WASHINGTON - US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday called charges that the United States is running a gulag at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba "reprehensible," saying only a tiny fraction of US forces have been found to have abused detainees.
"No force in the world has done more to liberate people that they have never met than the men and women of the United States military," Rumsfeld said at a news conference.
"Indeed, that's why the recent allegation that the US military is running a gulag at Guantanamo Bay is so reprehensible," he said.
Rumsfeld was referring to an Amnesty International report that called the prison at Guantanamo Bay "a gulag of our time."
He said there have been 370 criminal investigations into alleged abuses and that less than one tenth of one percent of the 525,000 US servicemembers who have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo were found to have committed illegal acts against detainees.
In a statement, Amnesty International USA said Rumsfeld has dismissed the group's reports on detainee abuse for years and that US officials "continue to ignore the very real plight of men detained without charge or trial."
"If this administration is committed to transparency, it should immediately open the network of detention centers operated by the US around the world to scrutiny by independent human rights groups," said the statement by the group's executive director, William Schulz.
Rumsfeld was the latest top US official to weigh in in what appears to be an administration counterattack on an issue that has bedeviled it since Washington decided that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners taken in the war on terrorism.
President George W. Bush on Monday called Amnesty's characterization of the Guantanamo detention center "absurd." General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, used a television appearance on Sunday to slam the report as "absolutely irresponsible."
The thrust of their remarks has been that prisoners at Guantanamo are treated humanely and that the Pentagon has gone to great lengths to prosecute those responsible for abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo.
Asked whether consideration had been given to moving the Guantanamo operation to the United States, where it would fall under the US justice system, Rumsfeld said he had not considered that.
"Oh my goodness, there's so much transparency in Gitmo and so much oversight," he said, using military slang for Guantanamo.
"There have been so many reforms instituted in the Department of Defense, and the oversight and the attention that's given to what's taking place at Gitmo is extensive. And the implication that it's a gulag is what's wrong -- not what's going on at Gitmo."
The administration's defense follows allegations that guards and interrogators at the prison had desecrated a Koran, which when reported by Newsweek magazine set off deadly riots in Afghanistan and stirred outrage in the Muslim world.
The commander in Guantanamo, Brigadier General Jay Hood, told reporters last week that an inquiry had identified five instances in which the Koran was mishandled but would not say how, saying the investigation was still open.
Hood said no "credible evidence" was found that the Koran was thrown in a toilet by guards or interrogators, the most inflammatory of the allegations.
"Most would define a gulag as where the Soviet Union kept millions in forced-labor concentration camps, or I suppose some might say where Saddam Hussein mutilated and murdered untold numbers because they held views unacceptable to his regime," Rumsfeld said.
"To compare the United States and Guantanamo Bay to such atrocities cannot be excused," he said.
"Free societies depend on oversight and they welcome informed criticism, particularly on human rights issues. But those who make such outlandish charges lose any claim to objectivity or seriousness," he said.
Rumsfeld also charged that the media has given a distorted picture of US treatment of detainees.
"Two of the country's largest newspapers, for example, have devoted more than 80 editorials combined since March of 2004 to Abu Ghraib and detainee issues, often repeating the same erroneous assertions and recycling the same stories," he said.
"By comparison, precious little has been written by those editorial boards about the beheading of innocent civilians by terrorists, the thousands of bodies found in mass graves in Iraq (or) the allegations of rape of women and girls by UN workers in the Congo."

06/01/2005 18:17 GMT