Washington, Sep 8 (PTI) The Human Rights Watch has flayed US President George W Bush's "defence" of detainee abuses, saying these violated basic global standards and were an attempt to justify "grossly abusive" treatment.

In his White House address yesterday, Bush had admitted the existence of CIA-run secret prisons for the first time and had said that he has ordered the transfer of some terror suspects, including those behind the September 11, 2001 terror strikes from these facilities to Guantanamo Bay.

Bush had also touched upon the "alternative set of procedures" of interrogation seen by the HRW as an attempt to justify "grossly abusive" treatment.

"Detainees in the custody of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been "disappeared" and by numerous credible reports, tortured.

"While the Bush administration's announcement that it transferred 14 so-called high-value detainees from CIA to military custody is an important step forward, one that Human Rights Watch has long called for this advance is limited by the president's stated intention of leaving the door open for future CIA detentions," the HRW said in a statement.

"President Bush's speech was a full-throated defence of the CIA's detention programme and of the "alternative procedures" that the CIA has used to extract information from detainees.

"Although the president adamantly denied that the U.S. government uses torture, the United States has used practices such as waterboarding that can only be called torture," Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of the HRW said.