The continuing uproar over US treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib has a top Senate Republican looking at the need to clarify in law the rights of foreign detainees.
On the heels of Amnesty International calling the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our time," Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, will hold hearings this month on the treatment of foreign terrorism suspects at the detention camp, said an aide to the senator.
Earlier this week Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld described Amnesty's characterization as "reprehensible."
But on Friday night, the Pentagon, for the first time, confirmed several incidents in which the Koran had been mishandled at Guantanamo Bay prison. The incidents included a soldier deliberately kicking the Muslim holy book, an interrogator stepping on a Koran, and a guard urinating near an air vent splashing urine on a detainee and his Koran.
The Pentagon is working on new guidelines for handling people captured during wartime, including an explicit ban on inhumane treatment. The 142-page draft document is being written by the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and is not intended to set policy, but rather to provide the military with guidance to implement detainee policies set by civilian authorities.
Specter, according to an aide, is in the preliminary stages of drafting a bill to establish procedures for detentions and exploring the possibility of making the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court the venue for challenging them.
Amnesty International has called on the US to close its Guantanamo prison, where about 540 men are being held on suspicion they have links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime or Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror network.
While the human rights watchdog worries about Congress putting into law "enemy combatant" status, which it says is a category of prisoner not sanctioned by international and humanitarian treaties, it applauded Specter for looking into the issue.
"Any kind of sunshine would be a good antiseptic for this situation," said Jumana Musa, advocacy director for human rights and international justice at Washington's Amnesty International.
Specter's hearing will focus on the detention of enemy combatants at both Guantanamo and in the US, and whether trying them before military tribunals provides them adequate due process, the senator's aide said.
The Bush administration created the detainee category of "enemy combatant" after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and applied it to members or associates of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
The administration argues that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to suspected members of al-Qaeda -- a position spelled out in a January 2002 memo to President George W. Bush from then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who is now attorney general.
The Guantanamo camp, which began in January 2002 with the arrival of prisoners captured in Afghanistan, has been widely criticized. So far, only four detainees there have been charged with a crime, and their military trials have been stalled because of appeals in US courts.
The problems at Guantanamo were compounded by the 2004 revelations about mistreatment of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad. Photographs taken by US military personnel and published around the world depicted scenes of sexual humiliation and physical abuse.
So far, only two US citizens have been designated as enemy combatants. Jose Padilla, a former gang member who was born in Brooklyn, New York, has been held since 2002 without being charged. Louisiana native Yaser Hamdi was released in October after the Justice Department said he no longer posed a threat to the US and no longer had any intelligence value. Hamdi, who was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2001, gave up his American citizenship and returned to his family in Saudi Arabia as conditions of his release.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
Hong Kong microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung (袁國勇) has done battle with some of the world’s worst threats, including the SARS virus he helped isolate and identify, and he has a warning. Another pandemic is inevitable and could exact damage far worse than COVID-19 pandemic, said the soft-spoken scientist sometimes thought of as Hong Kong’s answer to former US National Institutes of Health director Anthony Fauci. “Both the public and [world] leaders must admit that another pandemic will come, and probably sooner than you anticipate,” he said at the city’s Queen Mary Hospital, where he works and teaches. “Why I make such a horrifying prediction
A high-ranking North Korean diplomat stationed in Cuba defected to South Korea in November last year — just months before Seoul and Havana established diplomatic ties, the South Korean National Intelligence Service said yesterday. North Korean diplomat Ri Il-kyu had been responsible for political affairs at Pyongyang’s embassy in Cuba since 2019, tasked specifically “with obstructing the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Cuba,” South Korea’s Chosun Daily reported. Ri defected to South Korea with his wife and children in early November, making him the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat known to have defected since then-North Korean deputy ambassador to the
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,