Aljazeera reports:

For the first time, Washington has acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at U.S. detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said on Friday.

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“They are no longer trying to duck this, and have respected their obligation to inform the UN,” the Committee member told a media source.

“They they will have to explain themselves (to the Committee). Nothing should be kept in the dark.”

According to the UN sources it was the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from U.S. authorities.

The Committee, which monitors respect for the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, is gathering information from the U.S. ahead of hearings in May 2006.

Signatories of the convention are expected to submit to scrutiny of their implementation of the 1984 convention and to provide information to the Committee.

The document from Washington will not be formally made public until the hearings.

“They haven’t avoided anything in their answers, whether concerning prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan or Guantanamo, and other accusations of mistreatment and of torture,” the Committee member said.

“They said it was a question of isolated cases, that there was nothing systematic and that the guilty were in the process of being punished.”

The U.S. report said that those involved were low-ranking members of the military and that their acts were not approved by their superiors, the member added.

The U.S. has faced criticism from UN human rights experts and international groups for mistreatment of detainees — some of whom died in custody — in Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly during last year’s prisoner abuse scandal surrounding the Abu Ghraib facility there.

Scores of U.S. military personnel have been investigated, and several tried and convicted, for abuse of people detained during the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At the Guantanamo Bay naval base where around 520 suspects of some 40 nationalities are being held, charges of torture and other human rights breaches have been named and affirmed by international rights groups.

The U.S. has faced widespread criticism for keeping the Guantanamo detainees in a “legal black hole,” notably for its refusal to grant them prisoner of war status and allegedly sluggish moves to charge or try them.

Washington’s report to the Committee reaffirms the U.S. position that the Guantanamo detainees are classed as “enemy combatants,” and therefore do not benefit from the POW status set out in the Geneva Conventions, the Committee member said.

Four UN human rights experts on Thursday slammed the United States for stalling on a request to allow visits to terrorism suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base, and said they planned to carry out an indirect probe of conditions there.

6/25/2005 7:00:00 PM GMT