Acting like a sleazy, tin-pot dictator of a third-rate banana republic, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld this week refused to allow UN human rights investigators access to detainees at Gitmo. The UN personnel are concerned about reports of widespread hunger strikes and numerous suicide attempts. Rumsfeld prefers instead to restrict access to the International Red Cross because its findings are kept confidential.

According to the Reuters article, the military claims that only 27 detainees are currently involved in hunger strikes. The detainees lawyers estimate that number is closer to 200. Rumsfeld claims it’s all a publicity stunt.

He added, “There are a number of people who go on a diet where they don’t eat for a period and then go off of it at some point. And then they rotate and other people do that.”

Sloughing off responsibility for what’s happening under his watch, he said:

Rumsfeld appeared to distance himself from the decision to force-feed detainees.

“I’m not a doctor and I’m not the kind of a person who would be in a position to approve or disapprove. It seems to me, looking at it from this distance, is that the responsible people are the combatant commanders. And the Army is the executive agent for detainees,” Rumsfeld said.

Last week, it was revealed that the Pentagon has further violated detainee rights by force feeding them without advising their lawyers. A US District Court ordered that the lawyers be notified beforehand. Force feeding hunger strikers is discouraged by an international declaration:

”The ICRC backs a 1975 Tokyo declaration by the World Medical Association [WMA] stating that doctors should not participate in force-feeding but keep prisoners informed of the sometimes irreversible consequences of their hunger strike, [ICRC chief spokeswoman Antonella Notari] added”.

While there is no international law against force-feeding, the WMA declaration “sets guidelines for doctors involved in hunger strikes and says they should not participate in force-feeding.” The American Medical Association endorsed the declaration.

As we already know, the Bush administration has virtually no regard for international treaties or declarations that get in the way of their flagrant disregard for human rights.

In addition to the hunger strikes, numerous detainees have attempted suicide. The military views these actions as purely manipulative on the part of the prisoners. One detainee’s lawyer actually witnessed such an attempt while visiting one of his clients, Jumah al-Dossari:

On October 15th in the afternoon, I was meeting with him when he needed to use the bathroom, and without describing in elaborate detail the procedures at Guantanamo, that requires my calling M.P.s to come and move him from our meeting area to a small adjacent cell where there’s a toilet. The M.P.s arrived. I left the room. Several minutes later, the M.P.s came out after having moved Jumah into the cell. After a few moments, I decided that I should check and see whether he was finished, so that I could come in and speak with him again.

I opened the door to the room that houses both the meeting area and the cell. The first thing I saw was a pool of blood on the floor, and strangely in that first moment, my initial thought was that he had made himself vomit blood because this is a symptom that he has complained about, and I had the strange thought that maybe he was trying to convince me that it was a genuine symptom and not something that he had made up. A second later, I looked towards the area of the cell, however, and saw Jumah hanging by his neck from the top of a mesh metal wall that encloses the cell. He also had what appeared to be a very serious gash on the inside of his right arm, which was causing him to bleed on himself and also on the floor.

I immediately yelled for M.P.s, who arrived quickly. I called Jumah’s name several times, but he did not respond, and as best I could tell, appeared to be unconscious. The M.P.s arrived, cut him down from the noose that was holding him and put him on the floor. Still didn’t seem that he was conscious, and I also didn’t see him bleeding at all. Within a moment or so, I was asked to leave the room, or ordered to leave the room might be more accurate, and as I did I saw Jumah seeming to gasp, which at least struck me as a good sign.

The lawyer, Mr Colangelo-Bryan, was not allowed to see Mr al-Dossari later that day or since then. You can read or listen to his interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman here.

As a WaPo editorial declares today:

No wonder Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has denied permission to U.N. human rights investigators to meet with detainees at Guantanamo: Their accounts would surely add to the discredit the United States has earned for its lawless treatment of foreign prisoners.

That editorial goes on to chastise Democrats over their handling of the issues of detainee rights:

There is no more important issue before the country or Congress. Yet the advocates of decency and common sense seem to have meager support from the Democratic Party. Senate Democrats staged a legislative stunt on Tuesday intended to reopen — once again — the debate on prewar intelligence about Iraq. They have taken no such dramatic stand against the CIA’s abuses of foreign prisoners; on a conference committee considering Mr. McCain’s amendment, Democratic support has been faltering. While Democrats grandstand about a war debate that took place three years ago, the Bush administration’s champions of torture are quietly working to preserve policies whose reversal ought to be an urgent priority.

While Republican senator John McCain (who will be on CNN’s Larry King Live show Thursday nite) has surely taken on the difficult task of condemning his party’s leaders on the issue of torture, it cannot be said that the entire Republican party – which holds all of the power in Washington these days – is exempt from the type of criticism that this WaPo editorialist is flinging at the Democrats. It’s time for the Republicans to stand up and demand action – to make that “dramatic stand” themselves – because they are the only ones at this point who can actually do anything about the abuses.

Embarrassed by Wednesday’s revelations about secret CIA prisons and with the EU now set to investigate those which may exist in its member states and while Scotland has declared it will investigate US torture flights, the pressure is on the Bush administration to come clean and change its policies. Considering the arrogance and blatant disregard of Bush’s cabal towards human rights, it seems likely that the only way anything will happen is to oust the obstructionist Republicans from the US government so the Democrats can move in and clean house.