Guantanamo Rising

The American facility is back in the news. After recent weeks of increasing charges of cruel and unusual punishment, of the majority of prisoners never charged and many captured in random sweeps:

Today, the AP : The United States must close its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay because it is effectively a torture camp where prisoners have no access to justice, a U.N. report released Thursday concluded.

The 54-page report summarizing an investigation by five U.N. experts accused the United States of practices that "amount to torture" and demanded detainees be allowed a fair trial or freed. The investigators did not visit the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"Those people should be released or brought before an independent court," Manfred Nowak, the U.N. investigator for torture, told The Associated Press. "That should not be done in Guantanamo Bay, but before ordinary U.S. courts, or courts in their countries of origin or perhaps an international tribunal."

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 White House rejected the recommendation.

The American shame is not only Guantanamo Bay Prison but the fact that Americans have allowed it to continue. Where was the outcry saying precisely what the UN does, but years ago, before all this suffering? Even if Guantanamo were to be closed tomorrow, that Americans permitted it to exist has brought us closer to the possibility of a totalitarian police state for all of us in our near future.