US: US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday rejected calls from UN secretary general Kofi Annan and others to close Guantánamo Bay prison, and firmly denied accusations of torture and abuse.
"He's just flat wrong. We shouldn't close Guantanamo," Mr Rumsfeld said of Mr 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."
Mr Rumsfeld was speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, a day after a report by five UN special envoys called for closing the prison at the US naval base in Cuba.
The report accused the US of violating bans on torture and arbitrary detention and the right to a fair trial.
Mr Annan said he did not agree with everything in the report, produced by independent experts for the inter-governmental UN 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 given a fair trail.
Mr Rumsfeld said that while the authors of the UN report had not come to Guantánamo Bay, the International Committee of the Red Cross, US lawmakers and foreign officials who had visited the prison had not called for its closure.
The authors had turned down a US offer to visit the detention centre late last year because Washington would not allow them to interview individual detainees. The defence secretary said such interviews were the exclusive purview of the ICRC.
"There is no torture. There's no abuse. It's being handled honourably, 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," Mr Rumsfeld said.
Most of the roughly 500 inmates at Guantánamo have been held for four years without trial. The prisoners were mainly detained in Afghanistan and are held as part of President Bush's declared war against terrorism.
Asked whether he would support a new, independent investigation into allegations of detainee abuse at Guantánamo Bay, Mr Rumsfeld said there had been more than a dozen previous inquiries and it would not serve anyone's purpose to "rehash all of this".
"Any single example of abuse that's ever been cited has been investigated and to the extent appropriate, people have been punished. And that's how it should be dealt with," he said.
Mr Rumsfeld added that the United States was lagging dangerously behind al-Qaeda and other enemies in getting out information in the digital media age and must update its old-fashioned methods.
Modernisation was crucial to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide who were bombarded with negative images of the West, Mr Rumsfeld said.
The Pentagon chief said today's weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.
"Our enemies have skilfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but. . . our country has not adapted," Mr Rumsfeld said. "For the most part, the US government still functions as a 'five and dime' store in an eBay world."