NEW YORK: As Amnesty International urged the George W. Bush administration to close Guantánamo and disclose the situation in the USA’s shadowy network of detention centers around the globe,” a subsidiary of Halliburton, the oil services group once led by US Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, won a 30-million-dollar contract to help build a new permanent prison for terror suspects at the US Navy’s controversial detention centre in Cuba.

The Pentagon said that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root would be building a two-story jail with air conditioning and exercise and medical facilities.

The plan is seen as a sign that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld plans to keep the jail in operation, despite a growing chorus of criticism and mixed signals from the White House. Amnesty International, the human rights advocacy group, drew world attention to the Guantanamo facility in its recently released annual report, which referred to the detention facility as “the gulag of our times”.

The organisation said keeping the prison open was the “wrong decision and will fuel worldwide concern over the stories of torture and ill-treatment, religious humiliation and arbitrary detention that are seeping from the facility.”

Amnesty said the Bush administration “plans to memorialise in bricks and mortar its decision to operate outside of the law,” according to Curt Goering, senior deputy executive director.

The group called for “an independent investigation into US policies and practices on detention and interrogation, including torture and ill-treatment, (which) would reassure the world that the US administration has nothing to hide.”

Key lawmakers have said they will press Congress to intervene in detainee policies despite the administration’s claim that running the detention camp is the province of the executive branch and the military.

“This has become the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting terrorists around the world,” said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has proposed that an independent 9/11-type commission investigate Guantánamo Bay and make recommendations.

Former president Jimmy Carter has also added his voice to those urging the US to close the camp. “The US continues to suffer terrible embarrassment and a blow to our reputation... because of reports concerning abuses of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo,” Carter said.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham, a conservative Republican from South Carolina and former military judge, suggested that Congress develop “some statutory provisions defining enemy combatant status and standardising intelligence-gathering techniques and detention policies.”

Pentagon and Justice Department officials have defended the administration, saying the approximately 520 detainees are not covered by legal protections. —Dawn/IPS News Service