China: Guantanamo Just Tip of Iceberg in US’ “Deplorable” Record of Rights Violations

By Staff, Agencies

China says the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is just the tip of the iceberg in human rights violations committed by the United States, weeks after the United Nations slammed Washington for inhumane treatment of prisoners at the notorious offshore military prison.

In February, UN Special Rapporteur Fionnuala Ni Aolain granted unprecedented access to the US-run detention center in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay and released her report on her four-day visit to the infamous prison on Monday. 

Ni Aolain, who became the first UN human rights investigator allowed to visit the camp, harshly criticized the White House in her scathing report for continuing to subject the 30 men held at the prison, commonly known as Gitmo, to "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."

On Thursday, China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning, when asked to comment on the 23-page report, said at a regular briefing that for the past two decades, the Gitmo has repeatedly been exposed for its abuses, but Washington persistently refused to shut it down despite making promises to do so.   

"In the past two decades and more, it has been revealed many times that inmates were abused in the detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay, causing outrage in the international community. The US has promised time and again to close the detention center, yet till today dozens of individuals are still imprisoned in the facility at the Guantanamo Bay and only few of them have been indicted or convicted," she said.

"Over the decades, the US has set up 'black sites' in at least 54 countries and regions in the name of the “war on terror” to secretly detain 'suspected terrorists', carry out arbitrary detention and use torture to extort confessions.

"The detention center at the Guantanamo Bay is just the tip of the iceberg. The 'black sites' are a typical example of the US trampling on the rule of law and infringing on human rights," Mao further said.

She also stressed that Washington needed to "earnestly reflect upon its deplorable record on human rights, apologize and provide reparation to the victims and hold those who authorized and inflicted tortures on detainees accountable."

During her visit to the Guantanamo prison, Ni Aolain, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and at Queens University in Belfast, met with a range of the 34 prisoners who were then detained. The number has now dropped to 30, including the five inmates accused of plotting the attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11.

"After two decades of custody, the suffering of those detained is profound, and it’s ongoing. Every single detainee I met with lives with the unrelenting harms that follow from systematic practices of rendition, torture and arbitrary detention," she said at a press conference on Monday.

Ni Aolain, who visited the notorious prison as an independent UN monitor, did not, however, express harsh criticism for the fact that 19 of the 30 inmates had never been charged with any crime, some of whom have been held there for two decades, and only said their situation was a matter of “profound concern.”

The Gitmo opened in 2002 under the-then US president George W. Bush to held detainees captured during the so-called "war on terror" after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001.

It became synonymous with prisoner abuse by the US in the early years of "war on terror", gaining global notoriety for the widespread use of torture and other violations of human rights that took place in it.

Many detainees were reportedly subjected to psychological and physical abuse – including waterboarding, beating, exposure to deafening noise, and sleep and food deprivation – as part of their “enhanced interrogation,” the accounts of which were gradually leaked to the outside world by the few lawyers who visited the prison and the inmates who have since been released.

Washington's promises of closing down the site go back to the first tenure of former President Barack Obama, between 2009 and 2013.

Obama had made the closing of Guantanamo one of his top priorities and issued an executive order to do so soon after taking office in 2009. However, he failed to achieve that goal by the end of his second term in the face of stiff opposition in Congress. His successor, Donald Trump, rescinded Obama's order to close Guantanamo.

Officials of President Joe Biden say they aim to close the infamous prison but the detention facility remains in operation as the administration has transferred several detainees in recent years.