Pentagon: Top al-Qaida operative escaped

U.S. tells UN Guantanamo inmates off-limits

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

The United States has turned down a UN human rights panel's request to provide information about its detention centers in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a report showed Tuesday.

Washington declined to include information on detention facilities outside U.S. territory in its report submitted to the UN Human Rights Committee.

The committee, made up of 18 independent experts elected by the UN General Assembly, in July 2004 pressed Washington for information about its overseas military detention centers.

However, according to the U.S. response last month, these fall outside the committee's remit because they are "governed by the laws of war." Like the other 153 signatories of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the United States is bound to submit regular reports to the committee on its implementation of what is the UN's core human rights accord.

Washington reaffirmed its stance that the covenant only applies on U.S. territory - something the committee has disputed in the past.

"The obligations assumed by the United States under the covenant apply only within the territory of the United States," said the report.

"The United States has sought to respond to the committee's concerns as fully as possible, notwithstanding the continuing difference of view between the committee and the United States concerning certain matters relating to the import and scope of provision of the covenant," it added.

The UN committee also gathers information from non-governmental sources.

Released detainees and advocacy groups have made regular allegations of human rights violations at the U.S. military's foreign detention centers, stoked by the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal in Iraq.

Last week, Washington announced that it would invite three UN human rights experts to visit the base for a day, with the goal "to broaden understanding of U.S. detention operations and to demonstrate that detainees at Guantanamo are treated humanely."

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Writers jailed in 2002 for political satire
After three years at Guantanamo, Afghan writers found to be no threat to United States

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Badr Zaman Badr and his brother Abdurrahim Muslim Dost relish writing a good joke that jabs a corrupt politician or distills the sufferings of fellow Afghans. Badr admires the political satires in "The Canterbury Tales" and "Gulliver's Travels," and Dost wrote some wicked lampoons in the 1990s, accusing Afghan mullahs of growing rich while preaching and organizing jihad. So in 2002, when the U.S. military shackled the writers and flew them to Guantanamo among prisoners whom Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared "the worst of the worst" violent terrorists, the brothers found life imitating farce.

For months, grim interrogators grilled them over a satirical article Dost had written in 1998, when the Clinton administration offered a $5-million reward for Osama bin Laden. Dost responded that Afghans put up 5 million Afghanis -- equivalent to $113 -- for the arrest of President Bill Clinton.

"It was a lampoon ... of the poor Afghan economy" under the Taliban, Badr recalled. The article carefully instructed Afghans how to identify Clinton if they stumbled upon him. "It said he was clean-shaven, had light-colored eyes and he had been seen involved in a scandal with Monica Lewinsky," Badr said.

The interrogators, some flown down from Washington, didn't get the joke, he said. "Again and again, they were asking questions about this article. We had to explain that this was a satire." He paused. "It was really pathetic."

It took the brothers three years to convince the Americans that they posed no threat to Clinton or the United States, and to get released -- a struggle that underscores the enormous odds weighing against innocent foreign Muslims caught in America's military prisons.

In recent months, scores of Afghans interviewed by Newsday -- including a dozen former U.S. prisoners, plus human rights officials and senior Afghan security officials -- said the United States is detaining enough innocent Afghans in its war against the Taliban and al-Qaida that it is seriously undermining popular support for its presence in Afghanistan.

As Badr and Dost fought for their freedom, they had enormous advantages over Guantanamo's 500-plus other captives.

The brothers are university-educated, and Badr, who holds a master's degree in English literature, was one of few prisoners able to speak fluently to the interrogators in their own language. And since both men are writers, much of their lives and political ideas are on public record here in books and articles they have published.


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