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Rights Group Rebuffs US Criticism of its Report Citing US Treatment of Detainees
Jun 5, 2005 Washington
Amnesty International is not backing down from heavy criticism of the Bush administration's treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism. The human rights group's top official in the United States responded to recent denunciations by both President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
In a recent assessment of human rights worldwide, Amnesty International blasted the United States' indefinite detention of "enemy combatants" at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The human rights group also decried persistent allegations of torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. Amnesty's secretary general went so far as to describe Guantanamo as "the gulag of our times," a reference to Soviet-era prison camps known for their brutality.
Speaking on Fox News Sunday, the director of Amnesty International USA, William Schulz, acknowledged that U.S.-run detainee facilities are not concentration camps, but insisted they are not up to international human rights standards.
"People are not being starved in those facilities. They are not being subjected to forced labor. But there are some similarities," he said. "The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons, into which people are, literally, being 'disappeared,' held in indefinite, incommunicado detention, without access to lawyers or a judicial system, and, in some cases at least, we know that they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and killed."
Amnesty International USA Director William Schulz stressed that the London-based group has no anti-American agenda.
"The important point is that Amnesty is not America-bashing, anymore than we are China-bashing or Cuba-bashing, or any other country-bashing, when we try to hold one universal standard up for countries to be judged on," he explained. "That is all we are interested in."
Mr. Schulz said President Bush and others in the administration have, in the past, quoted from Amnesty International reports critical of other nations, including Iraq under the former regime of Saddam Hussein.
This article uses material from VOA.
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