"Widespread and routine"

That's the International Committee for the Red Cross's assessment of the torture and abuse of prisoners in Iraq.

The ICRC works with governments to improve the conditions of POWs, and generally keeps its findings secret, prefering to apply pressure in private rather than in public. However, in this case someone leaked the report, and its shocking. According to the Red Cross:

• "Between 70 percent and 90 percent" of detainees held in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.
• Abuse was reported in more than ten seperate detention facilities, some of it "tantamount to torture". Hooding, beatings, humiliation and mock-executions were used by interrogators

  in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information and other forms of cooperation from persons who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an 'intelligence value.'

• The Red Cross "directly witnessed" prisoners being abused (being kept "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness"); they were told by interrogators that this was "part of the process".
• They also observed evidence of other abuses - bruises, burns and other injuries - which supported prisoner's allegations.

"A few bad apples"? Yeah, right.