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| US Rejects UN's Call to Close Guantanamo Prison |
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The United States on Thursday rejected a UN report that calls for closing the prison at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where some 500 terror suspects are held indefinitely. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the report, released by the UN in Geneva earlier in the day, is a merely "rehash" of allegations that have been made previously by lawyers for some Guantanamo detainees. He claimed that the US military treats all detainees "humanely," and allegations about abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo are false information deliberately disseminated by al-Qaida. "We know that al-Qaida terrorists are trained in trying to disseminate false allegations," said McClellan. The report, summarizing an investigation by five UN human rights experts, called on the US government "to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention center and to refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the UN. report "clearly suffers from their unwillingness to take us up on our offer to go down to Guantanamo to observe first-hand the operations at Guantanamo, and so it is certainly a serious shortcoming of any report they have written." In fact, the UN experts rejected the offer to go to Guantanamo only because they are not allowed to talk to prisoners. About 500 detainees are being jailed at Guantanamo, most of whom were captured in the US-led war in Afghanistan in 2001, being held indefinitely without a trial. (Xinhua News Agency February 17, 2006) |
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