NEW YORK, Feb 18: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday angrily rejected UN charges of abuse at America’s Guantanamo Bay detention camp and said the UN chief was “just flat wrong” to call for its closure.
“There is no torture, there is no abuse,” Mr Rumsfeld said at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “It’s being handled honourably.”
Secretary General Kofi Annan on Thursday called for the closure of Guantanamo “as soon as possible,” saying that people could not be held in perpetuity without charges or a chance to defend themselves.
“I know Kofi Annan and there are a lot of things you can agree with him on, but he’s just flat wrong,” Rumsfeld said.
“We shouldn’t close Guantanamo,” he said. “We have several hundred terrorists, bad people, people if they went back out on the field would try to kill Americans.”
“To close that place, and pretend there’s no problem, just isn’t realistic,” he said.
A report by the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva made public this week said inmates at the detention centre had been abused and that it should be closed.
The UN human rights experts who wrote the report were invited to Guantanamo but declined after US authorities said they would not be permitted to interview the inmates.
But Rumsfeld angrily denounced Annan and the authors of the report for calling for its closure without having been there.
“He hasn’t been to Guantanamo Bay,” he said of Annan, adding that hundreds of others had visited, including US lawmakers, journalists, foreigners and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
“That place is being run as well as any detention centre can be run,” he said.
Rumsfeld defended the decision to deny the UN human rights investigators access to the prisoners.
“If you start letting every single person who wants to go in and interview these people, then you can’t manage a facility like that,” he said.
“They are trying to get information from these people about what’s going on in the world of terrorism.”
About 500 war-on-terror detainees are held at the maximum security prison located in an isolated corner of a US naval base in Cuba.
“Every once in a while someone pops up and gets some press for saying, ‘Oh, let’s close Guantanamo Bay.’ Well if someone has a better idea, I’d like to hear it,” Rumsfeld said.
“We didn’t come up with a rule that throughout history combatants are kept off the battlefield so they can’t go back and do it again,” he said.
He said 15 detainees who were released from Guantanamo had gone back to the battlefield.
“The idea you could just open the gates and say, ‘Gee, fellas, you’re all just wonderful,’ is just not realistic,” he said.
Rumsfeld’s comments came in a question and answer session after a speech in which portrayed the media as easily manipulated by al-Qaeda and that outlined plans for radically revamping the way the US military communicates with the public. —AFP