, who had returned to Camp X-Ray, was last week put in control of running Abu Ghraib.

He said he would halt or restrict some interrogation methods, especially eight to 10 "very aggressive techniques" including using hoods on prisoners, putting them in stressful positions and depriving them of sleep.

Those methods were now banned without specific approval, he said.

Democrat Congressman Jim McDermott, said he was convinced abuse had been sanctioned from the top. "It wasn't just six soldiers who did it. It goes all the way to the top – to the Presidency," he said.

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