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BBC
Thursday, 12 October 2006
Guantanamo Bay should be closed down, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett has said during a speech on human rights.
The US detention camp did as much to radicalise new extremists as it did to promote security, Mrs Beckett said.
She added: "The continuing detention without fair trial of prisoners is unacceptable in terms of human rights."
Some 450 terror suspects are thought to be detained at the camp in Cuba - criticised for holding inmates without trial and for abuse allegations.
Launching the Foreign Office's ninth annual human rights report, Mrs Beckett said: "As the prime minister has said, we believe that camp should close.
"The continuing detention without fair trial of prisoners is unacceptable in terms of human rights, but it is also ineffective in terms of counter-terrorism.
"It is widely argued now that the existence of the camp is as much a radicalising and destabilising influence as it is a safeguard to security."
Since the camp started taking foreign prisoners in 2002, it has attracted widespread criticism.
United Nations human rights investigators have called for the camp's closure and Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer has called it a "shocking affront to democracy".
UK prime minister Tony Blair has called it an "anomaly".
The US has said it is a matter of security and military necessity in the "war on terror" and said inmates are treated humanely.
Mrs Beckett also disputed a report in the medical journal The Lancet that as many as 655,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed since the war began in 2003.
"No-one disputes that there have been many deaths in Iraq and all of those deaths are regrettable and tragically many have been deaths of civilians," she said.
"That doesn't mean one has to accept every figure that someone comes up with."
She said the British government did not keep official figures for Iraqi civilians, but got information from the Iraqi government and others.
"The [Lancet] report gives a figure which is orders of magnitude different from that which comes from any other source," she said.
US President George Bush said on Wednesday the figure was "not credible" - he has previously put the civilian death toll in Iraq at 30,000.
Mrs Beckett also said human rights abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan were not an indictment of the prime minister's foreign policy.
"In neither of those countries was it the case that human rights abuses were acknowledged or opposed or investigated and dealt with [under the previous regimes].
"It's dreadful that those abuses continue, but they continue at a time when we are trying our utmost to bring them to an end."
news.bbc.co.uk...
Originally posted by mr conspiracy
US prison at Guantanamo Bay is one of the causes of terror.
Originally posted by magicmushroom
if you treat people like animals then they will act like animals.
Originally posted by FlyersFan
If they want to be treated as human beings then they should not have treated their fellow human beings as animals to begin with
But whatever ... they are treated just fine at GITMO. They are reaping what they themselves planted. In fact, they are being treated better than they deserve.
Originally posted by Xeros
These guys were completely innocent ..
and treated horrifically ...
Originally posted by FlyersFan
Originally posted by Xeros
These guys were completely innocent ..
No they aren't. They are terrorists. They are insurgent murderers. They are where they belong. And those that have been let go just end up pulling the same crap and get themselves back in. There ARE repeat offenders in GITMO. They are not innocent.
and treated horrifically ...
Nope. They have better housing than they deserve. They have three religiously appropriate nutritious meals. They have better medical care and dental care than many Americans get. They get their Koran and their clothing .... and even get their Islamic calls to prayers.
We treat them better than they deserve and it's all paid for by us.
Again - GITMO doesn't cause terrorism. The terrorists have found ignorant excuses for decades to murder innocent people. They did it before GITMO and they'll do it long after GITMO is gone. The only thing getting rid of GITMO would do is embolden the terrorists and make it necessary to house them in the American homeland ... and I don't think ANYONE wants those murders housed anywhere near them.
I don't want them in my backyard. Do you? If you think they are all innocent then offer your home ... go ahead if you dare .. best be careful though - I'm sure they'd slit your throat the first chance they got.
'Intelligence' comes out of this film looking almost comically stupid. The interrogators are entirely convinced of their captives' guilt, but seem less sure of (and indeed less interested in) easily verifiable details like who the detainees are, what language they speak, and whether they were actually in England (under well-documented police probation) at the time that the interrogators insist they were meeting Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
What the three actually have to say is rarely heeded, while manipulative lies, brutalisation, beatings, stress positions, and months of solitary confinement are regularly employed to persuade them of the interrogators' point of view. Of course such abuses will come as little surprise to anyone reading the newspapers, but to see them re-enacted (albeit with a certain restraint), and to hear the victims' personal accounts, has a much greater impact than the written word, putting paid to America's claims that the treatment of so-called 'enemy combatants' is, as Donald Rumsfeld puts it, "humane and appropriate and consistent with the Geneva Convention for the most part."
Originally posted by magicmushroom
Flyers keep your head in the sand if you want to,
now with the numbers of deaths reported in Iraq
Originally posted by mr conspiracy
Finally we have it:
America shares some blame for driving the muslims to commit acts of terror.