WASHINGTON, 30 May 2005 — America’s top military officer, Gen. Richard Myers, yesterday slammed as “absolutely irresponsible” a report by Amnesty International describing the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as a “gulag.” In a report released Wednesday, the international rights group called the Guantanamo prison camp, where hundreds of foreign terror suspects are held indefinitely, the “gulag of our times”, referring to the notorious prison camps of the Soviet Union.

Asked to respond to this charge on Fox News yesterday, Myers replied: “I think it’s absolutely irresponsible. It is ... essentially a model facility.”

The outgoing chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff said military guards have tried to treat their Guantanamo detainees as humanely as possible.

He stressed that 1,300 Qur’ans had been handed out to inmates in 13 different languages and that the prison has strived to make “the proper Muslim-approved food” available to detainees.

“I think I’d ask them to go look up the definition of gulag as commonly understood,” the US general said of Amnesty’s report.

Gulag is an acronym for the government department that ran the then Soviet Union’s labor camps, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It can also be used in reference to an “oppressive environment,” according to the OED.

Myers said the US has dealt with 68,000 detainees “since this conflict against extremism started,” adding that there had been 325 probes into alleged abuse and that 100 individuals “have had some sort of action taken, either court-martial or administrative action.”

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also slammed amnesty’s claim Friday in an interview with Knight Ridder Newspapers, as “absurd.”

The Guantanamo camp has been in the eye of a political storm since Newsweek magazine published a report this month saying interrogators had flushed a Qur’an in a toilet to rattle Muslim prisoners. Newsweek two weeks ago retracted its story.

Its report, however, sparked violent anti-US protests in Afghanistan, as well as demonstrations in Pakistan and Indonesia. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a close ally of US President George W. Bush, has called for a probe into claims US interrogators at the camp abused the Qur’an holy book, but Rice brushed off such calls Friday.

Brigadier General Jay Hood said Friday the US military had unearthed five incidents involving guards and one by an interrogator where “there was what could be broadly defined as mishandling of a Qur’an” following a probe.

Human rights groups have condemned US policy in Guantanamo, where some detainees have been held for years without charge and released inmates have claimed they were abused and mistreated by their interrogators.

A series of British nationals freed from Guantanamo have alleged they were tortured and abused by guards.

US media reports have detailed instances were female interrogators at the camp, some of them scantily clad, touched Muslim prisoners suggestively and smeared them with red dye intended to simulate menstrual blood.

US officials have consistently denied mistreating prisoners at the base and Myers yesterday said extremely dangerous individuals are being held there.

“How do you handle people who ... who aren’t part of a nation-state effort, that are picked up on the battlefield ... that if you release them, or if you let them go back to their home countries, that would turn right around and try to slit our throats, our children’s throats?” Myers said.

“The president said we’ll treat people humanely and in accordance with the Geneva Convention, we’re doing that,” Myers added.

In an interview with Time magazine released yesterday, former Israeli Cabinet Minister Nathan Sharansky said: “The violation of human rights at Abu Ghraib was very serious, but it was only a few people. In Guantanamo, the human-rights violations were much more serious because they were part of the system.”

However, Sharansky, one of President Bush’s intellectual guiding lights and a former Soviet dissident, said he had “serious criticisms” of Amnesty’s report.

“There is no moral clarity. It doesn’t differentiate between what I call fear societies and free societies,” Sharansky added.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that Guantanamo inmates can contest their detention in a civil court, but no prisoner has yet to do so, and no inmate has yet been brought to trial by the US government.

Some former inmates have been freed without charge and returned to Afghanistan, Britain, France Kuwait and Pakistan among other states.