New York Times
February 16, 2006
UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 16 — United Nations human rights investigators called on the United States today to shut down the Guantánamo Bay camp and give detainees prompt trials or release them.
Arguing that many of the interrogation and detention practices constituted abuses amounting to torture, the report stated, "The United States government should close the Guantánamo Bay detention facilities without further delay."
Even before that occurred, it said, the United States should "refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, discrimination on the basis of religion and violations of the right to health and freedom of religion."
"In particular," it continued, "all special interrogation techniques authorized by the Department of Defense should immediately be revoked."
Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, today called the report a "rehash" of old charges, and said that the military treats all detainees humanely.
"These are dangerous terrorists that we're talking about that are there," he said.
In a response included in an appendix to the 54-page report, the United States noted that the investigators had turned down an invitation to visit Guantánamo Bay, and it rejected the findings and faulted the investigators for using selective information to support their conclusions.
The investigators declined to go to the camp after being told that they would be denied the opportunity to interview detainees.
The report says that the use of excessive force during transportation, force-feeding through nasal tubes during hunger strikes and shackling, chaining and hooding of prisoners, placing them in solitary confinement, subjecting them naked to severe temperatures and threatening them with dogs amounted to torture.
It also expresses "utmost concern" at "attempts by the United States administration to redefine 'torture' in the framework of the struggle against terrorism in order to allow certain interrogation techniques that would not be permitted under the internationally accepted definition of torture."
The United States is holding some 500 detainees at the American naval base on the coast of Cuba and says they are people with direct ties to Al Qaeda or the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The report was based on the work of five United Nations rapporteurs, or experts, specialized in pursuing charges of arbitrary detention and torture and of alleged violations of freedom of religion, the right to health and the independence of judges and lawyers.
They said they based their conclusions on interviews with former detainees in Britain, France and Spain, lawyers representing current inmates, news accounts, reports from non-governmental organizations and answers to a questionnaire submitted to the United States government.
In rejecting many of the conclusions that have emerged this week in news reports on a draft, the United States has stressed that the United Nations investigators never went to Guantánamo Bay.
The investigators had been seeking permission to make the trip since 2002 and obtained permission this fall to go in December. But they turned down the invitation when the United States said they would not be permitted to talk to individual detainees.
Such interviews were a "totally non-negotiable pre-condition" for conducting visits, the investigators said.
The report said that the "executive branch of the United States government operates as judge, prosecutor and defense counsel of the Guantánamo Bay detainees" and asserted that this constituted "serious violations of various guarantees of the right to a fair trial."
The report said that persons who ordered or condoned abusive practices "up to the highest level of military and political command" should be brought to justice and that American personnel should be trained in international standards for treatment of detainees.
It also questioned the medical ethics of doctors who might have participated in or observed abuses.
In a letter dated Jan. 31 that was appended to the report, Kevin E. Moley, the American ambassador to the United Nations offices in Geneva, said the United States categorically objected to most of the report as "largely without merit and not based clearly on facts."
"It selectively includes only those factual assertions needed to support those conclusions and ignores other facts that would undermine those conclusions," Mr. Moley said.
The rapporteurs are independent investigators who report to the Geneva-based Human Rights Commission and have their expenses paid by the United Nations. The commission has come under intense criticism for permitting the membership of notorious rights violators like Sudan and Zimbabwe, and intense efforts are under way in New York to create a credible Human Rights Council to replace the commission by the time it holds its annual meeting next month.
But recommendations for change have spared the rapporteurs, and the United States has cited them in the past as reliable monitors of rights violations. In this case, Mr. McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said Monday that based on what he could tell from leaks of drafts of the report, the rapporteurs had produced a "baseless assertion."
"The United States has tried to work with these individuals, these rapporteurs who have gone around the world and done some good work in other places, but in this case, I'm sorry to say it's just not the case," Mr. McCormack said.