U.N. Draft Decries U.S. On Detainee Treatment

UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 13 -- The Bush administration's treatment of prisoners at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, violates international law and in some cases constitutes a form of torture, according to a draft report by a group of U.N. human rights investigators.

Five U.N. human rights rapporteurs appealed to the administration to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and try detainees in the United States. "The U.S. government should either expeditiously bring all Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial . . . or release them without further delay," the draft report recommended.

The findings emerged from an 18-month investigation that included interviews with former U.S. prisoners in France, Spain and Britain and lawyers and relatives of detainees. The report concluded that some practices -- including the force-feeding of hunger strikers -- "must be assessed as amounting to torture."

President Bush voiced concern about the panel's findings -- which were first reported in the Los Angeles Times -- during a meeting Monday with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Annan responded that he had not seen the report and that the U.N. investigators who authored the report were independent from his office, according to a senior official who attended the meeting.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack challenged the veracity of the findings and pointed out that "no one who wrote this report actually went to Guantanamo." The U.N. investigators, known as special rapporteurs, declined in November to accept an offer from the United States to make a one-day visit to the facility on the grounds that they could not speak privately with the prisoners.

"They are taking assertions by individuals who have left Guantanamo, as well as their lawyers, as fact," McCormack told reporters. "And, as we have seen over the past year, there have been a number of baseless claims about what went on at Guantanamo."

"The U.N. rapporteurs were offered the same access as Congress and the media to the facility, but they declined the offer," added Navy Lt. Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman. "All detainees are treated humanely and being provided with excellent medical care. It is U.S. policy to treat captured combatants humanely and in compliance with the U.S. Constitution, its statutes and its treaty obligations."

Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and an author of the report, declined to discuss the contents of the report until it is publicly released later this week. But he said the report's publication will mark the end of the first phase of a wider inquiry into U.S. treatment of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and other foreign sites where terror suspects are being held.

"The investigation is going far beyond Guantanamo," Nowak said in a telephone interview from Vienna. "We have asked the U.S. government to cooperate with us on various places where suspected terrorists are held: Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere."

Nearly 750 combatants and suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere since January 2002 have been taken to the Guantanamo Bay detention center. More than 260 of those have since been transferred to the custody of foreign governments, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Morocco. Seventeen are expected to be tried by a military commission.

The United States has provided access to detainees at Guantanamo to representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which never publishes reports on prison conditions.

The confidential draft, which was obtained by The Washington Post, notes that two of the U.N. investigators concluded that the "legal regime applied to these detainees seriously undermines the rule of law and a number of fundamental universally recognized human rights, which are the essence of democratic societies."

The report cites several practices -- including sleep deprivation, lengthy solitary confinement and the use of other harsh U.S.-authorized interrogation techniques -- that it claims violate international conventions barring cruel or inhumane treatment. It also charges that detainees' rights to religion and health were violated.

The report's authors criticized U.S. doctors and nurses at Guantanamo Bay, citing testimony that they violently force-fed some of the 100 hunger strikers against their wills.

"The force-feeding happens in an abusive fashion as the tubes are rammed up their noses, then taken out again and rammed in again till they bleed," Julia Tarver Mason, a lawyer who represents 13 Saudi detainees, wrote in a court affidavit cited by the U.N. team. "The tubes caused the detainees to gag and often they would vomit blood."

McCormack challenged that charge, saying the feeding of the hunger strikers was done in a "humane way, according to international practice."