Myers Remarks

WALLACE: I want to turn to another aspect of this. Amnesty International issued a report this week that was sharply critical of U.S. treatment of prisoners. And I want to show you some of the quotations.

The group's secretary general said of the U.S. facility in Cuba, "Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time," comparing it to the Soviet slave-labor camps, where millions of people died. The executive director of Amnesty International USA, talking about torture, said, "We've documented that the U.S. government is a leading purveyor and practitioner of this odious human rights violation." General, how do you respond to those comments?

MYERS: I think I'd ask them to go look up the definition of gulag as commonly understood. We've had 68,000 detainees since this conflict against violent extremism started. We've had 325 investigations into alleged abuse. We've had 100 cases of substantiated abuse and there are 100 individuals that have had some sort of action taken, either court-martial or administrative action.

The ICRC has been at Guantanamo since day one. It is essentially a model facility. The contracts for the food, to ensure that our detainees have the proper Muslim-approved food, is $2.5 million annually, just to make sure they're fed right. We passed out 1,300 Korans in 13 different languages.

WALLACE: I was going to ask you, how many countries pass out to their prisoners the holy books of their faith?

MYERS: I don't know that. But we take extreme care to do that. We know there are five cases where perhaps the Koran was handled in an inappropriate way, not flushing down a toilet, but just handled in an inappropriate way according to their faith. And the instructions for handling the Koran are very detailed.

WALLACE: So when you see Amnesty International talking about the U.S. as the Soviet gulag of our time, where you're the leading purveyor of torture, or a leading purveyor...

MYERS: I think it's irresponsible. I think it's absolutely irresponsible.

If you look back at the policy of this government, what we said we treat people — the president said, and we've all said — humanely and where military necessity permits, and in accordance with the Geneva Convention, we're doing that. And I just outlined a number of incidents. And it's very small compared to the population of detainees we've handled.

But here's the question that needs to be debated by everybody, and that is: how do you handle people who aren't part of a nation- state effort, that are picked up on the battlefield, that if you release them or let them go back to their home countries, they would turn right around and try to slit our throats, our children's throats? I mean, these are the people that took four airplanes and drove them into three buildings on September 11th. They're the same folks with the same mentality.

And we struggle, of course, because this is a different kind of struggle, a different kind of war. We struggle with how to handle them. But we've always handled them humanely and with the dignity that they should be accorded.

WALLACE: And yet, thousands of Muslims protested around the world late this week despite the Pentagon investigation, which you say points out only five cases in which the Koran was mishandled, only three of those intentional, and none involving flushing a copy down the toilet. What or who do you think is driving those demonstrations around the world?

MYERS: Well, demonstrations around the world, I think the ones that made most of the coverage were in Afghanistan. And some of those demonstrations, we know were planned before the Koran story came out in a magazine.

So they've already planned it. The story probably fueled that fire.

I think what I'd be outraged at is things like — let's just go back to when Sergio de Mello was killed in Baghdad by a car bomb,...

WALLACE: That's the head of the U.N. mission there.

MYERS: ...the head of the mission; Margaret Hassan, a care worker who spent essentially her entire life caring for Iraqi children; the beheading I guess that is now posted on the Web site of the Japanese individual that just was beheaded not too long ago; and the innocent men, women and children who lose their lives to the vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices. That's what we ought to be outraged against.

I think what contributes to this somewhat is sometimes a relish on some people's part to play up these, what I consider a very minor piece of this whole effort, and I don't know why they do that. I don't know why they relish focusing on that.

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