Make of this what you will:
US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo; in Iraq, Afghanistan – UN
06.24.2005, 11:37 AMGENEVA (AFX) – Washington has, for the first time, acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.
The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.
‘They are no longer trying to duck this and have respected their obligation to inform the UN,’ the Committee member said.
‘They they will have to explain themselves (to the Committee). Nothing should be kept in the dark,’ he said.
UN sources said this is the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities.
The Committee, which monitors respect for the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, is gathering information from the US ahead of hearings in May 2006.
Signatories of the convention are expected to submit to scrutiny of their implementation of the 1984 convention and to provide information to the Committee.
The document from Washington will not be formally made public until the hearings.
Update: this makes more sense when you read the entire article on Yahoo News, rather than Forbes’ truncated version. Picking up where the above leaves off:
“They haven’t avoided anything in their answers, whether concerning prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan or Guantanamo, and other accusations of mistreatment and of torture,” the Committee member said.
“They said it was a question of isolated cases, that there was nothing systematic and that the guilty were in the process of being punished.”
The US report said that those involved were low-ranking members of the military and that their acts were not approved by their superiors, the member added.
In other words, just a few bad apples…