UNITED NATIONS, Feb 14: Five UN human rights experts recommended the United States close down Guantanamo Bay after concluding the forced-feeding of detainees and other interrogation techniques amounted to acts of torture, according to a draft report obtained on Monday.
Washington denounced the report, saying the authors never visited the camp and based their document on rumors.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack complained that the authors wrote the report without seeing the prison.
“When people hear these press reports about these outcomes and when they actually view the final report, I would urge them to look at it in the context of the fact that nobody who wrote this report actually went to Guantanamo,” Mr McCormack said.
“So this is baseless assertion, at least what we have seen so far,” he said.
The 38-page report accused the United States of denying prisoners the right to due process and attempting to reinterpret some interrogation methods as not constituting torture.
“The US government should close Guantanamo Bay detention facilities without further delay,” the report said. “The US government should either expeditiously bring all Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial ... or release them without further delay.”
The report was first published by the Los Angeles Times in its Monday editions.
It is the product of an 18-month investigation ordered by the UN Commission on Human Rights and was based on interviews by the investigators with former prisoners, their lawyers and families rather than on-site visits.
The UN team rejected an invitation to tour the US naval base in Cuba, where more than 500 people have been held since the Sept 11, 2001, attacks in the United States because they would not have been allowed to interview the prisoners.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack criticised the draft UN report as hearsay.
“Just because they decided not to take up the US government on the offer to go to Guantanamo Bay does not automatically give (them) the right to publish a report that is merely hearsay and not based on fact,” Mr McCormack said.
The report said the mental health of the detainees, resulting from isolation and other factors, violated their right to health. It said the UN team was particularly concerned about the force feeding of hunger strikers through nasal tubes, which caused intense pain, bleeding and vomiting.
“The excessive violence used in many cases during transportation ... and forced feeding of detainees on hunger strike must be assessed as amounting to torture,” the report said.
Of the five envoys, Washington invited only three to Guantanamo last year — Austria’s Manfred Nowak, special investigator on torture; Pakistan’s Asma Jahangir, who focuses on religious freedom; and Algeria’s Leila Zerrougui, who looks into arbitrary detention.
It did not accept Argentina’s Leandro Despouy, special investigator on the independence of judges and lawyers; and New Zealand’s Paul Hunt, special rapporteur on mental and physical health, who were included in the UN request.—Reuters/AFP
