Bush ‘exploring’ alternatives in face of Guantanamo criticism by human rights groups

US President George W Bush yesterday left open the possibility that the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could be shut down following mounting criticism from former President Jimmy Carter and others.

“We’re exploring all alternatives as to how best to do the main objective, which is to protect America,” Mr Bush said when asked in an interview if he would close the detention centre.

The Defence Department disclosed last week that US guards or interrogators at Guantanamo kicked, stepped on and splashed urine on the Koran.

That followed an earlier report in Newsweek, later retracted, that US investigators had confirmed a guard had flushed a prisoner’s Koran in a toilet. The White House blamed that report for riots in Muslim nations.

The prison holds about 540 detainees. Some have been there more than three years without being charged with any crime. Most were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and were sent to Guantanamo Bay in the hope of extracting useful intelligence about the al-Qaida terrorist network from them.

Mr Carter told a human rights conference yesterday that closing the Guantanamo prison would demonstrate the US commitment to human rights at a time when the US reputation has suffered globally because of reports of prisoner abuses at Guantanamo as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Amnesty International also recently called for Guantanamo’s closure, saying the facility was the “the gulag of our time” - a characterisation Mr Bush dismissed again yesterday.

“It’s just absurd to equate Gitmo and Guantanamo with a Soviet gulag,” he said. “Just not even close.”