Patricia Kushlis, a retired U.S. Information Agency officer and a specialist in international politics, public diplomacy and national security, told us, "I suspect the Administration will try to use this as a rationale for questioning the report's veracity, or at least credibility. Whether it will stick, or not, is another question."
Prof. Roederer told us, "I only think it hurts as a rhetorical matter. It may work rhetorically to defend our actions by pointing back at our accusers as coming from 'bad' places, but that retort misses the point of the allegation. If the merits disclose violations it is no answer to say that other states are violating human rights or even that members of the Committee are focusing on the U.S. to move the spotlight off of their own countries. The charge is still left intact - two or more wrongs do not make a right."
CCR's Olshansky said, "Although the full membership of the U.N. Human Rights Commission includes states with less than ideal human rights records, the report that we have seen is being issued by unimpeachable sources". She noted that the five individuals who prepared the report are the "foremost authorities" on the issues addressed in the report. "They have no role or responsibility for the actions of their home governments."
In November, the Bush administration offered three of the five members of the U.N. team the same tour of the prison given to journalists and members of Congress. This tour prohibits direct contact with prisoners.
The report focuses on the U.S. government's legal basis for the detentions as described in its formal response to the U.N. inquiry: "The law of war allows the United States -- and any other country engaged in combat -- to hold enemy combatants without charges or access to counsel for the duration of hostilities. Detention is not an act of punishment, but of security and military necessity. It serves the purpose of preventing combatants from continuing to take up arms against the United States."
But the U.N. team concluded that there had been insufficient due process to determine whether the more than 750 people who had been detained at Guantanamo Bay since January 2002 were "enemy combatants," and determined that the primary purpose of their confinement was for interrogation, not to prevent them from taking up arms. The U.S. has released or transferred more than 260 detainees from Guantanamo Bay.
It also rejected the premise that "the war on terrorism" exempted the U.S. from international conventions on torture and civil and political rights.
The report said the simultaneous use of several interrogation techniques -- prolonged solitary confinement, exposure to extreme temperatures, noise and light; forced shaving and other techniques that exploit religious beliefs or cause intimidation and humiliation -- constituted inhumane treatment and, in some cases, reached the threshold of torture.
Prof. Nowak also said the U.N. team was "particularly concerned" about the force-feeding of hunger strikers through nasal tubes that detainees said were brutally inserted and removed, causing intense pain, bleeding and vomiting.
Coming on the heels of the release of yet more photos of detainee abuse taken at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, widely published photos of British abuse of prisoners in Iraq, the U.N. report has helped to make this a pretty uncomfortable week for the Bush Administration. White House press secretary Scott McClellan attempted to blow off the U.N. report by asserting that, since the investigative team did not visit GITMO, it told only one side of the story.
Yet there is virtual unanimity in the foreign affairs community that the so-called "torture issue" has greatly diminished America's reputation abroad - and not only in the eyes of Arabs and other Muslims. Notably, it has been the issue on which the new German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, publicly disagreed with President Bush during her recent White House visit.
President Bush has dug his heels in on the Guantanamo issue. But his administration has a penchant for publicly exhorting the world to "stay the course" - and then privately changing the course. So there may yet be hope for a more rational policy.
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