Monitors of torture treaty rebuke US

WASHINGTON -- A United Nations anti-torture panel yesterday urged the United States to shut down its Guantanamo Bay detention camp, close any secret overseas CIA prisons, and halt the use of what it said are cruel and degrading interrogation techniques.

Together, the recommendations by the UN Committee Against Torture amounted to the most sweeping rebuke yet of the detention and interrogation policies the Bush administration adopted after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The report was issued by a panel of human rights investigators at the UN who are charged with monitoring compliance with the Convention Against Torture.

The 11-page UN report came as the US military reported that a group of Guantanamo detainees had attacked guards with improvised weapons on Thursday, resulting in an hour-long melee before guards regained control.

On the same day, several prisoners tried but failed to commit suicide by swallowing overdose-levels of prescription medicines they had hoarded, a prison spokesman said.

The UN report went beyond criticizing the United States for the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantanamo.

The panel also found that many of the detention and interrogation policies the Bush administration put in place for the war on terrorism around the world were at odds with the commitments the United States made when it ratified the global Convention Against Torture treaty in 1994.

The report said that holding detainees in secret prisons, as the CIA is reportedly doing overseas with high-level Al Qaeda suspects, violates the treaty.

It also expressed concerns about the transfer of detainees to countries with poor human rights records; the report names no examples, but the United States has handed prisoners over to such countries as Saudi Arabia, whose governments have been criticized for torturing prisoners. And the report objected to the use of harsh interrogation techniques by US officials.

''The [US government] should rescind any interrogation technique -- including methods involving sexual humiliation, 'water boarding,' 'short shackling' and using dogs to induce fear -- that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment . . . in order to comply with its obligations under the convention," it said.

Water boarding refers to a technique in which a prisoner is made to feel that he is drowning. Short-shackling means chaining a prisoner in a contorted and painful position for a long time.

At the White House, press secretary Tony Snow yesterday rejected the UN report's findings. He focused on its call to shut down the Guantanamo prison, where the US military has been holding nearly 500 people without trial for more than four years. A handful of the prisoners are now being tried for war crimes before a long-delayed military commission.

Snow insisted that the prisoners are treated in accordance with US law. He also noted that President Bush said earlier this month that he would like to shut down Guantanamo eventually, but was not yet able to do so because the country remains at war with terrorists.

But Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, an activist organization, said that focusing on Guantanamo obscured the larger meaning of the UN panel's report. The long list of problems the UN identified, she said, amount to a finding that the United States has abandoned the human rights leadership role the nation played from World War II until Bush took office.

''There is really something much bigger than Guantanamo at stake here," she said. ''There is a risk that this system of international human rights standards, which has been built up over the last 50 years with US leadership, could crumble. And the victims of that will go way beyond the people held in US custody. The real victims will be in prisons and dark places in repressive countries around the world."

The Convention Against Torture prohibits its signatories from using cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners, and obliges them to ensure that any detainee is given certain minimum legal rights. President Ronald Reagan signed the treaty, President George H.W. Bush formally sent it to the Senate for approval, and the Senate ratified it in 1994.

Congress also passed legislation turning the treaty's provisions into domestic law, which President Bill Clinton signed. But after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush's legal team told him that he had the power to bypass domestic and international restrictions on the treatment of prisoners, such as the antitorture treaty or the Geneva Conventions.

Last year Congress passed a law making clear that no US official can use any form of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment against detainees, anywhere in the world. But when Bush signed the new torture ban, he issued a ''signing statement" reasserting his claim that he has the power, as commander-in-chief, to authorize interrogators to bypass the restrictions.

The call by the UN Committee Against Torture to shut down the Guantanamo camp was the latest in a chorus of such demands on the global stage.

Earlier this month, British Attorney General Peter Goldsmith said the prison ''should close" because it is an ''unacceptable" symbol of injustice. In February, the UN's Commission on Human Rights issued a 54-page report saying that the prison is illegal and should be shut down.

But the report by the UN anti-torture committee carries more heft than any prior attack on Guantanamo, according to specialists including Massimino.

The UN Commission on Human Rights, for example, was a discredited organization because its members included several countries with poor human rights records -- such as Sudan, China, and Zimbabwe -- and its findings were often decried as selective and politicized. In March, one month after the commission called on the United States to shut down Guantanamo, the UN General Assembly voted to shut down the commission.

In addition, the Bush administration denounced the February report because the commission did not visit Guantanamo, despite an invitation to do so. The commission said it rejected the invitation because the military said commission members could not speak with detainees if they went to Cuba.

In contrast, the UN Committee Against Torture is a more respected panel of 10 human rights investigators who are charged with periodically reviewing compliance with the anti-torture treaty by each country that has ratified it. Rather than conducting onsite investigations, the committee examines legal issues and extensive materials submitted by signatories to the treaty.

Yesterday's report, the panel's first review of the United States since the 9/11 attacks, followed four days of hearings in Geneva at which two dozen American officials participated. It was the first time since the start of the war on terrorism that American officials submitted to questioning by an international body about the abuse of detainees in US custody.

State Department legal adviser John Bellinger III, who led the US delegation to Geneva, yesterday expressed disappointment in the panel's results. He said the committee went beyond its mandate in calling for Guantanamo to be shut down, and complained that the panel had discounted much of the arguments the US presented during the hearings.

''We acknowledge that there were very serious incidents of abuse," Bellinger said. ''We've all seen Abu Ghraib. There have been numerous other allegations. There have been other incidents. We have investigated those. We've held people accountable. But as I said at the time, you know, clearly our record has improved over the last few years."