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Amnesty International throws down the guantlet: Let the world see American ‘gulag’

* Irene Khan hits back
* Says US response lacks substance

TOKYO: The head of Amnesty International on Thursday hit back at US outrage over the group labelling Guantanamo Bay a “gulag” and challenged Washington to open the military detention centre to outside inspections.

US President George W Bush and other government figures have said they were shocked when the human rights group accused the United States of running “a new gulag of prisons around the world beyond the reach of the law and decency”.

The secretary general of London-based Amnesty International, Irene Khan, on Thursday defended the comment and said the US response lacked substance and was “defensive and dismissive”. “We have not seen from them a more detailed response to the concerns we have expressed in our report,” she told a news conference on a visit to Tokyo.

“Our answer is simple: if that is so (that the allegations are unfounded), open up these detention centres. Allow us and others to visit them.

“What is interesting is that we are actually getting response from the US government” for the first time in more than three years, Khan said. “We welcome an opportunity to sit down and have a debate with them on the issue.”

Because the US military base in Guantanamo Bay for prisoners from the “war on terror” is located in Cuba, the Bush administration argues its inmates do not enjoy the same legal protections as those held inside the United States.

“We are concerned about allegations of torture that frequently emerge and are not independently and fully investigated,” Khan said.

She said the human rights watchdog had used the gulag reference in its annual report to “send a strong message”, not to set off debate in itself about the analogy to the infamous Soviet prison camps.

“Our concern is about the detention of individuals outside of the limit of laws,” she said. The United States should take a number of steps at the Guantanamo Bay and other detention centres, she said:

“End all secret and incommunicado detentions; grant the International Red Cross fully access; ensure recourse to the law for all detainees; bring to justice anyone responsible for authorizing or committing human rights violations.”

The Amnesty report came after allegations that interrogators at Guantanamo had desecrated the Muslim holy book the Koran to pressure prisoners.

Newsweek magazine retracted the report after it set off deadly riots in Afghanistan and stirred outrage in the Muslim world, saying its source had backed away from the allegation. Bush told a news conference Tuesday what he thought of Amnesty’s findings: “It is an absurd report. It just is.” “When there’s accusations made about certain actions by our people, they’re fully investigated in a transparent way,” Bush said.

“It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of and the allegations by people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to dissemble, that means not tell the truth,” he said. Khan said the report was compiled mostly by American staff. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday also called the gulag reference “reprehensible”.

“No force in the world has done more to liberate people that they have never met than the men and women of the United States military,” Rumsfeld said. afp

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