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CIA has 'too much to hide'
14/12/2007 07:27 - (SA)
Geneva - The destruction of CIA interrogation tapes supports the contention that the agency used torture to gather information from terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, a UN human rights expert who recently visited the camp said on Thursday.
Martin Scheinin, the UN's independent investigator on human rights in the fight against terrorism, said he also had reason to believe the CIA continues to use interrogation methods that violate international law.
"The destruction of videotapes of CIA interrogations is one more argument that supports the contention that the CIA has been involved, and continues to be involved, in the use of interrogation techniques that violate the absolute prohibition against torture and other inhuman or degrading treatment," he told reporters.
Scheinin did not offer an explanation for how he reached this conclusion.
The US mission to the United Nations in Geneva did not have an immediate comment, said spokesperson David Gilmour.
The tapes in question showed the interrogations of two top terror suspects in 2002. The CIA destroyed the tapes three years later out of fear they would leak to the public and compromise the identities of US questioners, the director of the agency said last week.
Scheinin's comment came a day after he presented his findings on the legal process at Guantanamo to the UN Human Rights Council.
US officials described Scheinin's reporting on the military commissions used to try detainees as misleading, ill-informed and oversimplified.
The Finnish professor, who acts as an independent expert for the 47-nation UN body, travelled to Guantanamo last week to observe a legal hearing for one of the 305 detainees held at the facility.
He said CIA officials he met at Guantanamo "failed to answer any single question in a substantive way, in a meaningful way, which only confirmed the suspicion that they have too much to hide so they prefer not to answer questions".
Scheinin said he believed the United States would refrain from prosecuting about 150 Guantanamo detainees because of the sensitive information that might be revealed in trials.
"Bringing them to court would bring to the court's attention the methods through which the evidence, including the confessions, were obtained," he said.
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