The atrocity of US troops abusing Iraqi POWs exposed the infringement of human rights of foreign nationals by the United States, according to the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004.

The report, released by the Information Office of China's State Council on Thursday, said that according to US media like the Newsweek and the Washington Post, as early as several years ago, in US forces' prisons in Afghanistan, interrogators used various kinds of torture tools for acquiring confession, causing many deaths.

The International Committee of the Red Cross believed that abuse of detained Iraqis in the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison was not a single case and it was a systematic behavior, the report said.

According to the report, at least 107 children were imprisoned in seven prisons including the Abu Ghraib Prison run by the US forces. They were not allowed to get in contact with their families. Their term in prison was undetermined. It was not clear when they were going to be brought court hearing. Some of these children had been abused.

The report said, to avoid international scrutiny, the United States keeps under wraps half of its 20-odd detention centers worldwide which are holding terrorist suspects. And at least seven US-controlled clandestine prisons, one of which dubbed "inferno," in Afghanistan, have not been kept within the bounds of law.

In a report by the Human Rights First on 24 US secret interrogation centers, these secret facilities are believed to "make inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely but virtually inevitable," the report quoted a British newspaper, the Times, as saying.

The US military spending has kept shooting up, with its fiscal 2005 defense budget hitting a historical high of 422 billion US dollars, an increase of 21 billion dollars over fiscal 2004, according to the report.

As the biggest arms dealer in the world, the United States has made a fortune out of war. Its transactions of conventional weapons exceeded 14.5 billion dollars in 2003, up 900 million dollars year-on-year and accounting for 56.7 percent of the total sales worldwide. The Iraq War has been "a helping straw" to the US economic development, the report said.

The report points out that the United States frequently commits wanton slaughters during external invasions and military attacks. Statistics from the health department of the interim Iraqi government show 3,487 people, including 328 women and children, have been killed and another 13,720 injured in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces between April 15 and Sept. 19 in 2004.

A survey on Iraqi civilian deaths, based on the natural death rate before the war, estimates that the US-led invasion might have led to 100,000 more deaths in the country, with most victims being women and children, the report said.

Jointly designed and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, the survey also finds that the majority of the additional, unnatural deaths since the invasion were caused by violence, while air strikes from the coalition forces were the main factor to blame for the violence-caused deaths, according to the report.

In addition, the US troops often plunder Iraqi households when tracking down anti-US militants since the invasion. The American forces have so far committed at least thousands of robberies and 90 percent of the Iraqis that have been rummaged are innocent, the report said.

The report said that the United States should reflect on its erroneous behavior on human rights and take its own human rights problems seriously instead of indulging itself in publishing the "human rights country report" to censure other countries unreasonably.