Obama administration bars torture investigators from Guantánamo Bay…
Adding to its six-month record of extending the Bush administration’s attacks on democratic rights, the Obama administration is now blocking efforts by human rights investigators from the United Nations to interview detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison.
According to a report Thursday in the Washington Post, two UN human rights researchers, Martin Scheinin and Manfred Nowak, have sought to visit Guantánamo and been turned down. In a particularly cynical twist, US officials claimed that they were too busy implementing Obama’s much publicized order to close down Guantánamo by next January to answer questions about the ongoing abuse of prisoners still held in the facility.
Last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected a UN request for a meeting in Washington to discuss the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo and at secret CIA detention centers, which Obama also claims to have shut down. The US government has flatly refused to provide any information about the locations of the secret prisons or the identities of those who were held in them.
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