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(The report said some coalition military intelligence officers estimated that "between 70 per cent and 90 per cent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake".)

I like that, unnamed source and failure to define "deprived of liberty," which probaly means held for a few minutes while the area was searched.

I hope you're right. I posted this as a breaking story, but what I'm reading now about the Red Cross report is, this might be older news, at least to Powell, Rice and Wolfowitz, than I thought.

The inspectors were also able to document the exact sort of behavior that has produced a firestorm over the last two weeks: "acts of humiliation such as being made to stand naked against the wall of the cell with arms raised or with women's underwear over the heads for prolonged periods — while being laughed at by guards, including female guards, and sometimes photographed in this position."

The report also said military intelligence officers had confirmed the inspectors' impression that those "methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information."

The 24-page report, completed in February, appears to contradict several statements by senior Pentagon officials in recent days concerning how and when the military learned of potential abuses in Iraq, how they reacted to reports of abuses and how widespread the practices might have been.

A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva said Monday that the organization's president, Jakob Kellenberger, complained about the prison abuses directly to top Bush administration officials during a two-day visit to Washington in mid-January when he met with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. (from the NYTimes.)

I'm afraid we haven't seen the worst fallout of this story, whether it's true or not, the public perception is going to hurt us.