The US on Monday rebuffed a draft UN report on the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay as flawed and one-sided because the investigators refused to visit the facility.
An 18-month investigation for the UN Human Rights Commission concludes that some US treatment of detainees at the military base on Cuba amounted to torture, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Allegations cited in the draft report include violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, excessive violence in transporting some prisoners and combinations of interrogation techniques, the newspaper said on Monday.
"We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the US government," the paper quoted one of the human-rights investigators, Manfred Nowak, as saying.
"But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and convention on human rights and torture."
US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack criticized the investigators for refusing a US offer to tour Guantanamo after being told they would have no access to detainees.
He accused the UN team of taking statements by people who have left Guantanamo and their lawyers as fact.
"These are people who never went to Guantanamo Bay," McCormack said in Washington. "So this is baseless assertion, at least what we have seen so far."
"And, as we have seen over the past year, there have been a number of baseless claims about what went on at Guantanamo," he said.
McCormack cautioned that the final version of the Guantanamo report, expected to be unveiled this week at the commission's annual meeting in Geneva, was still being drafted.
But he explicitly rejected one of the reported conclusions, saying that feeding of hunger-striking prisoners at Guantanamo complies with "accepted international practice" and "is done by medical professionals in a humane way."
The Pentagon last November cleared Nowak and at least four other human rights rapporteurs working for the Geneva commission to visit Guantanamo.
They turned it down because they were denied direct access and interviews with detainees, which they said were contrary to UN human-rights investigations.
The UN investigators then compiled the report based on interviews with former Guantanamo detainees, their lawyers and families and US officials.
The New York Times reported last week that US military authorities at Guantanamo had begun a program to force-feed detainees who were on hunger strike by strapping them on chairs for hours each day and preventing them from vomiting.
The Times said US military officials had expressed concern that the detainees were becoming more difficult to control and some of them had threatened to commit suicide to protest the long detention.
Lieutenant Colonel Jeremy Martin, a Guantanamo spokesman, told the Times that the number of hunger strikers had dropped from 84 in December to four now. Martin also said the force-feeding was done "in a humane and compassionate manner."
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