WASHINGTON, March 6: The United States included a rare mea culpa in issuing its annual report on global human rights on Tuesday, acknowledging missteps in its treatment of terrorist suspects since Sept 11, 2001.

“We do not issue these reports because we think ourselves perfect, but rather because we know ourselves to be deeply imperfect,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in releasing the congressionally-mandated report covering the human rights situation in 193 countries.

Ms Rice did not elaborate in remarks to the press, but her top human rights official, Assistant Secretary of State Barry Lowenkron, referred specifically to US laws and practices “governing the detention, treatment and trial of terrorist suspects” since the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington.

“We recognise that we are issuing this report at a time when our own record and actions we have taken to respond to terrorist attacks against us have been questioned,” Lowenkron told reporters.

“We will continue to respond forthrightly to the good faith concerns of others,” he said.

“Our democratic system of government is not infallible, but it is accountable,” he said.

It was the first such self-criticism included in a State Department rights report since the 2001 attacks.

The administration of President George W. Bush has been assailed by human rights groups at home and abroad for its treatment of hundreds of terrorist suspects captured overseas and held without charge for years at a prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.Mr Bush has also acknowledged the use of extreme interrogation techniques including simulated drowning against top captured Al Qaeda leaders held in secret locations around the world.

And US intelligence officials face legal action in Europe over a secret policy of “extraordinary rendition” under which terror suspects were abducted overseas and transferred to prisons in third countries, where several have claimed they were tortured.

Such practices have undermined the credibility of US criticism of other governments' human rights abuses, rights activists say.

“It is very difficult for the US government today to condemn a government for the use of torture, when the CIA itself has tortured people,” said Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch.

“Similarly it is hard for the US government to protest against the detention of somebody without trial, when it has hundreds of people held for up to five years in Guantanamo with a trial only a distant hope,” Roth said in an interview with Voice of America radio.—AFP