The US government is running an "archipelago" of prisons around the world, many of them secret camps into which people are being "literally disappeared," a top Amnesty International official said yesterday.

AI Executive Director William Schulz criticised the administration of US President George W. Bush for holding alleged opponents in "indefinite incommunicado detention" without access to lawyers in an interview with Fox News yesterday.

The right's group representative was pressed to substantiate Amnesty's claim that the prison camp at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- where hundreds of foreign terror suspects are being held indefinitely -- represents the "gulag of our times."

The gulag claim, referring to the notorious prison camps of the Soviet Union, has been fiercely criticised by Bush -- who called the claim "absurd" -- Vice President

Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top US officials.

Schulz said the gulag reference was not "an exact or a literal analogy."

"But there are some similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared -- held in indefinite incommunicado detention without access to lawyers," Schulz said.

Asked to explain the "moral equivalency" between the detentions of millions of Soviet citizens in the original gulag system and purported anti-US combatants taken on the battlefield, Schulz replied that some of those held in Guantanamo "happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"We do know that at least some of the 200 some prisoners who have been released from Guantanamo Bay have made pretty persuasive

cases that they were imprisoned there, not because they were involved in military conflict but simply because they were enemies of the Northern Alliance," he said.

Schulz called for an official probe into the alleged rights abuses at US detention centres around the globe.

The United States "should be the one that should investigate those who are alleged at least to be architects of torture, not just the foot soldiers who may have inflicted the torture directly, but those who authorized it or or encouraged it or provided rationales for it or in the case of Rumsfeld, provided the exact rules, 27 of them in fact, for interrogations, some of which do constitute torture or cruel, inhumane treatment," Schulz said.

The New York Times newspaper said Sunday that the Guantanamo Bay prison should be closed down by the Bush administration, saying it had become "a national shame" and a "propaganda gift to America's enemies."