WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Sunday strongly defended the military's treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, calling the prison, which has been harshly criticized by human rights organizations and others, a "model facility."
Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers rejected criticism leveled last week by Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, in its annual report on abuses across the globe.
Amnesty called Guantanamo's prison camp "the gulag of our time" and urged the Bush administration to shut down the facility, which was opened after the Sept. 11attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Since those attacks, the U.S. has taken 68,000 suspects into custody, Myers said, and has held them in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. He said the military had investigated 325 cases of alleged abuse and found 100 of them to have merit.
In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," the general said 100 "individuals" had been court-martialed or had administrative action taken against them as a result of abuse allegations.
Myers called Amnesty's likening of U.S. treatment of Guantanamo prisoners to the former Soviet government's abuse of inmates in the gulag "absolutely irresponsible."
The general said the military spent $2.5 million annually to ensure that the meals served to Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo were "proper, Muslim-approved food." He also said the military had distributed 1,300 copies of the Koran, Islam's holy book, in 13 languages to detainees.
Myers repeated the Pentagon's assertion that an ongoing military investigation had found five cases in which "perhaps the Koran was handled in an inappropriate way" by prison guards or interrogators at Guantanamo. Military investigators reported Thursday that they had found "no credible evidence" to support a detainee's claim that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet at the prison.
Noting that the International Committee of the Red Cross "has been at Guantanamo since Day 1," Myers insisted that "it is a model facility."
The ICRC, however, has in the past also criticized conditions at the prison at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, where the United States is detaining about 540 prisoners from 40 nations who are suspected of involvement in terrorism. Some prisoners have been held for as many as three years without legal representation.
