Saturday, January 27, 2007

Help US close Guantanamo, say MPs

MPs who have visited Guantanamo Bay have called on Britain and the international community to do more to help the US close the camp.

Seven Foreign Affairs Committee members visited the detention centre for "enemy combatants" in Cuba in September.

In a report they were critical of the conditions there, but said many inmates posed a threat and the world needed to find a "longer term solution".

Opposition MPs and human rights groups called the report "disappointing".

'Real threat'

The Guantanamo Bay facility was set up at a US base in Cuba after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002.

A total of 395 prisoners are currently being held there, including 10 British residents, whom the government says it is not obliged to try to bring home.

According to Clara Gutteridge of human rights group Reprieve, these 10 are of non-UK nationalities but with "long and serious ties with this country or who have indefinite leave to remain in the UK".

The report by the seven MPs said many of those detained presented a "real threat to public safety", and said all states were under an obligation to protect their citizens and others.

But at present only the US was doing so, and "the international community as a whole needs to shoulder its responsibility in finding a longer-term solution," it said.

The chairman of the committee, Mike Gapes, told BBC News: "The problem is if you closed it straight away what do you do with the people that are there?

"Some of them no doubt could be released - sent back to their country of origin and be of no threat to anyone. But there are people there that are dangerous people...

"The international community as a whole needs to look at finding a longer-term solution."

24-hour lighting

The MPs spent only one day at the camp and had no direct access to detainees.

Their report says food was plentiful, medical care good and the facilities broadly comparable with a British maximum security prison.

But they said the camp did not meet UK guidelines for recreation and education facilities nor for access to the media, lawyers and the outside world.

The report adds that most inmates are confined to small cells with little contact with the other prisoners and few opportunities to exercise.

One area apparently was closed for repair after detainees had been found dismantling the plumbing to make weapons.

Electric lighting was kept on 24 hours a day. Some detainees were reported to be clinically obese; two were being force-fed and 20% had some psychiatric condition.

The MPs said prisoner abuse had "almost certainly" happened there but the added that this was "unlikely to be taking place now".

And they said the government was right to "stick to its established policy of not accepting consular responsibility for non-British nationals".

'Missed opportunity'

Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather, who represents a 10-year-old constituent whose father is being held at the camp, said the committee appeared to have been given "the VIP antiseptic tour".

The camp once held 750 inmates, including several British citizens.

"The committee were given no direct access to prisoners, and they do not appear to have taken evidence either from former detainees, or lawyers or families of current detainees," she said.

Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, who chairs the all party Parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, said the report did not address the main issue, "which is whether US detention policy, whether in Guantanamo or elsewhere, is making the US, UK and the West more secure or less".

Amnesty International said the report was a "missed opportunity".

"We would have liked to have seen the committee unequivocally backing Amnesty International's long-standing call for Guantanamo to be closed immediately," said the organisation's UK director Kate Allen.

"We do not share the committee's apparent confidence that abuse is unlikely to be taking place now," she added.

Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of charity Reprieve which represents 38 prisoners at the base, said the report was "full of factual errors" and largely based on a "show tour".

Source: BBC

Wake Up America – We can do bloody well without you!

Wake up America. We've had enough of you and your arrogance. We've had enough of you and your self-centered souls. You are not the only country where you can go from rags to riches. You are not the only country where front-line scientists are created. You are not the only country where comfortable living is possible. You are not the country with the most admirable civilization, the most up-standing values, the finest arts, the lives most worth living. You are not the moral beacon of the world.

Will you please stop telling us we should be like you! Will you please stop traveling around the world with a sense of owning it all! Will you please stop thinking you are the salt of the earth!

There is a world out here that does not depend on you, a world that is at least as civilized as anything you can boast of. There is a world out here where young people get a first-class education, where they can go on to becoming professors and scientists, physicians and engineers without even getting any help from rich parents. You think money is everything. We think a good mind is everything. We try to create thinking people, people who can judge and question and doubt the validity of the acts of run-away politicians and self-righteous preachers. There are megalomaniacs in all countries of the world, but it's up to us the people to rein them in and not be daunted by the hubris of the people who run the country and who trample all over the planet with heavy boots and no souls.

We want a life that's worth living, a life of reflection and feelings, not a robot-like existence where the so-called values center around consumerism and soulless entertainment. We want human contacts, we want creative lives, we don't want to be just cogs in a wheel.

When are you Americans going to see that the megalomaniacs who are busy ruining your country and the world are just that? Sick bastards with the most enormous egos and the most putrid souls that the earth has ever seen. When are you going to see that you are not the upper crust of the world? When are you going to see that we Europeans, we Asians, we Africans, we Latin Americans don't want you to meddle with and ruin our countries. We can stand up fine without you, but with you we are destroyed.

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