Full text of Human Rights Record of the U.S. in 2005
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2006-03-09 11:47

VII. On the United States' Violation of Human Rights in Other Countries

Pursuing unilateralism on the international arena, the U.S. government grossly violates the sovereignty and human rights of other countries in contempt of universally-recognized international norms.

The U.S. government frequently commits wanton slaughters of innocents in its war efforts and military operations in other countries. The USA Today newspaper on Dec. 13, 2005 quoted a 2004 study published in the medical journal The Lancet as saying that it was estimated that about 100,000 Iraqis, mostly women and children, had died in the Iraqi war launched by the U.S. government in 2003. The year 2005 also witnessed frequent overseas military operations targeting at civilians by the U.S. forces, causing quite a number of deaths and injuries. On July 4, 2005, the U.S. forces killed 17 civilians, including women and children,in their air strikes in Konarha Province of Afghanistan. On Aug. 12, a U.S. military armored patrol vehicle fired at people coming out of a mosque in a town in the suburbs of the Iraqi city of Ramdi, killing 15 Iraqis, including eight children, and injuring 17 others. On Aug. 30, U.S. jet fighters launched several sorties of air raids against an area near the western Iraqi border town of Qaim, causing at least 56 deaths, including elderlies and children. On Nov. 21, U.S. troops fired at a civilian vehicle in northern Baghdad, killing a family of five, including three children. On Jan. 14, 2006, U.S. military aircraft struck a Pakistani village bordering Afghanistan, killing at least 18 civilians and triggering widespread anti-U.S. demonstrations in Pakistan.

In 2005, news of prisoner abuse by the U.S. forces again hit headlines, following their 2004 prisoner abuse scandal that stunned the world. To extract information, the U.S. forces in Iraq employed various kinds of torture in their interrogations. They abused the Iraqi detainees systematically, including sleep deprivation, tying them to the wall, hitting them with baseball bats, denying their access to water and food, forcing them to listen to extremely loud music in completely dark places for days running, unleashing dogs to bite them for amusement and even scaring them by putting them in the same cage with lions (reports from The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Washington Weekly and other news media). A report by The Human Rights Watch in September 2005 said that U.S. soldiers regarded prisoner abuse as "amusement" and a way "to relieve stress." Due to the unbearable abuse, many detainees maimed themselves, went on hunger strikes and even rioted. According to a report issued by the South Command of the U.S. military, there occurred 350 self-maiming cases in the prison of Guantanamo, Cuba, in 2003, with 23 prisoners seeking to hang themselves in one week of August. In August 2005, 131 prisoners in Guantanamo went on a hunger strike to protest inhuman treatment. In April the same year, a riot brokeout in Camp Bucca prison in south Iraq due to the U.S. warden's refusal to treat a sick prisoner. The United States has time and again rejected the requests of the UN Commission for Human Rights special mechanism to visit Guantanamo to investigate the incidentsof prisoner abuse. And after yielding to pressure, the U.S. side made it a rule that the UN delegation should not have any contacts with the detainees there, incurring international condemnation.