U.S. Rejects Guantanamo Report
UNITED NATIONS — The White House on Thursday rejected a United Nations report that says the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center should be closed and that U.S. treatment of detainees in some cases amounted to torture, calling it a "rehash" of old allegations.
The report concludes that combinations of interrogation techniques, brutal force feeding, and excessive violence in transporting prisoners violated their right to physical and mental health. The report was officially released Thursday, but its contents were reported by The Times on Monday.
The release came as previously unpublished pictures of abused prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad circulated internationally. The two events prompted U.S. officials to emphasize that the American military treats prisoners humanely and to assert that the U.N. team been taken in by disinformation spread by terrorist groups.
"We know that these are dangerous terrorists that are being kept at Guantanamo Bay," White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said. "They are trained to provide false information, and Al Qaeda training manuals talk about ways to disseminate false information and hope to get attention."
In addition to detailing allegations of abuse, the report urges the United States to quickly prosecute or release the nearly 500 people who have been held at Guantanamo since 2002 without charge as "enemy combatants."
In four years, the report notes, the cases of only nine detainees have been reviewed by a military commission, whose validity is still being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The U.S. says those at Guantanamo and other detention centers are not entitled to prisoner of war status because they are terrorists and illegal combatants.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he supported the report's conclusion that the prisoners should be quickly tried or released. The U.S. should close the prison "as soon as possible," he said.
The report notes particular concern with the forced feeding of hunger strikers. Detainees said long nasal tubes were brutally inserted and removed twice a day, causing intense pain, bleeding and vomiting.
The U.N.-appointed independent investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, said this week that detainees' lawyers had reported a resurgence in early January of intentionally painful forced feedings, a practice the International Red Cross and the World Medical Assn. say amounts to torture.
