WASHINGTON, June 3: The United States should open its detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere to human rights investigators if it wants to dispute allegations of abuse, Amnesty International said on Thursday.
The group released a report last week comparing the camps to Soviet-era gulags, and urged Washington to close down Guantanamo prison camp, where some 540 men accused of links to Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban and the al Qaeda terror network are held.
At a White House news conference on Tuesday President Bush dismissed the comparison to gulags as “absurd” and rejected Amnesty’s criticism of America’s human rights record.
In a statement issued in Washington on Thursday, Amnesty International said President Bush had again failed to address longstanding concerns regarding US detention policies and practices in the context of the ‘war on terror.’
Irene Khan, secretary-general of the London-based human rights group, challenged Washington to prove its case by opening the camps to outside scrutiny.
“Our answer is very simple ... open up the detention centres, allow us and others to visit them,” she told reporters. “Transparency is the best antidote to misinformation or incorrect facts.”
Ms Khan also defended the organization’s choice of the word ‘gulag.’ “We wanted to send a strong message that ... (the detention centres) are actually undermining human rights in a very dramatic way,” she said.
There has been widespread criticism of the Guantanamo Bay operation, which began in January 2002 with the arrival of prisoners captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Citing the US military prison at Guantanamo, Amnesty International said it was only the visible part of the problem.
Evidence continues to mount that the United States operates a network of detention centres where people are held in secret or outside any proper legal framework — from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond, the statement said.
Amnesty called for the Bush administration to end all secret and incommunicado detentions, and grant the International Committee of the Red Cross full access to all detainees including those held in secret locations.