Bush's re-election hopes slide as Iraq prisoner abuse scandal deepens

Despite a massive damage-control effort, the prisoner abuse scandal is threatening to poison further the image of the Bush administration at home and abroad, deepening the cloud over the President's re-election prospects.

Last week the White House tried to draw a line under the affair by releasing hundreds of classified internal documents, in a bid to show it had never condoned the use of torture against detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the process it formally disowned a 2002 Justice Department memo that seemed to do just that.

However in Iraq itself, three days before the transfer of sovereignty to the interim government of Iyad Allawi, the attempt to come clean did nothing to reduce resentment of the US military presence. And in the US, the documents raised as many questions as they answered, as their publication failed to halt the slide in Mr Bush's political fortunes.

For the first time, a majority of Americans believe the March 2003 invasion was a mistake - a shift that pollsters attribute primarily to the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, and to the wider controversy over the treatment of prisoners elsewhere in the "war on terror". According to one poll last week, the public believes that John Kerry, Mr Bush's Democratic challenger in November, would do at least as good a job in handling the terrorist threat to the US. The President, who narrowly trails Mr Kerry in most surveys, may have lost what had seemed his most powerful card for re-election.

Off the record, moreover, officials now acknowledge that, far from being "the worst of the worst", the 600-odd detainees at Camp X-Ray in Cuba are mostly small fry - an admission that calls into question the rationale of the military tribunals that are soon due to start, two and a half years after the first prisoners were taken to Guantanamo Bay.

In Iraq, where the US will retain effective control of its detainees even after the 30 June handover, trials in connection with the Abu Ghraib brutalities are under way. But both there and in the US, the view is that the problem extends far higher than the seven guards who have thus far been charged. Testimony last week at the Baghdad trial of Sabrina Harman - a reservist who normally works at a pizza parlour near Washington - suggested involvement by military intelligence at the jail, headed by Colonel Thomas Pappas, and by the CIA.

Yesterday the Pentagon announced a shake-up of the Abu Ghraib investigation, naming a more senior general to lead the inquiry into the role played by military intelligence interrogators. Crucially, three-star Lt Gen Anthony Jones is slightly more senior than Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the departing senior US commander in Iraq who has been accused of tacitly condoning the "anything goes" atmosphere.

Similar doubts are being raised about the documents published by the White House. Though they give compendious details on the techniques that were intermittently allowed (including stripping prisoners naked and scaring them with dogs), Democrats say they tell only part of the story.

The documents hint at a cavalier attitude among top civilians at the Pentagon - "What's inhumane about being kept in 8ft cells in beautiful sunny Cuba?", Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, once remarked - and leave unclear whether the rules about interrogation techniques applied to the CIA.

The agency runs its own secret interrogation centres abroad. Their whereabouts, as well as the names and number of people held in them, have never been disclosed.