Rights group hits US on detainees

WASHINGTON -- Amnesty International urged governments around the world yesterday to bring criminal charges against any high-level US officials found responsible for policies that have led to torture of prisoners in US-run detention facilities overseas.

''Amnesty International calls today on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior US officials involved in the torture scandal," William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said during a press conference yesterday. ''If those investigations support prosecution, the foreign governments should arrest any official who enters their territory and should begin legal proceedings against that official."

Schulz said the Bush administration should commission a ''truly independent investigation" of torture in the US-run facilities, including the one at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba housing prisoners detained in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the US war on terror.

Schulz said that if the United States does not take such action, foreign governments should go after top US officials, such as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, just as charges were brought in Spain against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998.

Schulz, speaking at the release of Amnesty's 2005 annual report on human rights abuses worldwide, appeared to acknowledge that foreign governments were unlikely to act now against US officials on the torture complaints when he noted that such crimes have no statute of limitation and could be tackled in the future.

''Let's keep in mind that these issues can be pursued years from now, not just today," he said.

Scott McClellan, White House spokesman, called Amnesty's accusations ''ridiculous, and unsupported by the facts."

''The United States is leading the way when it comes to protecting human rights and promoting human dignity," he told reporters. ''We have liberated 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan."

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher also defended the US human rights record.

''Around the world, you'll see the United States is supporting democracy and supporting the fight against terrorism," he said.

Calls for foreigners to investigate torture allegations are not without precedent. In November, German lawyers filed a criminal complaint against Rumsfeld and former CIA director George J. Tenet on behalf on four Iraqi citizens who said they were subjected to electric shock, severe beatings, sleep and food deprivation, and sexual abuse while in US custody.

But prosecutors threw out the case, saying German courts only had jurisdiction over such crimes if the United States does not investigate them.

Over the past year, lawmakers in Sweden and Italy have also probed cases involving the alleged treatment by US forces of terror suspects arrested in their soil.

Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International, said in London yesterday that US disregard for human rights in the war on terror had helped roll back human rights worldwide, making the world more dangerous.

Khan called Guantanamo Bay the ''gulag of our time," and urged the closure of the facility, where about 500 detainees have been held for more than three years without charges. She also called for an end to the secret, incommunicado detention of so-called ''ghost detainees," prisoners outside the oversight of the International Red Cross.

''When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a license to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity, " Khan wrote in the foreword of Amnesty's annual report. She added: ''From Israel to Uzbekistan, Egypt to Nepal, governments have openly defied human rights and international humanitarian law in the name of national security and 'counter-terrorism.' "

The report highlights what it calls massive human rights violations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan's Darfur region, Chechnya, Haiti, and the Ivory Coast. It also detailed alleged crimes against humanity committed against Palestinian civilians, both by Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups.

But it reserved some of its harshest language for the United States, which Amnesty accused of condoning and in some cases authorizing the use of tactics that violate the UN Convention against Torture, including detainee beatings, prolonged detention in painful positions, and moving detainees to nations that use torture.

The report said Amnesty found evidence ''that Iraqi prisoners were beaten severely, forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, made to masturbate in front of female US soldiers, and forced to walk on their hands and knees and bark like dogs."

Yesterday, Schulz cited the case of a man named Mohammad al Dossari, who told Amnesty he was subjected to electric shocks in US custody in Afghanistan. He also said the autopsy of a captured Iraqi general revealed five broken ribs, which he said were apparently caused by ''punching, kicking, or striking."

Schulz said it was a ''mockery" that many of those who developed the Bush administration's policy on treatment of detainees had been promoted, while other senior officials escaped punishment.

He mentioned former assistant attorney general Jay S. Bybee, who argued in a 2002 Justice Department memorandum that it is permissible to inflict pain as long as it is less than the pain associated with organ failure or death. Bybee is now a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Justice Department later repudiated the statement.

Schulz also said Colonel Thomas Pappas, the top military intelligence official at Abu Ghraib prison during the abuse scandal in 2003, ''was only given a reprimand and fine amounting to one month's pay."

Schulz also called on state bar associations to probe whether government lawyers who wrote legal opinions that shaped US policy on torture met ''professional responsibility standards."

The group distributed a handout with the faces of Rumsfeld, Tenet, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II, and five other senior current or former US officials under the title: ''Architects of a descent into torture?"