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Annan: Shut Guantanamo prison camp

British Cabinet member joins calls for closing facility

Annan says the prisoners at Guantanamo need to be "given a chance to explain themselves."

Gallery: Inside Guantanamo

• Detainee describes treatment

• Group: U.S. has torture policy

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UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is backing a U.N. report calling for the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be closed, saying he hoped it would happen "as soon as is possible."

In a report out Thursday, U.N. experts said the United States should shut the Guantanamo Bay camp "without further delay" and either try the roughly 500 detainees held there or release them.

"There's a lot in the report, and I cannot say that I necessarily agree with everything," Annan said. But he said the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay can't be held "in perpetuity" and need to be "given a chance to explain themselves."

"I think sooner or later there will be a need to close Guantanamo, and I think it will be up to the government to decide, hopefully, to do it as soon as is possible," he said.

The Associated Press reports that British Cabinet member Peter Hain also is urging Washington to shut the prison camp, and suggested that Prime Minister Tony Blair shares that view.

"I would prefer that it wasn't there. I would prefer it was closed, yes," AP quoted Hain appearing on BBC television. (Full story)

Blair "has said that, as a matter of fact, some of the information that came from there was of importance, but that doesn't mean to say that he thinks the place should have been set up in the first place. There's a distinction there," said Hain, who's the Cabinet member responsible for Northern Ireland and Wales.

"We've always said that Guantanamo Bay was something that shouldn't have happened," Hain said, according to AP.

The Bush administration has dismissed the findings of the report, with White House spokesman Scott McClellan calling it "a rehash" of claims made by lawyers for some of those prisoners.

The 54-page report concluded that prisoners held in Guantanamo, most of whom were captured in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, should be able to challenge the legality of their detention before a judicial body and be released if no grounds for imprisonment are found. (Watch clips of dramatic new film about Gitmo detainees -- 2:23)

"This right is currently being violated," it added. "The executive branch of the United States government operates as judge, prosecutor and defense counsel of the Guantanamo Bay detainees."

The United States has defended the use of the facility to hold "enemy combatants" without charges for as long as the "war on terror" may last.

But detention without charges runs counter to established human-rights law, and the "war on terror" does not constitute an armed conflict under international law, the report concluded.

The report -- which will be presented to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights -- was based on interviews with former detainees, lawyers, public documents, media reports and a questionnaire filled out by the U.S. government.

U.S. officials argued that the United Nations had gotten only one side of the story.

McClellan criticized the report's authors for not visiting the prison camp, located on a U.S. Navy base near the eastern tip of Cuba.

But Manfred Nowak, one of the report's authors, said U.S. officials barred them from speaking to the detainees -- a condition he called unacceptable.

"We are serious, objective, independent fact-finders," Nowak said. "We would undermine the U.N.'s fact-finding capacities if we were to accept an invitation that we are not accepting from any other state in the world.

The report called for U.S. officials to put an end to "special interrogation techniques" and to stop sending detainees to countries where there are "substantial grounds for believing" they might be tortured -- a process called extraordinary rendition.

The United States has denied it mistreats prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, which McClellan said houses "dangerous terrorists."

"They are people that are determined to harm innocent civilians or harm innocent Americans," he said. "They were enemy combatants picked up on the battlefield in the war on terrorism. They are trained to provide false information."

U.N.: Treatment amounts to torture

But the U.N. report found that interrogation techniques authorized by the Department of Defense, "particularly if used simultaneously, amount to degrading treatment in violation of ... the Convention against Torture."

For example, indefinite periods of detention and prolonged solitary confinement amount to torture, the report said.

And it noted a "profound deterioration" in the mental health of many being held on the island. In 2003, more than 350 acts of self-harm were reported, along with individual and mass suicide attempts and hunger strikes, it said.

The report also singled out health professionals for criticism, noting that some appear to have been "complicit in abusive treatment of detainees detrimental to their health."

Ambassador Kevin Edward Moley, a permanent representative of the United States to the United Nations, said the report "does not reflect the direct, personal knowledge" that a visit would have provided.

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