Center for International Policy

As printed in
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel
June 11, 2005

Investigation Needed

By Wayne S. Smith

Responding to Amnesty International's allegations on May 25 of "atrocious human rights violations " at Guantanamo and various other U.S.-controlled detention centers, and especially to the term "gulag," President Bush on May 31 described the charges as "absurd" and based on the stories of "people who hate America," i.e., the detainees.

Vice President Cheney was as emphatic as the president. Detainees at Guantanamo, the vice president said in an interview on May 30, have been "well-treated, treated humanely and decently … What we're doing down there has, I think, been done perfectly appropriately."

Gen. Richard B. Meyers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called the Amnesty report "absolutely irresponsible" and described detainees at Guantanamo as terrorists who, if released, "would turn right around and try to slit our throats, our children's throats … We struggle with how to handle them," he said, "but we've always handled them humanely and with the dignity they should be accorded."

They may not have liked the term "gulag," but given the massive reports of abuses coming out of Guantanamo, it defies understanding how Bush, Cheney and Co. could insist that everything is "just fine," and that anyone who says different just "hates America."

It isn't just Amnesty International, after all, with reports of wrongdoing. Nor are we dealing simply with the allegations of detainees. The International Red Cross and the FBI both have eyewitness accounts (and surely FBI agents do not "hate America"). An FBI e-mail in December 2003 (obtained through the Freedom of Information Act), for example, said that Defense Department interrogators at Guantanamo had impersonated FBI agents while using "torture techniques" so that they could not be held accountable. Other released FBI memos speak of the practice of shackling inmates, sometimes in a fetal position, for as long as 24 hours, leaving them to defecate and urinate on themselves. And the memos also suggest that what was going on at Guantanamo was systematic and done with the consent of senior officials with the intent of having a system of prolonged psychological and physical coercion as part of the interrogation process.

And a former U.S. soldier, Sgt. Erik Saar, has written a damning expose of the brutal, illegal treatment he saw meted out to detainees at Guantanamo. Titled Inside the Wire, it describes, among other things, how female interrogators tried to break Muslim prisoners by rubbing what they said was menstrual blood on their faces and then locking them in cells with no water -- so that they could not cleanse themselves and thus be able to pray.

While Bush, Cheney and Meyers seem to focus their dismissals on reports dealing with Guantanamo, Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, rejects even Amnesty allegations dealing with Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the Bagram prison in Afghanistan and various other detention centers. "The allegations are ridiculous and unsupported by the facts," he said on May 25. But given the photos and other hard evidence of the ghastly abuses at Abu Ghraib and Bagram, for McClellan to have so claimed took more than chutzpah.

Both Bush and McClellan also insist there has been no damage to our reputation for defending human rights. The U.S., said Bush, is seen as "a country that promotes freedom around the world." McClellan goes further, saying, "The United States is leading the way when it comes to protecting human rights and promoting human dignity."

But is that really true? Do other nations still look to the United States as the champion of human rights and dignity? Unfortunately, no. The abuse and even murder of prisoners held by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo -- and the rendition of others to countries where it is known they will be tortured -- have been widely reported around the world and inexorably done grave harm to the U.S. image and reputation -- especially in the Muslim world.

Indeed, our reputation for protecting human rights has never been so sullied as under the Bush administration -- even among our closest allies. In March, for example, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British Parliament charged that the U.S. has committed "grave violations of human rights" in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. The European Parliament has called for an investigation of the situation at Guantanamo, and the Council of Europe, a human rights body more than half a century old, has denounced the U.S. for resorting to the torture of prisoners.

And as clear evidence that the Latin American states no longer see the U.S. as "leading the way" in the protection of human rights, the U.S. has for the first time been excluded from membership in the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights. Not only that, but that body has called for immediate hearings to determine the status of prisoners held at Guantanamo. The Bush administration, of course, has ignored the call.

To prevent further damage to the honor of our nation, isn't it time to call for an independent commission to conduct a full investigation? The president won't do it, so it must be up to the Senate to demand it.

Wayne S. Smith is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., an adjunct professor of Latin American studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and the former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana (1979-82).