WASHINGTON, June 1: Amnesty International has dismissed President Bush’s criticism of the group’s latest report on US human rights abuses, saying the White House was all too willing to applaud Amnesty when its target was Saddam Hussein. Last week, Amnesty issued its annual report on human rights abuses, comparing US prison camps in Cuba with the gulags of the former Soviet Union.

Hours after President Bush rejected the report as ‘an absurd allegation’, the director of Amnesty’s USA chapter said the Bush administration had regularly relied on the organization’s reports when it pleased it.

William F. Schulz, who runs the organization’s 167-person staff in the United States, told reporters: “If we are such a left-leaning group, why did Donald Rumsfeld rely upon our reports in the run-up to the Iraq war and why is the administration more than happy to cite Amnesty reports on countries such as Cuba, China and North Korea?”

At a White House news conference on Tuesday, Mr Bush said allegations about US mistreatment of detainees at Guantanamo prison were coming from the detainees themselves, calling them ‘people who hate America’. He implied that Amnesty International based its report on the claims by these prisoners.

Human rights advocates rejected Mr Bush’s attack on their methods. “In the face of all this evidence, to try to dismiss this with a wave of the hand is really to fail in one’s public duty,” Mr Schulz said in response to President Bush’s comments. In last week’s report, Mr Schulz and Amnesty’s secretary general, Irene Khan, were particularly critical of US human rights records.

Mr Schulz labelled Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top aides as ‘architects of torture’.