UN: Try or Release Enemy Combatants

By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press Writer

A U.N. human rights expert is calling on the United States to prosecute or release suspects detained as "unlawful enemy combatants" and to move quickly to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Martin Scheinin, the U.N.'s independent investigator on human rights in the fight against terrorism, said in a report released Monday that he's concerned about U.S. detention practices, military courts and interrogation techniques.

He urged the U.S. government to end the CIA practice of extraordinary rendition, in which terrorism suspects are taken to foreign countries for interrogation.

Scheinin said he was also concerned about what he termed "enhanced interrogation techniques reportedly used by the CIA," saying that under international law "there are no circumstances in which cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment may be justified."

The U.S. military defended the current process. "Unlawful enemy combatants held at Guantanamo are afforded more due process than any other captured enemy fighters in the history of warfare," U.S. Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Defense Department spokesman on Guantanamo, told The Associated Press. "We will enforce the law as spelled out in the Military Commissions Act of 2006."

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