U.N. report alleges torture at Guantanamo Bay prison

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, February 12, 2006

NEW YORK – A draft U.N. report on the detainees at Guantanamo Bay concludes that the U.S. treatment of them violates their right to physical and mental health, and, in some cases, constitutes torture.

It also urges the United States to close the military prison in Cuba and bring the captives to trial on U.S. territory, charging that Washington’s justification for the continued detention is a distortion of international law.

The report, compiled by five special envoys to the United Nations who interviewed U.S. officials, former prisoners, and detainees’ lawyers and families, is the product of a year-and-a-half investigation ordered by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. The team did not have access to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Its findings – notably, a conclusion that the violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, incidents of excessive violence used in transporting prisoners and combinations of interrogation techniques “must be assessed as amounting to torture” – are likely to stoke criticism of the detention facility.

More than 500 people captured abroad since 2002 as “enemy combatants” are detained at Guantanamo.

“We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the U.S. government,” said Manfred Nowak3, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, one of the envoys. “There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture.”

The draft report has not been officially released.

In November, the Bush administration offered the U.N. team the same tour of the detention facility given to journalists and members of Congress, but it refused to allow the envoys access to prisoners. Because of that, the U.N. group declined the visit.

The U.N. team concluded that there had been insufficient due process to determine whether the more than 750 people detained at Guantanamo Bay since January 2002 were “enemy combatants,” and determined that the primary purpose of their confinement was for interrogation, not to prevent them from taking up arms. The U.S. has released or transferred more than 260 detainees from Guantanamo Bay.

The simultaneous use of several interrogation techniques, including prolonged solitary confinement, exposure to extreme temperatures, noise and light, forced shaving and other techniques that exploit religious beliefs or cause intimidation and humiliation, constitute inhumane treatment and, in some cases, reach the threshold of torture, according to the report.

Nowak said the U.N. team was “particularly concerned” about the force-feeding of hunger strikers through nasal tubes that detainees claimed were brutally inserted and removed, causing intense pain, bleeding and vomiting. “It remains a current phenomenon,” he said.