LONDON, Jan 21: Dramatic pictures of gagged and manacled Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at a US prison camp in Cuba have stirred controversy in Europe and the Middle East.
Media commentators and human rights advocates say the images have shifted the focus of moral condemnation from the carnage of the Sept 11 attacks on the United States to the makeshift Guantanamo Bay penal colony.
“(The images) should raise questions with all people who are attached to human rights. We’re supposed to be better than terrorists,” said the president of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly, Lord David Russell-Johnston.
However, most governments have made no comment on the photographs, released by the US government at the weekend. They showed the prisoners in orange overalls, wearing black-out goggles, ear muffs and surgical face masks, kneeling in open-air cages with their wrists and ankles tightly shackled.
Hafez Abu Se’da, chairman of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights, said the United States was violating international human rights standards.
“What we’re seeing is suffering, and it is against human rights principles all over the world. We all expect the United States to respect human rights,” he said.
Media in Britain, America’s top ally in its war in Afghanistan, were the most vocal in condemning the treatment of the detainees, three of whom are Britons.
London’s left-leaning Mirror newspaper featured a full-page colour picture of the captives and asked Prime Minister Tony Blair: “What the hell are your doing in OUR name, Mister Blair?”
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said on Sunday that Britain wanted an explanation from the United States about the pictures.
But Blair’s spokesman on Monday said the British detainees had “no complaints” about their treatment or the facilities in Cuba. A British delegation visited its detainees on Friday.
Yemen has asked the United States for access to 17 Yemeni men held in the camp to check on their condition, a Yemeni official said on Monday.
The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, a London-based charity, said precautions taken by the US military “were unnecessarily humiliating and degrading”.
“Winning a war does not entitle the victor to humiliate the vanquished,” said Sherman Carroll, the foundation’s public affairs director.
GUANTANAMO TRANSFER: The US military has transferred nearly 150 prisoners to Guantanamo Bay since last week and several hundred more are being held in Afghanistan.
The United States has not classified its captives as prisoners of war, a label which carries specific rights under the Geneva Convention. Both the Red Cross and U.N. human rights chief Mary Robinson consider the captives prisoners of war.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has dismissed criticism over the handling of the detainees, who he said were “extremely dangerous”.
“I think that the people who have been the most shrill on the subject, once they have more knowledge of the subject, will stop being so shrill,” Rumsfeld said on Sunday.
At Camp X-Ray, the prisoners are held in 2-metre by 2.6-metre enclosures with roofs and floors but only chain-link walls until more permanent structures are built.
The London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission said the treatment of the prisoners was “reminiscent of the treatment meted out in concentration camps”.
“This is the type of action that Nazis would be proud of,” IHRC Chairman Massoud Shadjareh said.