WASHINGTON, April 15: US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld allowed an ‘abusive and degrading’ interrogation of an Al Qaeda detainee in 2002, an online magazine reported on Friday, citing an Army document.

In a report a Pentagon spokesman denounced as ‘fiction’, the Salon magazine quoted an Army inspector general’s report, released in December, in which officers told of Mr Rumsfeld’s direct contact with the general overseeing the interrogation at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The report at www.salon.com, titled ‘What Rumsfeld Knew’, comes amid a spate of calls by retired US generals for the Pentagon chief to resign to take responsibility for military setbacks in Iraq.

Mr Rumsfeld spoke regularly to Army Maj Gen Geoffrey Miller, a key player in the treatment of detainees in Iraq and Guantanamo, during the interrogation of Mohammed al Kahtani, suspected to have been an intended Sept 11 hijacker, Salon quoted the inspector general’s report as saying.

Kahtani, a Saudi national, received ‘degrading and abusive’ treatment by soldiers who were following the interrogation plan Mr Rumsfeld had approved, Salon said, quoting the 391-page report, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Salon cites Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, an Army investigator, as saying in a sworn statement to the inspector general that ‘The secretary of defence is personally involved in the interrogation of one person’.

Schmidt is quoted under oath as saying he concluded that Rumsfeld did not specifically order the interrogation methods used on Kahtani, but that Mr Rumsfeld’s approval of broad policies permitted abuses to take place.—Reuters