GUANTANAMO, SOONER OR LATER

The White House, State Department and the Pentagon have dismissed a report by United Nations investigators calling for the closing “without delay” of the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay. They called it biased, inaccurate and lacking merit and didn’t bother to dispute its details.

The 54-page report on an 18-month investigation by five widely respected human rights experts assigned by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights deserves a serious response. The commission has been rightly criticized for including notorious human rights violators. But the investigators have been rightly praised for earlier studies of human rights abuses.

The Bush administration’s one spe-cific complaint is, as the Pentagon spokesman put it, that the report “clearly suffers from their unwillingness to take us up on our offer to go down to Guantanamo to observe firsthand the operations.” That’s not the whole story. The investigators asked for a visit in a June 25, 2004, letter. After waiting 17 months, the U.S. government replied on Oct. 28, 2005, with an invitation, but it stipulated that “the visit will not include private interviews or visits with detainees.” Naturally, the investigators refused and went ahead with questioning of detainees’ lawyers, their families, former prisoners and other sources.

The result was a stunning report on continuing practices including shackling, chaining and hooding prisoners, force-feeding them with nasal tubes during hunger strikes, subjecting them to severe temperatures while naked and threatening them with dogs. It said many of the actions amounted to torture and clearly violated Geneva Conventions to which the United States is a party.

The report is purely advisory, and the United Nations is not ordering the closing of the prison. But pressure is mounting. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said last week that it should be closed “sooner or later.” British Prime Minister Tony Blair said it was “an anomaly, and sooner or later it’s got to be dealt with.” Over the weekend the British, French and German ambassadors to Washington said it should be closed. The U.S. National Council of Churches asked for its closing, saying that reports of torture violated “the fundamental Christian belief in the dignity of the human person.”

“Anomaly” is a good word for the detention center. The State Department’s own Web site says that the United States “seeks to hold governments accountable to their obligations under universal human rights norms and international human rights instruments.” The department issues an annual human rights report on all other countries of the world, while our own actions have become a domestic and international embarrassment.

A simple solution is to close down this illegal, unjust, ill-conceived and politically disastrous prison camp and either give the prisoners a fair trial in a regular court of law or else let them go. If President Bush won’t do it on his own initiative, Congress should force him to do it.