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24 June 2005 US quiet as UN seeks Guantanamo visit
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?ID=11537
ISN SECURITY WATCH (24/06/05) - UN human rights experts seeking to visit the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said on Thursday that they had obtained credible information that suspected extremists being held there have been tortured.
According to news agency reports, four independent UN experts said the US administration had failed to respond to their requests to examine the condition of suspects in detention at Guantanamo Bay and at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.The last request was made a year ago and renewed in April.
Some 500 suspected extremists, whom the US refers to as “enemy combatants”, are being held at Guantanamo.The experts - all members of the 53-member UN Human Rights Commission - said that their request to visit the facilities was “based on information, from reliable sources, of serious allegations of torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees, arbitrary detention, violations of their right to health, and their due process rights”.
Torture expert Manfred Nowak told reporters he had heard numerous allegations of the torture and ill-treatment of detainees at Guantanamo.“At a certain point, you have to take well-founded allegations as proven in the absence of a clear explanation by the government concerned,” he told a news conference, adding that Washington’s failure to respond had led the experts to conclude that the US government had something to hide.
UN investigators said they would conduct their own investigation on Guantanamo and draw up a report by the end of the year.Brooks Robinson, the spokeswoman for the US mission to UN offices in Geneva, said the response had been delayed because of Washington’s review process, which she said was “thorough and independent” and involved the government, Congress, and the US judicial system.
“It is true there is no answer yet to their request, but the main point is that their request is being addressed and discussed and reviewed in the US,” Robinson told reporters.
Last week, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended US policy at Guantanamo, saying: “Arguably, no detention facility in the history of warfare has been more transparent or received more scrutiny than Guantanamo.”
Earlier this month, Amnesty International also requested permission to visit the prison, which it has compared to the Soviet Union’s Gulag prison camps.So far, only the International Committee of the Red Cross has been allowed to visit detainees at Guantanamo, but the organization keeps its findings confidential.
Also on Thursday, Reuters reported that military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay may have violated medical privacy, as well as professional and legal standards at the prison. The allegations came after the New England Journal of Medicine said interviews with medical personnel at the prison showed that detainees’ health records could be used against them to find the most effective way to extract information during interrogation.
The Pentagon’s top health official called the allegation “an outrageous distortion” of reality.
“Health information has been routinely available to behavioral science consultants and others who are responsible for crafting and carrying out interrogation strategies,” the US medical journal wrote.
In a related development on Wednesday, the White House rejected calls by opposition Democrats for an independent commission to probe allegations of detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay, saying that the Defense Department was already conducting its own investigation.
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