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Images that shame
US
WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 (Xinhuanet) -- The United States
on Thursday rejected a UN report that calls for closing the prison at the U.S.
naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where some 500 terror suspects are held
indefinitely.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the
report, released by the UN. in Geneva earlier in the day, is a merely "rehash"
of allegations that have been made previously by lawyers for some Guantanamo
detainees.
He claimed that the U.S. military treats all
detainees "humanely," and allegations about abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo are
false information deliberately disseminated by al-Qaida.
"We know that al-Qaida terrorists are trained in
trying to disseminate false allegations," said McClellan.
The report, summarizing an investigation by five UN.
human rights experts, called on the U.S. government "to close down the
Guantanamo Bay detention center and to refrain from any practice amounting to
torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the UN. report
"clearly suffers from their unwillingness to take us up on our offer to go down
to Guantanamo to observe first-hand the operations at Guantanamo, and so it is
certainly a serious shortcoming of any report they have written."
In fact, the UN. experts rejected the offer to go to
Guantanamo only because they are not allowed to talk to prisoners.
About 500 detainees are being jailed at Guantanamo,
most of whom were captured in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan in 2001, being
held indefinitely without a trial. Enditem | 
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