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Under the 1984 United Nations Convention against Torture, ratified by most countries in the world, each state pledges to impose drastic penalties for the cruel treatment of prisoners -- and to ensure that not only those issuing the orders, but also the torturers themselves, are brought to justice.

The cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners is also banned under the Geneva Conventions. Today even US legal experts no longer question that the Geneva Conventions also apply in the war against al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. The Geneva Conventions obligate all nations to try torturers and those who issue their orders, if apprehended, or to extradite them to a country willing to do so.

The Bushies knew perfectly well why they withdrew the US signature from the International Criminal Court (ICC) statute. If the United States had subjected itself to the ICC statute, the court's unflinching prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, would undoubtedly have petitioned for the issuance of arrest warrants against Bush and his cohorts long ago.

"The release of CIA memos on interrogation methods by the US department of justice appears to have offered a get-out-of-jail-free card to people involved in torture," Amnesty International said. "Torture is never acceptable and those who conduct it should not escape justice."

The Bush administration lawyers argued in the memos that the techniques did not amount to torture because no serious psychological or physical harm was done. About 10 techniques, with variations, were approved, ranging from waterboarding, which simulates drowning, to sleep deprivation and playing on a detainee's perceived fear of insects.

Hayden and Mukasey, in a jointly written piece in the Wall Street Journal today, declared there was no need to release the memos. "Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies."Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg [the US businessman who was killed in Iraq] and Daniel Pearl [the US journalist killed in Pakistan], and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the US will no longer interrupt that sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens."

One of the memos, dated 2005, said that the CIA had 94 detainees in its custody at the time and had used the approved techniques against 28 of them, and that these amounted to the hard core of prisonersThree of the memos were written by Steven Bradbury, of the US justice department, in response to questions from John Rizzo, a lawyer with the CIA, who wanted to know if the techniques complied with international laws.

Stacy Sullivan, of Human Rights Watch, echoed this: "President Obama said there was nothing to gain 'by laying blame for the past'. But prosecuting those responsible for torture is really about ensuring that such crimes don't happen in the future."

The Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists issued a statement calling on Obama to investigate and prosecute officials who authorised and engaged in torture."Without holding to account the authors of a policy of torture and those executing it, there cannot be a return to the rule of law," said Wilder Tayler, acting secretary-general of the ICJ.

Cramped confinement: Detainees put in uncomfortably small containers. But this was judged to be unsuccessful, as it offered detainees a temporary save haven.

This is why Obama, a Democrat, is promising the people at the CIA that they will not be prosecuted, because when they tortured people, they did so strictly within the framework of the then-administration's interpretation of the law. This is a concept that is not entirely foreign to European legal thought. Under German criminal law, for instance, the actions committed by a person who could have assumed his behavior was permissible, are considered excusable, albeit not justified.

Nevertheless, the idea that "what was lawful then cannot be unlawful today" -- as the late Baden-Württemberg Governor Hans Filbinger, who had been a judge during the Third Reich, famously told SPIEGEL in a 1978 interview -- does not always apply.

The civil nuclear agreement was signed in January between the United Arab Emirates and the Bush administration, but after the new administration took office, the deal had to be recertified

"It's being temporarily held up because of that tape," one senior official said.

The State Department had little to say publicly on the torture tape incident, but its 2008 human rights report about the United Arab Emirates refers to "reports that a royal family member tortured a foreign national who had allegedly overcharged him in a grain deal."

U.S. Rep. James McGovern -- the Massachusetts Democrat who co-chairs the congressional Human Rights Commission

McGovern asked Clinton to "place a temporary hold on further U.S. expenditures of funds, training, sales or transfers of equipment or technology, including nuclear until a full review of this matter and its policy implications can be completed." He also asked that the United States deny any visa for travel to the United States by Sheikh Issa or his immediate family, including his 18 brothers, several of whom are ruling members of the UAE government.

UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a half-brother of Sheikh Issa, is expected to visit Washington sometime next month.

Under the "1-2-3 deal," similar to one the United States signed last year with India, Washington would share nuclear technology, expertise and fuel. In exchange, the UAE commits to abide by the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. The small oil-rich Gulf nation promises not to enrich uranium or to reprocess spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium, which can be used to make nuclear bombs.

The deal is part of a major UAE investment in nuclear, and it has already signed deals to build several nuclear power plants. The United States already has similar nuclear cooperation agreements with Egypt and Morocco, and U.S. officials said Washington is working on similar pacts with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Jordan.

When the Bush administration signed the deal in January, it stressed the UAE's role in global nonproliferation initiatives, including a donation of $10 million to establish an International Atomic Energy Agency international fuel bank.

Congressional critics fear the deal could spark an arms race and proliferation in the region, and the UAE's ties to Iran also have caused concern.

Iran is among the UAE's largest trading partners. In the past, the port city of Dubai, one of the UAE's seven emirates, has been used as a transit point for sensitive technology bound for Iran.

Dubai was also one of the major hubs for the nuclear trafficking network run by Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who admitted to spreading nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya up until the year 2000.

Such ties contributed to stiff opposition in Congress to the failed deal for Dubai Ports World to manage U.S. ports.

Officials said they expect the deal to be sent up to the Hill for ratification within the next few weeks, given that there has been little blowback from the publication of the tape, except for McGovern's letter to Clinton. "It will be sent very soon," one official said.

UAE Ambassador to the U.S. Yousef Al Otaiba told CNN his government always expected the deal to be sent to the Senate in early May, regardless of the controversy surrounding the tape. "As far as we are concerned, the deal is on track and this has not affected the timing," he said.

The role of health professionals as described in the documents has prompted a renewed outcry from ethicists who say the conduct of psychologists and supervising physicians violated basic standards of their professions.

the documents show a steady stream of psychologists, physicians and other health officials who both kept detainees alive and actively participated in designing the interrogation program and monitoring its implementation. Their presence also enabled the government to argue that the interrogations did not include torture.

"The health professionals involved in the CIA program broke the law and shame the bedrock ethical traditions of medicine and psychology," said Frank Donaghue, chief executive of Physicians for Human Rights, an international advocacy group made up of physicians opposed to torture. "All psychologists and physicians found to be involved in the torture of detainees must lose their license and never be allowed to practice again."

The alleged actions of medical professionals in the secret prisons are viewed as particularly troubling by an array of groups, including the American Medical Association and the International Committee of the Red Cross. AMA policies state that physicians "must not be present when torture is used or threatened." The guidelines allow doctors to treat detainees only "if doing so is in their [detainees'] best interest" and not merely to monitor their health "so that torture can begin or continue."

Ten techniques are approved, listed as: attention grasp, walling (in which the suspect could be pushed into a wall), a facial hold, a facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box (the suspect had a fear of insects) and the waterboard. In the latter, "the individual is bound securely to an inclined bench, which is approximately four feet by seven feet. The individual's feet are generally elevated. A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes. Water is then applied to the cloth in a controlled manner........produces the perception of 'suffocation and incipient panic'."

'Walling' involved use of a plastic neck collar to slam suspects into a specially-built wall that the CIA said made the impact sound worse than it actually was. Other methods include food deprivation.

The Bush administration, in particular former vice-president Dick Cheney, claimed that waterboarding did not amount to torture but the Obama adminstration has ruled that it is. Obama ordered the closure of Guantánamo and the CIA secret detention sites abroad.

Spanish human rights lawyers last month asked Judge Baltasar Garzón, who indicted the former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet in 1998, to consider filing charges against the former US attorney-general, Alberto Gonzales, and five others.

civil rights organisations have been disappointed by a series of rulings by the Obama administration that have protected a lot of material relating to Guantánamo and the sites abroad. The release of the memos today reversed that trend, though there will be unhappiness over the immunity from prosecution.

Echoing the president, the attorney-general, Eric Holder, reiterated that there would be no prosecution of CIA operatives working within the guidelines set by the Bush administration."It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the justice department," Holder said.

The director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, told CIA employees that "this is not the end of the road on these issues", apparently in expectation of Congressional inquiries and court actions abroad. He promised legal and financial help for any CIA employees who faced such action.

In Spain, the chances of court action against six senior Bush administration members over the torture receded today after a ruling by the attorney-general, Candido Conde-Pumpido.He said that any such action should be heard in a US court rather than a Spanish one, and that he would not allow Spain's legal system to be used as a plaything for political ends.

In the first of the memos, dated 1 August 2002, the justice department gave the go-ahead to John Rizzo, then acting general counsel to the CIA, for operatives to move to the "increased pressure phase" in interrogating an al-Qaida suspect.

Obama, in a statement from the White House, said: "In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carrying out their duties relying in good faith upon the legal advice from the department of justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

The fresh revelations about Issa's actions will add further doubt to a pending nuclear energy deal between the UAE and the US. The deal, signed in the final days of George W Bush, is seen as vital for the UAE. It will see the US share nuclear energy expertise, fuel and technology in return for a promise to abide by non-proliferation agreements. But the deal needs to be recertified by the Obama administration and there is growing outrage in America over the tapes. Congressman James McGovern, a senior Democrat, has demanded that Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, investigate the matter and find out why US officials initially appeared to play down its significance.

The tape emerged from a court case brought in America by Nabulsi. The American citizen is a former business partner of Sheikh Issa, and claims he, too, was tortured in the UAE after the pair fell out. Nabulsi said the first tape was shot by his brother on the orders of Sheikh Issa, who liked to view them later for his own pleasure.

Some senior Obama administration officials, including Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., have labeled one of the 14 approved techniques, waterboarding, illegal torture.

The United States prosecuted some Japanese interrogators at war crimes trials after World War II for waterboarding and other methods detailed in the memos.

Together, the four memos give an extraordinarily detailed account of the C.I.A.’s methods and the Justice Department’s long struggle, in the face of graphic descriptions of brutal tactics, to square them with international and domestic law. Passages describing forced nudity, the slamming of detainees into walls, prolonged sleep deprivation and the dousing of detainees with water as cold as 41 degrees alternate with elaborate legal arguments concerning the international Convention Against Torture.

The documents were released with minimal redactions, indicating that President Obama sided against current and former C.I.A. officials who for weeks had pressed the White House to withhold details about specific interrogation techniques.

Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, had argued that revealing such information set a dangerous precedent for future disclosures of intelligence sources and methods.

A more pressing concern for the C.I.A. is that the revelations may give new momentum to proposals for a full-blown investigation into Bush administration counterterrorism programs and possible torture prosecutions.

Mr. Obama said that C.I.A. officers who were acting on the Justice Department’s legal advice would not be prosecuted, but he left open the possibility that anyone who acted without legal authorization could still face criminal penalties. He did not address whether lawyers who authorized the use of the interrogation techniques should face some kind of penalty.

Mr. Obama condemned what he called a “dark and painful chapter in our history” and said that the interrogation techniques would never be used again. But he also repeated his opposition to a lengthy inquiry into the program, saying that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

The four legal opinions, released in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the A.C.L.U., were written in 2002 and 2005 by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the highest authority in interpreting the law in the executive branch.

The first of the memos, from August 2002, was signed by Jay S. Bybee, who oversaw the Office of Legal Counsel, and gave the C.I.A. its first detailed legal approval for waterboarding and other harsh treatment.

Three others, signed by Steven G. Bradbury, sought to reassure the agency in May 2005 that its methods were still legal, even when multiple methods were used in combination, and despite the prohibition in international law against “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment.

All legal opinions on interrogation were revoked by Mr. Obama on his second day in office, when he also outlawed harsh interrogations and ordered the C.I.A.’s secret prisons closed.

They recounted the C.I.A.’s assertions of the effectiveness of the techniques but noted that interrogators could not always tell a prisoner who was withholding information from one who had no more information to offer.

The memos include what in effect are lengthy excerpts from the agency’s interrogation manual, laying out with precision how each method was to be used. Waterboarding, for example, involved strapping a prisoner to a gurney inclined at an angle of “10 to 15 degrees” and pouring water over a cloth covering his nose and mouth “from a height of approximately 6 to 18 inches” for no more than 40 seconds at a time.

But a footnote to a 2005 memo made it clear that the rules were not always followed. Waterboarding was used “with far greater frequency than initially indicated” and with “large volumes of water” rather than the small quantities in the rules, one memo says, citing a 2004 report by the C.I.A.’s inspector general.

Most of the methods have been previously described in news accounts and in a 2006 report of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which interviewed 14 detainees. But one previously unknown tactic the C.I.A. proposed — but never used — against Abu Zubaydah, a terrorist operative, involved exploiting what was thought to be his fear of insects.

“As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar,” one memo says.

Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, cautioned that the memos were written at a time when C.I.A. officers were frantically working to prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing,” said Mr. Blair in a written statement. “But we will absolutely defend those who relied on these memos.”

Similar conclusions were reached by the second investigative report on CIA kidnappings in Europe, which was submitted two years ago by the special investigator of the Council of Europe, Dick Marty

Journalist Mariusz Kowalewski at Rzeczpospolita and two colleagues have been searching for months now for proof of the existence of a secret CIA base in Poland. The journalists have discovered flight record books from Szymany that had been declared lost, and based on refueling receipts and currency exchange rates, they have reconstructed flights and routes, and spoken with informants. Over the past few weeks, their newspaper and the television network TVP Info have revealed new details on an almost daily basis.

There are rumors circulating that one of the most important interrogators of Sheikh Mohammed, an American named Deuce Martinez -- the man who didn't torture him, but rather had the task of gently coaxing information out of him -- was in Poland at the time. That is the proof that's still missing.

According to Marty's report, members of the former Polish military intelligence and counterintelligence agency, WSI, were given positions with the border police, customs and airport administration to safeguard the activities of the CIA. "The latest revelations in Poland fully corroborate my evidence, which is based on testimony by insiders and documents that have been leaked to me," says the investigator today. Now, under the "dynamic force of the truth" that Obama has unleashed, Marty says that Europeans must finally reveal "which governments tolerated and supported the illegal practices of the CIA."

"The order to give the CIA everything they needed came from the very top, from the president," a member of the Polish military intelligence agency told the Marty team in 2007. Kwasniewski denies this. He says that there was close intelligence corporation with the US, but no prisons on Polish soil.

It's very possible that the debate on torture and responsibility which is currently being conducted in the US will soon also reach Europe. After all, Germany granted the US flyover rights and dropped its bid to extradite 13 CIA operatives in the case of Khalid el-Masri, a German citizen who claims he was abducted by the Americans. The Italian intelligence agency allegedly assisted the CIA with the kidnapping in Milan of the Islamic cleric Abu Omar. Britain's intelligence agency, MI6, reportedly delivered information directly to CIA agents who were conducting interrogations in Morocco. And there are also reports of a secret prison in Romania.

Often using the detainee's own words, the report offers a harrowing view of conditions at the secret prisons, where prisoners were told they were being taken "to the verge of death and back," according to one excerpt. During interrogations, the captives were routinely beaten, doused with cold water and slammed head-first into walls. Between sessions, they were stripped of clothing, bombarded with loud music, exposed to cold temperatures, and deprived of sleep and solid food for days on end. Some detainees described being forced to stand for days, with their arms shackled above them, wearing only diapers. "On a daily basis . . . a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room," the report quotes detainee Tawfiq bin Attash, also known as Walid Muhammad bin Attash, as saying. Later, he said, he was wrapped in a plastic sheet while cold water was "poured onto my body with buckets." He added: "I would be wrapped inside the sheet with cold water for several minutes. Then I would be taken for interrogation."

President George W. Bush acknowledged the use of coercive interrogation tactics on senior al-Qaeda captives detained by the CIA in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but he insisted that the measures complied with U.S. and international law. Former CIA director Michael V. Hayden confirmed last year that the measures included the use of waterboarding on three captives before 2003. President Obama outlawed such practices within hours of his inauguration in January. But Obama has expressed reluctance to conduct a legal inquiry into the CIA's policies.

Abu Zubaida was severely wounded during a shootout in March 2002 at a safe house he ran in Faisalabad, Pakistan, and survived thanks to CIA-arranged medical care, including multiple surgeries. After he recovered, Abu Zubaida describes being shackled to a chair at the feet and hands for two to three weeks in a cold room with "loud, shouting type music" blaring constantly, according to the ICRC report. He said that he was questioned two to three hours a day and that water was sprayed in his face if he fell asleep. At some point -- the timing is unclear from the New York Review of Books report -- Abu Zubaida's treatment became harsher. In July 2002, administration lawyers approved more aggressive techniques. Abu Zubaida said interrogators wrapped a towel around his neck and slammed him into a plywood wall mounted in his cell. He was also repeatedly slapped in the face, he said. After the beatings, he was placed in coffinlike wooden boxes in which he was forced to crouch, with no light and a restricted air supply, he said. "The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in my leg and stomach became very painful," he told the ICRC. After he was removed from a small box, he said, he was strapped to what looked like a hospital bed and waterboarded. "A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe," Abu Zubaida said. After breaks to allow him to recover, the waterboarding continued.

Rice touched off a firestorm last week when she told students at Stanford that "we did not torture anyone." "The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture," Rice said at Stanford, before adding: "And so, by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture."

It was apparently here, just under an hour's drive from Szymany airport, that Sheikh Mohammed was tortured, exactly 183 times with waterboarding -- an interrogation technique that simulates the sensation of drowning -- in March, 2003 alone. That averages out to eight times a day. And all of this happened right here in Europe.

What the CIA did back then to prisoners in the Polish military airbase of Stare Kiejkuty, north of Szymany, had been authorized by the president. According to witnesses, Stare Kiejkuty housed a secret CIA prison for "high value detainees" -- for the most prominent prisoners of the war on terror.

There is now no doubt that the Gulfstream N379P landed at least five times at Szymany between February and July, 2003. Flight routes were manipulated and falsified for this purpose and, with the knowledge of the Polish government, the European aviation safety agency Eurocontrol was deliberately deceived.

Stare Kiejkuty military base, known as a training camp for Polish intelligence agents.

Sheikh Mohammed said that they cut the clothes from his body, photographed him naked and threw him in a three-by-four-meter (10 x 13 ft) cell with wooden walls. That was when the hardest phase of the interrogating began, he claims. According to Sheikh Mohammed, one of his interrogators told him that they had received the green light from Washington to give him a "hard time":

"They never used the word 'torture' and never referred to 'physical pressure,' only to 'a hard time.' I was never threatened with death, in fact I was told that they would not allow me to die, but that I would be brought to the 'verge of death and back again.'"

He says he was questioned roughly eight hours a day. He spent the first month naked and standing, with his hands chained to the ceiling of the cell, even at night.

the al-Qaida operative described how he was strapped to a special bed and submitted to waterboarding: "Cold water from a bottle that had been kept in a fridge was then poured onto the cloth by one of the guards so that I could not breathe. This obviously could only be done for one or two minutes at a time. The cloth was then removed and the bed was put into a vertical position. The whole process was then repeated during about one hour. Injuries to my ankles and wrists also occurred during the waterboarding as I struggled in the panic of not being able to breathe."

Obama left open the possibility of criminal prosecution Tuesday for former Bush administration officials who drew up the legal basis for aggressive interrogation techniques many view as torture. Obama said it will be up to Attorney General Eric Holder to decide whether or not to prosecute the former officials. "With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that is going to be more a decision for the attorney general within the parameter of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that," Obama said during a meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah II at the White House.

A Gallup poll in early February showed that 38 percent of respondents favored a Justice Department criminal investigation of torture claims, 24 percent favored a noncriminal investigation by an independent panel, and 34 percent opposed either. A Washington Post poll about a week earlier showed a narrow percentage of Americans in favor of investigations.

The author of one of the memos that authorized those techniques, then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, is now a federal appeals court judge in California. U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-New York, a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, has called for Bybee's impeachment, while Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, chair of the Senate Judiciary committee, called for his resignation. "If the White House and Mr. Bybee told the truth at the time of his nomination, he never would have been confirmed," Leahy said. "So actually, the honorable and decent thing for him to do now would be to resign. If he's an honorable and decent man, he will."

Obama reiterated his belief that he did not think it is appropriate to prosecute those CIA officials and others who carried out the interrogations in question. "This has been a difficult chapter in our history and one of [my] tougher decisions," he added. The techniques listed in memos "reflected ... us losing our moral bearings."

The president's apparent willingness to leave the door open to a prosecution of Bush officials seemed to contradict White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who indicated Sunday that the administration was opposed to such an action. Obama believes "that's not the place that we [should] go," Emanuel said on ABC's "This Week."

The Obama administration said the move reiterated its previously-stated commitment to end the use of torture by its officers, and would protect those who acted within the limits set out by a previous legal opinion.

Mr Obama gave an assurance that "those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice... will not be subject to prosecution".

One of the documents contained legal authorisation for a list of specific harsh interrogation techniques, including pushing detainees against a wall, facial slaps, cramped confinement, stress positions and sleep deprivation. The memo also authorises the use of "waterboarding", or simulated drowning, and the placing of a detainee into a confined space with an insect.

The release of the memos stems from a request by civil rights group the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Mr Parker said the decision to allow the use of insects in interrogation was reminiscent of the Room 101 nightmare described by George Orwell in his seminal novel, 1984.

The approved tactic - to place al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah, who is afraid of insects, inside a box filled with caterpillars but to tell him they were stinging insects - was never used.

During his first week in office, President Obama issued an executive order officially outlawing the use of harsh interrogation techniques by the CIA, and forcing the agency to adhere to standards laid out in the US Army Field Manual.

"Bottom line here is you've had crimes committed," Amnesty International analyst Tom Parker told the BBC.

the former head of the CIA under former President George W Bush, Gen Michael Hayden, said the White House move would undermine intelligence work and dissuade foreign agencies from sharing information with the CIA. "If you want an intelligence service to work for you, they always work on the edge. That's just where they work," he told the Associated Press.

The pictures are similar to those from Abu Ghraib that in 2004 created shock around the world, caused a backlash in the Middle East and eventually led to jail sentences for the US military personnel involved.A US official said the pictures were not as bad as Abu Ghraib but "not good" either. The Abu Ghraib pictures showed Iraqi prisoners hooded, naked, posed in sexually embarrassing positions and being harassed by dogs.

Obama has consistently said he does not want to rake over history, fearing that it will deflect attention from his heavy domestic and foreign policy programme. But this week he opened the way for the prosecution of senior figures in the Bush administration and the establishment of a congressional inquiry.Amid the uproar this created, he has since been backing off. Both he and the Democratic leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, have signalled their unwillingness to hold a truth commission, but the Democratic leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, appears ready to push ahead. With so much clamour for an investigation, it is almost certain that Congress will hold one, with or without the backing of the White House.

The release of the pictures has been sought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a human rights organisation whose legal action forced publication of the Bush administration memos under freedom of information.

The pictures will increase pressure for pardons for military personnel who were punished for abuses at Abu Ghraib. Their lawyers are arguing that the Bush administration portrayed it as an isolated incident, whereas in fact it was widespread and approved at the highest levels."This will constitute visual proof that, unlike the Bush administration's claim, the abuse was not confined to Abu Ghraib and was not aberrational," said Amrit Singh, a lawyer for the ACLU.

The Bush administration, in blocking release of the pictures, had argued that they would create outrage but also that they would contravene the Geneva conventions obligation not to show pictures of prisoners.

About a quarter of a million petitions were delivered to the attorney-general, Eric Holder, yesterday calling for prosecution of Bush administration officials responsible for approving waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods.

Palestinian human rights groups in Gaza also found 49 Palestinians were shot in the legs in punishment attacks and around 73 were severely beaten, suffering broken arms and legs, from the start of the war in late December until the end of January. Some of the attackers were not identified, but many appeared to be from Hamas.

During the Gaza war 18 Palestinians, many suspected of collaborating with Israel, were killed. Most had escaped from Gaza's main prison after it was bombed by Israeli aircraft at the start of the war. A further 14, at least four of whom were in jail at the time, have been killed since the end of the war.

The accounts corroborate witness testimony reported by the Guardian at the time and appear to show Hamas took advantage of the chaos of the war to exert control over its political and security rivals in Gaza. Other Palestinians have also spoken of a campaign of intimidation against secular and moderate groups in Gaza.

Human Rights Watch said Fatah, the rival, western-supported Palestinian faction that controls the West Bank, had also used "repressive measures" against its Hamas opponents. It said Palestinian human rights groups recorded 31 complaints of torture by the Fatah-led security forces, as well as one death in custody and the arbitrary arrest of two Palestinian television journalists.

"Western governments that support and finance the Fatah authorities in the West Bank have remained publicly silent about the arbitrary arrests and torture against Hamas members and others," said Stork.

Human Rights Watch has also accused Israel of violating international law during the Gaza war, including by what it said was indiscriminate use of weapons such as white phosphorus in densely populated civilian areas.

Mr Obama said he had had no choice but to release the Bush administration's legal justification for interrogation techniques, which he considers to be torture - and has banned. "Don't be discouraged that we have to acknowledge that potentially we've made some mistakes.