More Usa bullshit !!!!!

By Warren Hoge The New York TimesFRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2006
UNITED NATIONS, New York UN human rights investigators called on the United States on Thursday to shut down the Guantánamo Bay camp and give prisoners quick trials or release them, but the White House promptly dismissed the report.
Arguing that many of the interrogation and detention practices constituted abuses amounting to torture, the report stated, "The United States government should close the Guantánamo Bay detention facilities without further delay."
Alert to the report's conclusions from news accounts based on a draft and reacting quickly to its publication Thursday, the White House suggested the investigators had based their conclusions on disinformation deliberately spread by terror groups.
"I think some of this appears to be a rehash of some of the allegations that have been made by lawyers for some of the detainees," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman. "We know that Al Qaeda detainees are trained in trying to disseminate false allegations."
The report said that the Defense Department should immediately revoke "all special interrogation techniques" it had authorized and that the United States needed to "refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, discrimination on the basis of religion and violations of the right to health and freedom of religion."
McClellan asserted that the American military already treated prisoners humanely. "These are dangerous terrorists that we are talking about who are there," he said. "Nothing had changed in terms of our views."
In a response included in an appendix to the 54-page report, the United States noted that the investigators had turned down an invitation to visit Guantánamo Bay. It rejected the findings and accused the investigators of selecting information to support their conclusions. The investigators declined to go to the camp after being told that they would be denied the opportunity to interview the prisoners.
The report says practices amounting to torture include the use of excessive force during transportation; force-feeding prisoners through nasal tubes during hunger strikes; shackling, chaining and hooding of prisoners; placing them in solitary confinement; and subjecting them naked to severe temperatures.
It also expresses "utmost concern" at "attempts by the United States administration to redefine 'torture' in the framework of the struggle against terrorism in order to allow certain interrogation techniques that would not be permitted under the internationally accepted definition of torture."
The United States is holding about 500 people at the American naval base on the coast of Cuba and says they are people with direct ties to Al Qaeda or the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The report was based on the work of five UN rapporteurs, or experts, specialized in pursuing charges of arbitrary detention and torture and of alleged violations of freedom of religion, the right to health and the independence of judges and lawyers.
They said they had based their conclusions on interviews with former prisoners in Britain, France and Spain, lawyers representing current inmates, news accounts, reports from non-governmental organizations and answers to a questionnaire submitted to the U.S. government.
In rejecting many of the conclusions that have emerged this week in news reports on a draft, the United States has stressed that the UN investigators never went to Guantánamo Bay.
The investigators had been seeking permission to make the trip since 2002 and obtained permission last autumn to go in December. But they turned down the invitation when the United States said they would not be permitted to talk to individual prisoners.
Such interviews were a "totally non-negotiable precondition" for conducting visits, the investigators said.
The report said that the "executive branch of the United States government operates as judge, prosecutor and defense counsel of the Guantánamo Bay detainees" and asserted that this constituted "serious violations of various guarantees of the right to a fair trial."