Officials in the Pentagon and the US intelligence community on Monday flatly denied a New Yorker magazine report that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the expansion of a secret interrogation program used in Afghanistan to the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.  

"This is the most hysterical piece of journalist malpractice I have ever observed," said Rumsfeld spokesman Lawrence Di Rita.

The Central Intelligence Agency also denied the existence of such a secret interrogation program. "The New Yorker story is fundamentally wrong, there was no DOD/CIA program to abuse and humiliate Iraqi prisoners," CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said.

The New Yorker report, citing unnamed current and former intelligence officials, said that the clandestine program of Pentagon, known as a special access program, gave advance approval to kill, capture or interrogate so-called "high-value" targets of the al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan.

The rules of the secret operation were "grab whom you must. Do what you want," the report said.

When attacks against coalition forces were on the rise in Iraq last fall, Rumsfeld approved the expansion of the program in Iraq, the report said. The CIA pulled its people from involvement in interrogations at Abu Ghraib in October "because it was out of control," it said.

Interrogation techniques used by US military personnel in Iraq have come under scrutiny following the revelation of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison that has sparked calls for Rumsfeld's resignation and caused anger around the world.

Also Monday, the White House denied accusations that a memo by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales in January 2002 contributed to the Iraqi abuses.

The Newsweek reported that within months of the Sept. 11 attacks, Gonzales sent President George W. Bush a memo about prisoners' rights under the Geneva Conventions, suggesting the new security environment "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the memo did not pertain to Iraq. "We have made it clear that we are bound by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq," he said.

(Xinhua News Agency May 18, 2004)