CAIRO, November 8, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Being the most unpopular political figure in the world, US President George Bush should end his administration's disastrous experiment with officially sanctioned torture, the American Newsweek magazine says in its latest version.

"Ask any American soldier in Iraq when the general population really turned against the United States and he will say, ‘Abu Ghraib,’" wrote Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria writes in the edition which hits newsstands on Monday, November 14.

He recalls that a few months before the abuse scandal broke upon the world scene, Coalition Provisional Authority polls showed Iraqi support for the occupation at 63 percent.

A month after Abu Ghraib, the number was 9 percent, notes Zakaria, who has been overseeing Newsweek's eight editions throughout Asia, Latin America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East since 2001.

The Abu Ghraib scandal gained international notoriety in 2004 after the CBS news network published several graphic photos of Iraqi detainees tortured and sexually abused by American soldiers at the Baghdad-based prison.

Several photographs taken in late 2003 at the prison showed detainees wearing women's underwear on their heads, detainees shackled to their cell doors or beds in awkward positions, and naked detainees standing before female soldiers.

Bush has threatened to veto a bill that would prohibit cruel treatment of detainees.

The torture incidents, Zakaria writes, clearly go well beyond Abu Ghraib.

He said that during the past few months, declassified documents and testimony from army officers make abundantly clear that torture and abuse of prisoners is something that has become quite widespread since 9/11.

The most recent evidence comes from autopsies of 44 prisoners who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan in US custody.

Most died under circumstances that suggest torture, as the reports use words like "strangulation," "asphyxiation" and "blunt force injuries."

Even the "natural" deaths were caused by "Arteriosclerotic Cardiovascular disease"—in other words, sudden heart attacks.

The Human Rights Watch has revealed that US troops routinely subjected Iraqi detainees to severe beatings and other cruel and inhumane treatment as a "way of sport" or just to "relieve stress".

Calling them the "black sites," The Washington Post revealed on Wednesday, November 2, that American was hiding detainees in secret CIA-run prisons in at least eight countries, including several eastern European democracies.

Once calling Guantanamo the "gulag of our time," Amnesty International said in a recent report that this prison has become a "symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that is betraying the best US values."

Zakaria maintains that while such scandals sully America's image in the world, the lack of accountability adds insult to the injury.

"What angers friends of America abroad is not that abuses like those at Abu Ghraib happened. What angers them is that no one beyond a few 'little people' have been punished."

The system has not been overhauled, he asserts.

He notes that even now after all that has happened, the White House is spending time, effort and precious political capital in a strange, stubborn and surely futile quest to preserve the option to torture.

Bush must end the officially sanctioned torture if he wants to improve his image at home and abroad.

"And it doesn't require that Karen Hughes go anywhere," writes Zakaria.

Hughes, the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs and a close confidante of Bush, has been touring Muslim countries as part of efforts to polish the image of the US.

Bush, who maintained Monday that Americans "do not torture," has threatened to veto a measure sponsored by Republican Senator John McCain that would prohibit cruel treatment of detainees.