BEIJING, March 9 (Xinhuanet) -- The U.S. government grossly violates the sovereignty and human rights of other countries in contempt of universally-recognized international norms, said the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2005 issued here on Thursday.

    "The U.S. government frequently commits wanton slaughters of innocents in its war efforts and military operations in other countries," said the report issued by the Information Office of the State Council, China's cabinet.

    The USA Today newspaper on Dec. 13, 2005 quoted a 2004 study published in the medical journal The Lancet as saying that it was estimated that about 100,000 Iraqis, mostly women and children, had died in the Iraqi war launched by the U.S. government in 2003.     

    The year 2005 also witnessed frequent overseas military operations targeting at civilians by the U.S. forces, causing quite a number of deaths and injuries, said the report.

    On July 4, 2005, the U.S. forces killed 17 civilians, including women and children, in their air strikes in Konarha Province of Afghanistan. On Aug. 30, 2005, U.S. jet fighters launched several air raids against an area near the western Iraqi border town of Qaim, causing at least 56 deaths, including elders and children, the report said.

    In 2005, news of prisoner abuse by the U.S. forces again hit headlines, following their 2004 prisoner abuse scandal that stunned the world. To extract information, the U.S. forces in Iraqused various kinds of torture in their interrogations, said the report.

    They abused the Iraqi detainees by all means, including sleep deprivation, tying them to the wall, hitting them with baseball bats, denying their access to water and food, forcing them to listen to extremely loud music in completely dark places for days running, unleashing dogs to bite them for amusement and even scaring them by putting them in the same cage with lions, according to reports from The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Washington Weekly and other news media.

    A report by The Human Rights Watch in September 2005 said that U.S. soldiers regarded prisoner abuse as "amusement" and a way "to relieve stress." Due to the unbearable abuse, many detainees maimed themselves, went on hunger strikes and even rioted.

    According to a report issued by the South Command of the U.S. military, there occurred 350 self-maiming cases in the prison of Guantanamo, Cuba, in 2003, with 23 prisoners seeking to hang themselves in one week of August. In August 2005, 131 prisoners in Guantanamo went on a mass hunger strike to protest inhuman treatment.

    The report said after the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States wantonly apprehended terrorism suspects worldwide under the banner of "anti-terrorism".

    An AP story on Nov. 16, 2005 said that since the start of the anti-terrorism war in 2001, the United States had detained more than 83,000 foreign nationals, with 82,400 of them under the custody of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq. And 700 captives were shipped to Guantanamo.

    Over the past four years, the U.S. has not brought any indictment against them or brought them to court hearing. By March 2005, 108 people had died in custody. Up to date, there are still 14,500 foreign nationals under U.S. custody.

    The report said "the U.S. government ought to first clean up its own record of human rights before qualifying itself to comment on human rights situations in other countries, let alone arrogantly telling them what to do."

    "We urge the U.S. government to look squarely at its own human rights problems, reflect what it has done in the human rights field and take concrete measures to improve its own human rights record," said the report.

    "The U.S. government should stop provoking international confrontation on the issue of human rights, and make a fresh start to contribute more to international human rights cooperation and to the healthy development of international human rights cause," the report added. Enditem