US: Calls are growing in the United States for the closure of the US internment camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which Amnesty International categorised recently as part of "the gulag of our times".
The New York Times said yesterday that "the best thing Washington can now do about this national shame is to shut it down." Democratic Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware called the camp "the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting of terrorists around the world," and also said the US should close it for good.
The calls to dismantle the camp, which was set up after 9/11 to detain prisoners in Washington's "war on terror", were partly prompted by a Pentagon report issued late on Friday evening detailing incidents in which the Koran was desecrated.
US military officials said that no evidence had been found that a guard had flushed a detainee's Koran down a lavatory, as reported but later retracted by Newsweek two weeks ago, but confirmed five complaints about the treatment of the Muslim holy book.
In the most serious incident on March 25th, urine came through an air vent and splashed a detainee and his Koran when a guard relieved himself outside. The guard was reprimanded, according to the report.
In other confirmed incidents, water balloons thrown by prison guards wet a number of Korans, and an obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of another detainee's Koran.
The findings were the result of an investigation last month by base commander Gen Jay Hood, who reported there was a "consistent, documented policy of respectful handling of the Koran dating back almost 2½ years." Allegations of Koran desecration at the Guantanamo camp, where some 540 detainees have been held without trial since 2001 and 2002, have sparked violent anti-American protests in Afghanistan.
"It is unfortunate that some have chosen to take out of context a few isolated incidents by a few individuals," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
Amnesty International's depiction of Guantanamo Bay as part of an American gulag angered President Bush, who called it "absurd".
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - who has praised Amnesty International in the past for its reports on torture in Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq - dismissed the allegation as "reprehensible".
The New York Times said the gulag metaphor was apt because Guantanamo was but one of a chain of "shadowy detention camps" that also included Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram in Afghanistan, which have produced stories of abuse, torture and criminal homicide. These constituted "a tightly linked global detention system with no accountability in law".
The paper called on the Bush administration to shut Guantanamo down as it had become "a propaganda gift to America's enemies; an embarrassment to our allies; a damaging repudiation of the American justice system; and a highly effective recruiting tool for Islamic radicals, including future terrorists."
The chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, plans to hold hearings this month on the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo.
Senator Biden, however, called for an independent commission to investigate the camp.
The head of Amnesty International in the US, William Schulz, yesterday distanced himself from the use of the word "gulag", the term for Stalin's forced-labour camps in Russia.
"Clearly this is not an exact or a literal analogy," he said, noting that it was made by Amnesty's London headquarters.
"But there are some similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared, and in some cases, at least, we know that they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed," Mr Schulz said.