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."
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
RSS