Amnesty International is defending its description of Guantánamo prison as a "gulag," and urges the US to allow independent investigations of allegations of torture at its detention centers for terrorism suspects. A verbal feud between Amnesty and Washington has escalated since the group's new annual report compared Guantánamo Bay to the brutal Soviet system of forced labor camps where millions of prisoners died. President Bush dismissed the report as "absurd" the Amnesty report, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the description "reprehensible."

"The administration's response has been that our report is absurd, that our allegations have no basis, and our answer is very simple: if that is so, open up these detention centers, allow us and others to visit them," Amnesty International secretary general Irene Zubaida Khan told a news conference.

Emulating recent jihadi tactics in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Iraqi resistance has targetted a gathering of Sufis for a suicide attack, as well as escalating attacks against Shi'ites.

A suicide bomber blew himself up at a gathering of Sufi Muslims north of Baghdad June 2, killing 10 and injuring at least 12. The attack took place at a house in the village of Saud, near the northern town of Balad as Sufis gathered for a religious ceremony, Interior Ministry officials said. Ahmed Hamid, a Sufi witness, told the AP: "I was among 50 people inside the tekiya [Sufi gathering place] practicing our rites when the building was hit by a big explosion. Then, there was chaos everywhere and human flesh scattered all over the place."

President for life Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled Turkmenbashi, or "leader of all the Turkmen," has made good on a pledge to order all hospitals outside the Turkmen capital Ashbagat shut.

This comes on the heels of his decision to close the country's libraries. "No one goes to libraries and reads books anyway," explained Niyazov. Opera, ballet and circuses, among many other things, were already banned in Turkmenistan. (IWPR, Apr. 21) Required study, at work, in schools, and in mosques, is Ruhknama, the spiritual treatise penned in Turkmenbashi's own hand. Now, for all devotees of this Central Asian post-communist insect that preys upon the lives of his people, Rukhnama is available online in English.

A dozen men armed with assault rifles killed two children of a man who belongs to a peasant ecologist group in Mexico's Pacific coast state of Guerrero May 19, and soldiers arrested three members of the same group on weapons charges the following day. The shooting attack, which also wounded the boys' father, Alberto Peñaloza, and two older sons, occurred in the Sierra Petatlan, the scene of a decade-long struggle between loggers and campesinos. Peñaloza is a founder of the local Organization of Campesino Ecologists, which has blockaded logging trucks on the mountain roads.

The Independent Task Force on the Future of North America, a New York-based body coordinated by the Council on Foreign Relations, has released a detailed set of proposals that build on the recommendations adopted by Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, Mexican President Vicente Fox, and U.S. President Bush at their March trilateral summit in Waco, TX. The recommendations concern how to pursue and strengthen the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), which was adopted at that summit, to coordinate border security and anti-terrorist cooperation among the three NAFTA members.

A suicide bomb tore through a mosque in Kandahar June 1 at the funeral of Mullah Abdul Fayaz, a Muslim cleric who spoke out against the Taliban, killing at least 20 people and wounding dozens. Hundreds of mourners were crowded inside the Mullah Abdul Fayaz Mosque in the center of the city when the bomb went off. Kabul's police commander, Gen. Akram Khakrezwal was among the dead. Mullah Fayaz, a supporter of President Hamid Karzai, was shot dead in Kandahar on May 29 by suspected Taliban gunmen--a week after he led a call for people not to support the rebels.

In a second attack west of Kandahar June 1, a bomb exploded on a bridge as a group of Afghan de-miners were driving over it, killing two and wounding five others, said Patrick Fruchet, spokesman for the UN Mine Action Center for Afghanistan.

More chilling revelations in the ongoing scandal over abuse at Guantanamo Bay and other US military detention centers...

Gitmo Detainees Say Muslims Were Sold
By Michelle Faul
The Associated Press

Tuesday 31 May 2005

San Juan, Puerto Rico -- They fed them well. The Pakistani tribesmen slaughtered a sheep in honor of their guests, Arabs and Chinese Muslims famished from fleeing U.S. bombing in the Afghan mountains. But their hosts had ulterior motives: to sell them to the Americans, said the men who are now prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

What ironic timing. An official visit by the US Energy Secretary to Azerbaijan to mark the opening of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline was immediately preceeded by violent repression of pro-democracy protests there. From the May 29 New York Times:

Washington - Samuel Bodman, the new secretary of energy, led the United States delegation to Azerbaijan last week to celebrate a huge moment in America's effort to diversify its sources of oil: The opening of a pipeline that will carry Caspian oil to the West, on a route that avoids Russia and Iran.