US 'lost trust' - Saudi paper

2004-05-15 21:02

Riyadh - A Saudi newspaper charged on Saturday that revelations of prisoner abuse by US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were showing the United States to be as bad as the al-Qaeda terror network says it is.

"The United States finds itself living up to its al-Qaeda billing as an evil and unjust state," the English-language Arab News said in its leader.

"Every new claim of mistreatment is now going to be believed, no matter what the Americans do to try to disprove it," the paper wrote.

"They have lost what little trust the world still had in them, they have forfeited every claim they may have had to be bringing the rule of law to a lawless part of the world. Only a truly extraordinary gesture can even begin to restore them."

Allegations of abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan have emerged following shocking pictures of US soldiers mistreating and humiliating Iraqi detainees in Baghdad.

Some of the detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have probably committed the crimes for which they were arrested, Arab News said.

"Yet Washington's fudging of its own much-vaunted legal norms at Guantanamo Bay, since followed by what looks increasingly like institutionalised maltreatment of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan... is diverting attention from what the prisoners have done to what has been done to them, and rightly so."

- AFP