U.S. Decries Treatment of Evacuees : Gulf crisis: It says some of the 270 Americans who flew home Wednesday were harassed and intimidated by the Iraqis.

The State Department expressed outrage today over Iraqi intimidation and harassment of the latest planeload of evacuees from Iraq and Baghdad.

State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said that a chartered 747 left Basra, in southern Iraq, on Wednesday with about 320 people, about 270 American citizens and the rest foreign-born members of their families.

The evacuees are now in London, recovering from what was described as a long ordeal without food and water, punctuated by constant interrogation and threats by Iraqi soldiers.

The evacuees, originally scheduled to arrive in the United States late this afternoon, will be flown to Raleigh-Durham (N.C.) Airport on Friday instead.

“We are profoundly disturbed by several aspects of yesterday’s evacuation,” Tutwiler said.

She said the Iraqis did not allow a U.S. Embassy representative to accompany the evacuees from Kuwait to Basra.

She said the Iraqis also reneged on their promise to provide a representative from the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs to assist the bus convoy from Kuwait.

Ten buses left Kuwait on Wednesday for what should have been a three-hour ride that turned into a 10-hour ordeal for the passengers, many of them infants.

Tutwiler said the buses, instead of taking the direct route to Basra, were redirected by the Iraqis to a hotel in Kuwait City, where the passengers were herded into rooms and interrogated for three hours.

An unknown number of passengers, suspecting they were going to be permanently detained, left the buses and returned to their homes.

When the buses were allowed to proceed, Iraqi soldiers again interrogated passengers at the border for another three hours.

Tutwiler said there was no food or water available and that some of the passengers said they were threatened with weapons by the Iraqi soldiers.

At Basra, the Iraqi authorities challenged the documentation of seven of the evacuees and refused them permission to leave.

Tutwiler said that when the plane arrived in Baghdad, an ill American man, an American woman, her Jordanian husband and their two children were removed from the plane and were reportedly taken to a hotel.