US faults UN report on Guantanamo

UNITED NATIONS -- The White House yesterday rejected a UN report that said the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba should be closed and that US treatment of detainees in some cases amounted to torture, calling it a ''rehash" of old allegations.

The report concluded that combinations of interrogation techniques, brutal force-feeding and excessive violence in transporting prisoners violated their right to physical and mental health. In some cases, the treatment constituted torture, according to the report. It was officially released yesterday, but its contents were reported by the Los Angeles Times on Monday.

The release of the report came as previously unpublished pictures of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq circulated internationally. The combination prompted US officials to emphasize that the US military treats prisoners humanely and to assert that the UN team had fallen for disinformation spread by terror groups.

''We know that these are dangerous terrorists that are being kept at Guantanamo Bay," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. ''They are trained to provide false information, and Al Qaeda training manuals talk about ways to disseminate false information and hope to get attention."

In addition to detailing allegations of abuse, the report urged the United States to quickly try or release the nearly 500 prisoners held without charge as ''enemy combatants" at the military prison in Cuba since 2002.

In four years, the report noted, only nine detainees have had their cases reviewed by a military commission, whose validity is still being considered by the US Supreme Court.

The United States says detainees at Guantanamo Bay and other detention centers are not entitled to prisoner of war status because they are terrorists and illegal combatants.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he supported the report's conclusion that the prisoners should be quickly tried or released. The United State should close the prison ''as soon as possible," he said.

The report noted particular concern with forced feeding of hunger strikers through long nasal tubes that detainees claimed were brutally inserted and removed twice a day, causing pain, bleeding, and vomiting.

The UN-appointed independent expert on torture, Manfred Nowak, said earlier this week that detainees' lawyers had reported a resurgence in early January of intentionally painful twice-a-day force feeding, a practice that the International Red Cross and the World Medical Association say amounts to torture.

Lawyer Thomas B. Wilner, who has represented 12 Kuwaiti detainees and visited his clients earlier this month, said the methods helped break a five-month-long hunger strike. In late December, about 85 prisoners were refusing food to protest their lack of a trial; in January, only four remained on strike.

A Pentagon spokesman said earlier this week that prisoners were being treated humanely and being force fed only to save their lives.

In November, the five experts canceled a long-sought visit to Guantanamo Bay after the US government refused to allow them access to the prisoners. Instead, they based their conclusions on interviews with lawyers and family members of prisoners, former detainees, and information provided by the US government.

In their rebuttal of the report, US officials emphasized the team's lack of a visit to Guantanamo.

Adam Ereli, the deputy spokesman at the State Department, said that the United States had offered the experts a chance to meet with the commander of the joint task force and the medical and interrogation staffs. They were also offered a chance to visit the cells housing the detainees, and the medical facilities.