WASHINGTON, Aug 24: The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was like an 'animal house' at night where American guards tortured Iraqi prisons at will, an independent Pentagon panel reported on Tuesday.

The high-level panel, headed by former Defence Secretary James Schlesinger, blamed the chain of command 'all the way to Washington' for prison abuses, which it said were 'not just individual cases but were widespread'.

The findings, released on Tuesday at the Pentagon, did not directly blame US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his senior commanders for the abuses. "There were some 300 cases, some beyond Abu Ghraib," Mr Schlesinger told a briefing at the Pentagon.

"The abuses were widespread (and constituted) freelance activities of the nightshift" at the prison. Direct responsibilities for these abuses, he said, went 'up to the brigade level' but indirect responsibility went all the way to Washington.

The high command in Washington, he said, 'could have and should have taken action' but did not. Mr Schlesinger also mentioned a memo Mr Rumsfeld had written defining the tactics that could be used to interrogate prisoners, but said it was meant for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and not Iraq. "And the memo was later amended," he said.

The prisoners at Abu Ghraib, he said, were not targeted for 'presumed intelligence value' but were tortured because their guards wanted to do so. But he emphasized that the Bush administration did not have 'a policy of abuse'.

The Schlesinger report is the first to link the abuse to top officials in Washington. Previous reports blamed military intelligence and military police deployed on the scene.

The four-member inquiry commission confirms that prisoners at Au Ghraib were stripped naked, sexually humiliated and threatened with ferocious dogs, causing some of them to faint while teenage prisoners urinated in their trousers when threatened with dogs.

The scandal, reported by the US media earlier this year, has drawn international condemnation for US prison policies and the conduct of its soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and in Cuba.

In the Arab and Muslim worlds, already upset over the US invasion of Iraq, the prison abuses fanned anti-American feelings and made it difficult for Muslim and Arab rulers to openly support US policies in Iraq.

The panel points out that the military's Joint Staff at the Pentagon - which is responsible for allocating forces - did not recognize that Abu Ghraib guards were overwhelmed by an influx of detainees during uprising in Iraq.

The report directly criticizes the top US general in Iraq at the time, Army Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, for inadequately supervising policies at the prisons but does not reprimand him.

The panel censures Army Brig Gen Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade at Abu Ghraib for failing to stop the abuses. An earlier investigation also had criticized Ms Karpinski who was suspended from her post in May. She is protesting the suspension.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch group said the report did not go far enough. "The report should have tried to determine who in the Pentagon and the US military command ordered, approved and tolerated the torture of detainees," said a spokesman, Reed Brody. "Instead the report is focusing on management failures."

Mr Brody said the report also failed to examine the relationship between Mr Rumsfeld's approval of interrogation techniques designed to inflict pain and humiliation and the widespread abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

Seven US Army reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company have already been accused of torturing and humiliating detainees at Abu Ghraib. The Schlesinger panel, formed by Mr Rumsfeld to look into the abuse and suggest remedies, includes former Defence Secretary Harold Brown, former Florida Republican Rep Tillie Fowler and retired Air Force Gen Charles Horner, who led the allied air campaign in the 1991 Gulf War.

The panel interviewed Mr Rumsfeld, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Air Force Gen Richard Myers, chairman of the Pentagon's military Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the probe.