UNITED NATIONS – Amnesty International singled out America yesterday for human rights violations and accused it of creating an environment that “grants license” to other nations to abuse rights.

In a scathing annual report released yesterday, Amnesty specifically highlighted the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. But critics said that the London-based Amnesty fails to distinguish between democratic systems where human rights abuses are criticized and prosecuted and dictatorial regimes that punish critics.

In a separate report, the New York-based organization Human Rights Watch criticized the FBI’s cooperation with Pakistani authorities on the detention and torture of two American citizens of Pakistani descent. In addition, the Washington Post cites an American Civil Liberties Union report today on new documents released by the FBI, which include interviews with Guantanamo prisoners who complain that guards have mistreated the Koran.

According to Amnesty’s report, American transgressions are highlighted because they cause the spread of human rights violations elsewhere. “When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a license to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity,” the report says.

In the next sentence, however, Amnesty identifies human rights violators “from Israel to Uzbekistan, Egypt to Nepal,” where “governments have openly defied human rights and international humanitarian law in the name of national security and counter-terrorism.” But, according to critics, including three dictatorships in the same category as democratic Israel hurts Amnesty’s credibility.

“While democratic governments, including Israel, should not be immune from analysis criticism, this process must be based on credible sources and avoid political filtering,” said Gerald Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University, who edits the Israeli-based NGO Monitor, published by an organization critical of human rights organizations.

The secretary-general of Amnesty International, Irene Khan, portrays the abuse of prisoners by Americans in the harshest tones yet by a human rights organization, calling for the closure of the Guantanamo detention center altogether. “The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law,” she writes in the introduction to the 308-page report.

The Bush administration “has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to redefine torture,” she writes. “It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding ‘ghost detainees’ [people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention], and the ‘rendering’ or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practice torture.”

The Amnesty report is “ridiculous and unsupported by the facts,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. “We hold people accountable when there’s abuse. We take steps to prevent it from happening again. And we do so in a very public way for the world to see that we lead by example and that we do have values that we hold very dearly and believe in.”

The report cites released detainees who claimed they had been tortured while in American custody in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. “Evidence also emerged that others, including Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and the International Committee of the Red Cross, had found that such abuses had been committed against detainees,” it says.

The Amnesty report surveyed human rights violations worldwide and even included criticism of the U.N. Human Rights Commission. But by highlighting American wrongdoing over other violators, it joined a growing chorus of critics of the Bush administration.

The U.N. chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown, who is perceived as one of Turtle Bay’s most American-friendly officials, criticized America when he spoke at Pace University over the weekend. “This ungainly giant of a nation that has led the world in advancing freedom, democracy, and decency cannot quite accept membership in the global neighborhood association and the principle of all neighborhoods that it must abide by others’ rules as well as its own,” he said.

In another report, the ACLU says documents it obtained from the FBI show that numerous detainees at Guantanamo Bay told FBI interrogators that guards had mistreated copies of the Koran, including one who said in 2002 that guards “flushed a Koran in the toilet,” the Washington Post is reporting.

The ACLU requested the documents as part of an ongoing lawsuit and said yesterday that they include other allegations: that the Koran was kicked, thrown to the floor, and withheld as punishment, and that guards mocked Muslim prisoners during prayers. The release of the documents comes after Newsweek magazine, which is owned by the Washington Post company, retracted a story reporting that an internal military report had confirmed that a Koran was flushed down a toilet.

Separately, the Human Rights Watch report released on Tuesday refers to the case of Zain Afzal, 23, and his brother Kashan, 25, who were detained in a raid on their Karachi home on August 13, 2004. The two were freed on April 22.

“It is outrageous that Pakistan abducts people from their homes in the middle of the night and tortures them in secret prisons to extract confessions,” the Asia director of Human Rights Watch, Brad Adams, told the Associated Press. “The United States should be condemning this, but instead, it either directed this activity or turned a blind eye in the hopes of gaining information in the war on terror.”

Amnesty is even harsher in its assessment of America’s war on terror. “Respect for human rights is the best antidote for ‘terrorism,’ ” Ms. Kahn writes. While Amnesty adds quotation marks to the word, critics say that it fails to distinguish between terrorist groups and the state-controlled armies that fight them. Mr. Steinberg of NGO Monitor uses the example of Amnesty’s repeated reference to Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who had been killed by Israel, as “paralyzed and wheelchair-bound.” The fact that he had directed terror attacks against Israel “is sanitized from Amnesty’s reports,” he says. At the same time, Israel is cited for what Amnesty defines as war crimes, violations of international law, excessive use of force, and crimes against humanity.

Amnesty’s new report, according to NGO Monitor, “erases the distinction between open democratic societies under attack, and ‘fear regimes’ – including terrorist groups – that use violence to pursue their goals.” While it offers a more detailed analysis of violations by Palestinian Arab organizations and “armed groups” than past reports, it “demonstrates that Amnesty’s dominant political and ideological framework has not been reversed.”

While acknowledging that a national approach to human rights “differs from country to country,” a spokeswoman for Amnesty, Alex Arriaga, defended the organization’s “global” approach to human rights. Every nation the organization has criticized has complained, she told The New York Sun.