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CUBA
NEWS
Yahoo!
Cuba Attacks Guantanamo Use for Prisoners
By ANITA SNOW, Associated
Press Writer. Fri Dec 26.
HAVANA, 26 - Cuba charged Friday that
the U.S. base on the east end of the communist
island had become a "concentration
camp," deriding its use as a holding
center for terrorism suspects.
"In the territory illegally occupied
by the Guantanamo Naval Base, hundreds of
foreign prisoners are subjected to indescribable
humiliations," said a statement released
Friday by Cuba's National Assembly.
Cuba has long opposed the presence of the
American base, which operates in the eastern
part of the island under a treaty signed
long before the 1959 revolution that brought
Fidel Castro to power.
But until Friday, Cuba had withheld criticism
and even offered the first prisoners medical
assistance when they arrived two years ago.
The statement said the prisoners are "totally
isolated, without the possibility of communicating
with their families or access to appropriate
legal defense." It added that "some
of the very few who have been freed have
narrated the horrors of that concentration
camp."
However, U.S. officials have repeatedly
argued that the prisoners were being well
treated.
"Should our servicemen and women be
in the same position, I would hope they
would be treated in the same humane manner,"
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, commander of
the detention mission at Guantanamo, told
The Associated Press in an interview earlier
this year.
The U.S. government currently holds more
than 600 men on the base, detained in Afghanistan
and Pakistan and elsewhere on suspicion
of terrorism.
Because they are being held on foreign
land, the Bush administration has maintained
the men have no rights to the American legal
system.
Miller says that the prisoners are treated
humanely under many of the principles of
the Geneva Conventions. Because the U.S.
government has classified the men as "enemy
combatants" rather than prisoners of
war, they are not entitled to the same protections
under the conventions.
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