The US on Monday rebuffed a draft UN report on the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay as flawed and one-sided because the investigators refused to visit the facility.
An 18-month investigation for the UN Human Rights Commission concludes that some US treatment of detainees at the military base on Cuba amounted to torture, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Allegations cited in the draft report include violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, excessive violence in transporting some prisoners and combinations of interrogation techniques, the newspaper said on Monday.
"We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the US government," the paper quoted one of the human-rights investigators, Manfred Nowak, as saying.
"But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and convention on human rights and torture."
US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack criticized the investigators for refusing a US offer to tour Guantanamo after being told they would have no access to detainees.
He accused the UN team of taking statements by people who have left Guantanamo and their lawyers as fact.
"These are people who never went to Guantanamo Bay," McCormack said in Washington. "So this is baseless assertion, at least what we have seen so far."
"And, as we have seen over the past year, there have been a number of baseless claims about what went on at Guantanamo," he said.
McCormack cautioned that the final version of the Guantanamo report, expected to be unveiled this week at the commission's annual meeting in Geneva, was still being drafted.
But he explicitly rejected one of the reported conclusions, saying that feeding of hunger-striking prisoners at Guantanamo complies with "accepted international practice" and "is done by medical professionals in a humane way."
The Pentagon last November cleared Nowak and at least four other human rights rapporteurs working for the Geneva commission to visit Guantanamo.
They turned it down because they were denied direct access and interviews with detainees, which they said were contrary to UN human-rights investigations.
The UN investigators then compiled the report based on interviews with former Guantanamo detainees, their lawyers and families and US officials.
The New York Times reported last week that US military authorities at Guantanamo had begun a program to force-feed detainees who were on hunger strike by strapping them on chairs for hours each day and preventing them from vomiting.
The Times said US military officials had expressed concern that the detainees were becoming more difficult to control and some of them had threatened to commit suicide to protest the long detention.
Lieutenant Colonel Jeremy Martin, a Guantanamo spokesman, told the Times that the number of hunger strikers had dropped from 84 in December to four now. Martin also said the force-feeding was done "in a humane and compassionate manner."
Two-year-old Xu Haoyang (徐灝洋) has likely just months to live — but the only medicine that can help his rare genetic condition is not found anywhere in China and closed borders due to the COVID-19 pandemic mean that he cannot travel for treatment. Instead, his desperate father, Xu Wei (徐偉), has created a home laboratory to create a remedy for the boy himself. “I didn’t really have time to think about whether to do it or not. It had to be done,” the 30-year-old said from his DIY lab in an apartment building in southwestern Kunming. Haoyang has Menkes syndrome, a genetic disorder
BURNING, LOOTING: The demonstrators called for Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare to step down over failure to deliver infrastructure, among other complaints Solomon Islands police yesterday fired tear gas in the capital, Honiara, as crowds of protesters set fire to buildings, including a police station, and looted shops in an eruption of anger at the government, Radio New Zealand (RNZ) reported. The protest was led by people from the Pacific nation’s largest island, Malaita Province, about 120km from the capital. They were demanding that Solomon Island Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare step down over failure to deliver promised infrastructure among other complaints, RNZ said. The protest began peacefully, but most schools and businesses in Honiara were closed by the afternoon as crowds tried to enter the
MOBS, TEAR GAS: Anti-government protests deteriorated and led to looting and arson, as the Pacific nation’s PM said he regretted a return to the country’s ‘dark days’ Rioters torched buildings in the Solomon Islands’ capital of Honiara yesterday, targeting the city’s Chinatown district in a second day of anti-government protests. Eyewitnesses and local media reported that crowds had defied a government lockdown to take to the streets. Live images showed several buildings engulfed in flames and plumes of thick black smoke billowing high above the capital. It followed widespread disorder on Wednesday, when demonstrators attempted to storm parliament and depose Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare. Businesses operated by Honiara’s Chinese community were looted and burned, prompting Beijing’s embassy to express “serious concerns” to the Solomons’ government. The embassy “made representations
IMBALANCE: An annual survey found that 48 percent of people eat either too little or too much, resulting in them being overweight, obese or underweight Nearly half the world’s population suffer from poor nutrition linked to too much or not enough food, a global assessment said yesterday, with wide-ranging impacts on health and the planet. The Global Nutrition Report (GNR), a yearly survey and analysis of the latest data on nutrition and related health issues, found that 48 percent of people currently eat either too little or too much — resulting in them being overweight, obese or underweight. At current rates, the world would fail to meet eight out of nine nutrition targets set by the WHO for 2025, it said. These include reducing child wasting (when
RSS