U.N. Tells U.S. To Shut Down Cuban Prison Camp

GENEVA -- The United States must close its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay because it is effectively a torture camp where prisoners have no access to justice, a U.N. report released Thursday concluded.

The 54-page report summarizing an investigation by five U.N. experts accused the United States of practices that "amount to torture" and demanded detainees be allowed a fair trial or freed. The investigators did not visit the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"Those people should be released or brought before an independent court," Manfred Nowak, the U.N. investigator for torture, told The Associated Press. "That should not be done in Guantanamo Bay, but before ordinary U.S. courts, or courts in their countries of origin or perhaps an international tribunal."

The United States should allow "a full and independent investigation" at Guantanamo and also give the United Nations access to other detention centers, including secret ones, in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, Nowak said by telephone from his office in Vienna, Austria.

"We want to have all information about secret places of detention because whenever there is a secret place of detention, there is also a higher risk that people are subjected to torture," he said.

The United States is holding about 490 men at the military detention center. They are accused of links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime or to al-Qaida, but only a handful have been charged.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan rejected the call to shut the camp, saying the military treats all detainees humanely and "these are dangerous terrorists that we're talking about."

The U.N. investigators said photographic evidence - corroborated by testimony of former prisoners - showed detainees shackled, chained and hooded. Prisoners were beaten, stripped and shaved if they resisted, they said.

The report's findings were based on interviews with former detainees, public documents, media reports, lawyers and questions answered by the U.S. government, which detailed the number of prisoners held but did not give their names or the status of charges against them.

Some of the interrogation techniques - particularly the use of dogs, exposure to extreme temperatures, sleep deprivation and prolonged isolation - caused extreme suffering.

"Such treatment amounts to torture, as it inflicts severe pain or suffering on the victims for the purpose of intimidation and/or punishment," the report said.

The U.N. experts who wrote the report had sought access to Guantanamo Bay since 2002. Three were invited last year, but refused in November after being told they could not interview detainees.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the U.N. report "clearly suffers from their unwillingness to take us up on our offer to go down to Guantanamo to observe first-hand the operations."

The International Committee of the Red Cross is the only independent monitoring body allowed to visit Guantanamo's detainees, but it reports its findings solely to U.S. authorities.

Legislators and journalists have been allowed in on guided tours but few are permitted to see interrogations.

The U.S. ambassador to U.N. offices in Geneva, Kevin Moley, wrote in a response that the investigation had taken little account of evidence provided by the United States.

"We categorically object to most of the unedited report's content and conclusions as largely without merit and not based clearly in the facts," Moley said.

Although his statement did not address specific allegations, the Pentagon has acknowledged 10 cases of abuse or mistreatment at Guantanamo, including a female interrogator climbing onto a detainee's lap and a detainee whose knees were bruised from being forced to kneel repeatedly.

In Strasbourg, France, the European Parliament condemned the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and renewed its calls for the detention center to be closed.

"The United States also operates detention facilities at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq and has been implicated in the use of secret detention facilities in other countries," an Amnesty statement said.

Many of the allegations in the report have been made before. But the document represented the first inquiry launched by the 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission, the world body's top rights watchdog.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric stressed it was compiled by independent experts. Asked whether Secretary General Kofi Annan endorsed the panel's findings, Dujarric said: "The secretary-general has often said, and repeatedly said, that there is a need for proper understanding and effective balance between action against terrorism and the protection of civil liberties and human rights."

Letter dated 31 January 2006, addressed to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, by the Permanent Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva.

“We have received your letter dated January 16, 2006, enclosing an advance unedited copy of the report of four Special Rapporteurs and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on the situation of detainees in Guantanamo Bay (“Unedited Report”). Your letter asked for any factual clarifications regarding the Unedited Report by January 31 and noted that “changes made will not be of a substantive nature.”

The United States Government regrets that it has not received sufficient opportunity to provide a fuller response to the factual and legal assertions and conclusions in the Unedited Report. Despite the substantial informational material presented by the United States to the Special Rapporteurs in 2005 regarding Guantanamo and the offer to three of the Special Rapporteurs to visit the facility to observe first hand the conditions of detention, there is little evidence in the Unedited Report that the Special Rapporteurs have considered the information provided by the United States. We offered the Special Rapporteurs unprecedented access to Guantanamo, similar to that which we provide to U.S. congressional delegations. It is particularly unfortunate that the Special Rapporteurs rejected the invitation and that their Unedited Report does not reflect the direct, personal knowledge that this visit would have provided. Rather, the Unedited Report is presented as a set of conclusions -- it selectively includes only those factual assertions needed to support those conclusions and ignores other facts that would undermine those conclusions. As a result, we categorically object to most of the Unedited Report’s content and conclusions as largely without merit and not based clearly in the facts.

An example of this problematic approach is how the Unedited Report deals with the force-feeding of detainees. The U.S. Government has provided information that in the case of detainees who have gone on hunger strikes, Guantanamo authorities have authorized involuntary feeding arrangements, monitored by health care professionals, to preserve the life and health of the detainees. Rather than reporting the factual information provided by the United States on when and how involuntary feeding is authorized and how it is carried out, the Unedited Report simply states categorically that “excessive force was used routinely” for this purpose and that “some of the methods used for force feeding definitely amount to torture.” This is untrue, and no such methods are described in the Unedited Report. Moreover, it is bewildering to the United States Government that its practice of preserving the life and health of detainees is roundly condemned by the Special Rapporteurs and is presented as a violation of their human rights and of medical ethics.

We are equally troubled by the Unedited Report’s analysis of the legal regime governing Guantanamo detention. Nowhere does the report set out clearly the legal regime that applies according to U.S. law. The United States has made clear its position that it is engaged in a continuing armed conflict against Al Qaida, that the law of war applies to the conduct of that war and related detention operations, and that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, by its express terms, applies only to “individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction.” (ICCPR Article 2(1)). The Report’s legal analysis rests on the flawed position that the ICCPR applies to Guantanamo detainees because the United States “is not currently engaged in an international armed conflict between two Parties to the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions.” This, of course, leads to a manifestly absurd result; that is, during an ongoing armed conflict, unlawful combatants receive more procedural rights than would lawful combatants under the Geneva Conventions. Numerous other discussions in the Unedited Report are similarly flawed.

The United States is a country of laws with an open system of constitutional government by checks and balances, and an independent judiciary and press. These issues are fully and publicly debated and litigated in the United States. To preserve the objectivity and authority of their own Report, the Special Rapporteurs should review and present objective and comprehensive material on all sides of an issue before stating their own conclusions. Instead, the Special Rapporteurs appear to have reached their own conclusions and then presented an advocate’s brief in support of them. In the process they have relied on international human rights instruments, declarations, standards, or general comments of treaty bodies without serious analysis of whether the instruments by their terms apply extraterritorially; whether the United States is a State Party -- or has filed reservations or understandings -- to the instrument; whether the instrument, declaration, standard or general comment is legally binding or not; or whether the provisions cited have the meaning ascribed to them in the Unedited Report. This is not the basis on which international human rights mechanisms should act.

The Special Rapporteurs have not provided a meaningful opportunity to the United States to consult on the draft report or to rebut factual and legal assertions and conclusions with which we fundamentally disagree. The United States reserves the opportunity to reply in full to the final Report, but in the meantime requests that this letter be attached to the Report as an interim reply.

Regards,” Signed: Kevin Edward Moley Ambassador Permanent Representative of the United States of America

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