In its annual report  on the state of human rights worldwide, Human Rights Watch on Wednesday accused both the United States and Europe of major violations. Most of its vile, though, was reserved for the Bush Administration, saying that the torture and abuse of terror suspects was part of a "deliberate" and "shameful" White House strategy.

The report, presented in Washington, said that the abuse of prisoners by Americans could not be "reduced to a few bad apples at the bottom of the barrel."

"Responsibility for the use of torture and inhumane treatment can no longer credibly be passed off to misadventures by low-level soldiers on the night shift," wrote Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth in an introduction  accompanying the 500-page tome that offers a human rights progress report for every country, from A-Z.

"In 2005, it became disturbingly clear that the abuse of detainees had become a deliberate, central part of the Bush administration’s strategy for interrogating terrorist suspects," criticized Roth. In order for the Bush administration to "acknowledge the wrongfulness of its interrogation policies and to embrace respect for human rights as a moral, legal and pragmatic imperative," Roth wrote, "pressure will be needed ... from the citizens of the United States and from friends and allies around the world." The willingness to flout human rights to fight terrorism, Roth said, "is not only illegal and wrong; it is also counterproductive."

In the report, Human Rights Watch noted that US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the US Senate that the government is entitled to submit prisoners to cruel, inhumane or humiliating treatment as long as they aren't American citizens and aren't being held in the US.  In addition, CIA director Porter Goss has defended "waterboarding," a method of torture that originated during the Spanish Inquisition, as a "professional interrogation technique."

"Other governments obviously subject detainees to such treatment or worse, but they do so clandestinely," the report continued. "The Bush administration is the only government in the world known to claim this power openly, as a matter of official policy, and to pretend that it is lawful."

The White House, however, defended itself against those claims. The report "appears to be based more on a political agenda than facts," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters. "The United States does more than any country in the world to advance freedom and promote human rights.... The focus should be more on those who are violating human rights and denying people their human rights."

In its human rights report card, the organization is also sharply critical of the European Union . Human Rights Watch claimed the EU continued to have difficulty responding to human rights violations in other countries with appropriately firm measures due to "institutional disarray" and "competing priorities." It also blamed what it called "an opaque decision-making process and lack of leadership among EU members." The organization described the collapse of the planned European constitution, which would have streamlined EU foreign policy, as a "major setback" to having a common and firm response to human rights violations.

Among its criticisms was that Europeans had "largely ignored US rights transgressions," mostly looking the other way, with the exception of a few countries. Germany, it noted, launched investigations into secret CIA flights of suspected terrorists to secret prisons and to third countries for interrogation.

The organization also accused the EU of not doing enough to speak out against human rights violations in Russia or China. Economic interests, it wrote, trumped human rights considerations in relations between Europe and those countries.

In their dealings with Moscow, EU member states shied away from criticism in favor of energy, business and political interests in Russia, which has been accused of curbing free speech and violating human rights. The report accused German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac of competing with each other to butter up to and claim who was closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin.