Rumsfeld Rejects Calls for Guantanamo Closure
February 17, 2006
Reuters
Original Source: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-rumsfeld-guantanamo.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday rejected calls from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and others to close Guantanamo Bay prison, and firmly denied accusations of torture and abuse.
``He's just flat wrong. We shouldn't close Guantanamo,'' Rumsfeld said of Annan. ``We have several hundred terrorists, bad people, people who if they went back out on the field would try to kill Americans. ... To close that place and pretend that really there's no problem just isn't realistic.''
Rumsfeld was speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, a day after a report by five United Nations special envoys called for closing the prison at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The report accused the United States of violating bans on torture and arbitrary detention and the right to a fair trial.
Annan said he did not agree with everything in the report, produced by independent experts for the inter-governmental U.N. Human Rights Commission, but he believed the prison should be closed as soon as possible.
Adding its voice, the European parliament voted overwhelmingly on Thursday for a resolution urging that the prison be closed and inmates be given a fair trail.
Rumsfeld said that while the authors of the U.N. report had not come to Guantanamo Bay, the International Committee of the Red Cross, U.S. lawmakers and foreign officials who had visited the prison had not called for its closure.
The authors had turned down a U.S. offer to visit the detention center late last year because Washington would not allow them to interview individual detainees. The defense secretary said such interviews were the exclusive purview of the ICRC.
``There is no torture. There's no abuse. It's being handled honorably, and to the extent anyone does anything wrong, it's reported and they are punished under the uniform code of military justice. And by golly, that's the way it ought to be,'' Rumsfeld said.
Most of the roughly 500 inmates at Guantanamo have been held for four years without trial. The prisoners were mainly detained in Afghanistan and are held as part of President George W. Bush's declared war against terrorism.
Asked whether he would support a new, independent investigation into allegations of detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay, Rumsfeld said there had been more than a dozen previous probes and it would not serve anyone's purpose to ``rehash all of this.''
``Any single example of abuse that's ever been sited has been investigated and to the extent appropriate, people have been punished. And that's how it should be dealt with,'' he said.