6-24-05,9:00am
On human rights, the administration’s unwritten policy is that the world must abide by its standard of human rights or face military and economic threats, while the administration isn’t required to abide by any standard. This imperialist arrogance again became evident over the issue of UN investigations into allegations of human rights violations in US prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Yesterday, UN human rights investigators said their requests to the Bush administration to arrange a visit to Guantanamo Bay have fallen on deaf ears. The administration has publicly accepted the idea of a visit, but so far hasn’t directly addressed UN investigation teams and has refused to even discuss making concrete arrangements.
UN investigators have been asking to visit Guantanamo Bay since 2002 (as well as US facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere).
UN investigator Manfred Nowak said, “I have received numerous allegations of torture, cruel and inhuman treatment and lack of medical treatment, all kinds of interrogation methods and I want to go there in order to asses as objectively as possible the situation before I come out with a report.”
Nowak hinted that the length of the imprisonment of most of the 500-600 prisoners held in the prison suggests that the Bush administration has created “conditions they want to hide from the public.”
Nowak was with three other UN investigators who told reporters in Geneva, Switzerland yesterday that reliable information of serious allegations of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees, arbitrary detention, violations of their right to health and their due process rights require international examination.
Further raising concerns about the mistreatment of US-held prisoners, a report in the respected New England Journal of Medicine says that its own inquiry into the medical practices of the US military at Guantanamo Bay shows that doctors, nurses, and medics caring for the prisoners there are required to provide health information to military and CIA interrogators.
And despite public claims by military officials that medical care was separate from intelligence matters (a principle of international law), “[s]ince late 2003, psychiatrists and psychologists (at Guantanamo) have been part of a strategy that employs extreme stress, combined with behavior-shaping rewards, to extract actionable intelligence from resistant captives,” says the journal.
According to the report, military intelligence officials used medical information provided by health care professionals to develop interrogation methods that, even with the approval of the Pentagon and the Justice Department, have been found to depart from international law and conventions banning torture.
In a related story, the Bush administration has rejected bipartisan calls for an independent Guantanamo Bay prison commission. The White House insists that the military, the very organization suspected of systematically violating human rights, is perfectly capable of investigating the situation and punishing any offending parties.
For skeptics and critics of the administration’s stated policy of refusing to treat prisoners under applicable international laws, without due process, and using interrogation methods found to break numerous conventions against torture and prisoner abuse, quiet internal investigations simply aren’t adequate.
It’s like asking Enron to regulate the energy market.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi argued that without independent investigations, the credibility of the US is undermined and its human rights record is stained. “These questions are important because the safety of our country depends on our reputation and how we are viewed, especially in the Muslim world,” Pelosi said.
The Republican leadership in the House, seeking to avoid embarrassing the administration, succeeded earlier this week in blocking a vote on a Democratic amendment that would have created such a bipartisan panel similar to the 9/11 Commission as part of the military authorization bill.
But some prominent Republicans echoed the call for an independent commission. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) questioned the Bush administration’s strategy in handling the Guantanamo issue. Lindsey said, “that isn’t working anymore” and pressed for congressional action on the matter.
Jumana Musa, an Amnesty International USA spokesperson, supported the bipartisan call for a commission: “A thorough examination of the detention centers and interrogation techniques will provide Congress with the information necessary for proper oversight of the treatment of detainees and will be a significant step towards ensuring that all detained individuals are treated in accordance with US and international law.”
So far the White House strategy for handling the criticism on this issue has been a PR campaign. Various officials and GOP congressional leaders have paraded prison food items, have insisted that prisoners of suspected of terrorism are being treated like kings, and that Guantanamo Bay prison facilities are plush four-star hotels.
As cute as that is, they have not provided evidence that FBI, military, and other government documents that demonstrate widespread abuse in US prisons is incorrect, inaccurate or false. They even have hinted that if any UN investigation is conducted in the Guantanamo prison, investigators will be prevented from privately interviewing prisoners, a key ingredient to securing honest and uncoerced testimony.
Throughout, Bush officials have insisted they are not required to uphold international human rights standards.
When the Bush administration pressured other countries on the UN Commission on Human Rights last April to reject a Cuban resolution calling for international inspections of the Guantanamo Bay prison facilities, US representative Lino Piedra, said UN requests to visit Guantanamo made the Cuban resolution redundant, without denying the basic facts that cry out for investigation.
Lying boldly, Piedra insisted that negotiations were under way to bring UN inspectors to the Guantanamo Bay prisons.
The failure to respond to UN requests directly, positively, and in good faith makes the basic principles of the Cuban resolution not only pertinent but also necessary.
--Contact Martha Kramer at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
