Documents obtained by The Guardian claim to contain evidence that such abuses took place in the main detention centre at Bagram, near the capital Kabul, as well as at a smaller US installation near the southern city of Kandahar.

Abu Ghraib abuse 'just for fun'

The documents also indicate that US soldiers covered up abuse in Afghanistan and in Iraq, even after the Abu Ghraib scandal last year. In sworn affidavits to a British-American human rights lawyer, a Palestinian says he was sodomised by American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Another former prisoner of US forces, a Jordanian, describes a form of torture which involved being hung in a cage from a rope for days. Both men were freed from US detention last year after being held in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Neither has been charged by any government with any offence.

In the second affidavit, the Jordanian citizen Wesam Abdulrahman Ahmed Al Deemawi, detained from March 15, 2002 to March 31, 2004, says that during a 40-day period of detention at Bagram he was threatened with dogs, stripped and photographed "in a shameful and obscene positions" and placed in a cage with a hook and a hanging rope. He says he was hung from this hook, blindfolded, for two days although he was "occasionally given hour-long breaks."

A thousand pages of evidence from US army investigations released to the American Civil Liberties Union after a long legal battle, and made available to the newspaper, show that an Iraqi detained at Tikrit in September 2003 was forced to withdraw his report of abuse after soldiers told him he would be held indefinitely.

The Gulf War II Homepage

According to the report, photographs taken in southern Afghanistan showing US soldiers from the 22nd infantry Battalion posing in mock executions of blindfolded and bound detainees, were purposely destroyed after the Abu Ghraib scandal to avoid public outrage.

In the dossier, the Iraqi detainee claims that three US interrogators in civilian clothing dislocated his arms, stuck an unloaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, choked him with a rope until he lost consciousness, and beat him with a baseball bat.

"After they tied me up in the chair, they dislocated my both arms. He asked me, otherwise I will be killed and he beat me again and again," the prisoner said in his statement. "He asked me: Are you going to report me? You have no evidence. Then he hit me very hard on my nose, and then he stepped on my nose until it broke and I started bleeding."

The detainee withdrew his charges on November 23, 2003. He says he was told: "You will stay in the prison for a long time, and you will never get out until you are 50 years old."

According to the report, a medical examination by a US military doctor confirmed the detainee's account, yet the investigation was closed last October.

America's War on Terror

"It is further proof that the army is not seriously investigating credible allegations of abuse," said Jameel Jaffar, a lawyer for the ACLU.

'The documents are the latest indication of alleged U.S. military abuse of detainees in Afghanistan. Military investigators are probing a December 2002 incident in which two detainees died after being captured and beaten,' said the Los Angeles Times.

Military investigators have also been looking into allegations of 'murder and torture involving an 18-year-old Afghan army recruit who died while in US custody last year. The inquiry has also focused on the alleged torture of seven other Afghan soldiers,' it said.

In another development, The New York Times said several American soldiers are under investigation in the shooting deaths of two Afghan villagers outside a US base in western Afghanistan

'Witnesses and local officials said the two villagers were shot February 11 while they fled across a field. Two witnesses said in an interview that two American soldiers then approached one of the Afghans, who was wounded, and shot him dead at close range,' said the Times.