Amnesty International's description of the US detention facility at Guantánamo Bay as “the gulag of our time” was “reprehensible”, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, said on Wednesday.

Mr Rumsfeld, who has been criticised over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and for permitting aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantánamo, was responding to comments published by the human rights group in its annual report last week.