U.S. Rejects U.N. Call To Close Gitmo

Report Calls For Detainees To Be Tried Or Released

(CBS/AP)  The United States is holding about 490 men at the military detention center. They are accused of links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime or to al Qaeda, but only a handful have been charged.

Martin reports Bush administration officials have taken to calling the war against terror "The Long War" and Guantanamo is likely to be in operation for as long as the war goes on — and likely to be a sore point with the rest of the world.

"These are the things that's creating the hatred and creating more terrorism around the world by the fact that we are such hypocrites," said James Bamford, Author of A Pretext for War. "We want the world, these places we invade, to be democratic and have democratic institutes. Yet when we capture people we won't do the same thing. We treat them as if Saddam Hussein had captured these people. Put them away, don't give them a trial, and throw away the key."

The issue of closing Guantanamo has come up before, Martin reports, but the answer has always been no, because closing it would only required opening another detention center someplace else.

The U.N. investigators said photographic evidence — corroborated by testimony of former prisoners — showed detainees shackled, chained and hooded. Prisoners were beaten, stripped and shaved if they resisted, they said.

The report's findings were based on interviews with former detainees, public documents, media reports, lawyers and questions answered by the U.S. government, which detailed the number of prisoners held but did not give their names or the status of charges against them.

Some of the interrogation techniques — particularly the use of dogs, exposure to extreme temperatures, sleep deprivation and prolonged isolation — caused extreme suffering, the report said.

"Such treatment amounts to torture, as it inflicts severe pain or suffering on the victims for the purpose of intimidation and/or punishment," the report said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross is the only independent monitoring body allowed to visit Guantanamo's detainees, but it reports its findings solely to U.S. authorities.

Legislators and journalists have been allowed in on guided tours but few are permitted to see interrogations.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the U.N. report "clearly suffers from their unwillingness to take us up on our offer to go down to Guantanamo to observe first-hand the operations."

McClellan, the White House spokesman, echoed Whitman, saying "it's a discredit to the U.N. when a team like this goes about rushing to report something when they haven't even looked into the facts. All they have done is look at the allegations."

Although his statement did not address specific allegations, the Pentagon has acknowledged 10 cases of abuse or mistreatment at Guantanamo, including a female interrogator climbing onto a detainee's lap and a detainee whose knees were bruised from being forced to kneel repeatedly.

In Strasbourg, France, the European Parliament condemned the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and renewed its calls for the detention center to be closed.

Human rights activists also supported the investigators' findings.

Amnesty International said the report was only the "tip of the iceberg."

"The United States also operates detention facilities at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq and has been implicated in the use of secret detention facilities in other countries," an Amnesty statement said.

Many of the allegations in the report have been made before. But the document represented the first inquiry launched by the 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission.