Close Gitmo, end torture, U.N. panel tells U.S.

(CNN) -- The United States should close its jail at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and any secret prisons it may be running, a U.N. panel said Friday.

"The state party should cease to detain any person at Guantanamo Bay and close this detention facility, permit access by the detainees to judicial process or release them as soon as possible," the U.N. Committee Against Torture said in an 11-page report issued in Geneva, Switzerland.

The report concluded that detention of suspects without charges being filed runs counter to established human rights law and that the war on terrorism does not constitute an armed conflict under international law.

The United States has defended its use of the Guantanamo facility to hold "enemy combatants" without charges during the war on terrorism after the September 11, 2001, attacks. About 500 detainees are thought to be held there.

The White House said Friday that President Bush has indicated he would like to shut down the Guantanamo facility but was awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on whether detainees can face military tribunals, according to The Associated Press.

"It is important to note that everything that is done in terms of questioning detainees is fully within the boundaries of American law," the AP quoted White House press secretary Tony Snow as saying.

Snow also told AP that the United States ensures detainees have food, clothing and other basic necessities as well as giving them the chance to worship.

"In short," Snow told the AP, "we are according every consideration consistent with not only the law but the needs of safety and security at Guantanamo to the people who are there."

U.S. State Department legal adviser John B. Bellinger III, who led the U.S. delegation at the U.N. panel hearing this month, said that the panel seemed not to have read a lot of the information Washington had given, or had ignored it, according to the AP.

"There are a number of both factual inaccuracies and legal misstatements about the law applicable to the United States," Bellinger told the AP.

Andreas Mavrommatis, a Cypriot rights expert who chaired the committee's review of the United States, told the AP the report should not be blown out of proportion because overall the United States has "a very good record of human rights."

He told the AP the committee had identified some problems in the U.S.-led war on terror. "We are telling them we hope to have a dialogue, and we trust that they might take the necessary measures to improve."

The report also suggested that the United States is operating "secret prisons" and called on Washington to close any "it may be running."

The report said U.S. interrogators should stop using "water boarding" and other questioning techniques that amount to torture.

American officials reportedly have acknowledged using water boarding as one of the more extreme techniques to elicit information from suspects.

The technique involves strapping down an interrogation subject and dunking them in water or otherwise making them feel that they may be drowning, although they are not.

The committee also took aim at the United States using dogs to induce fear and methods involving sexual humiliation -- both documented in unofficial photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib facility in Iraq. Several of the individuals involved in those cases have been prosecuted.

It urged an end to any methods that amounted to torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

There have been about 800 investigations into allegations of mistreatment in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. delegation said, according to the AP. The Department of Defense found misconduct and took action against more than 250 service personnel; there have been 103 courts-martial and 89 service members were convicted, of whom 19 received sentences of one year or more, the AP reported.