These cruel experiments in the 1970s brought rise to the animal rights and liberation movement and the end of sanctioning such experiments. However, we now read of the suicide of the three subjects exposed to similar experimental conditions at Guantanamo Bay. These deaths were being described as "a PR stunt" or an "act of warfare" rather than the obvious results of extreme deprivation and desperation.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, on the ABC's Lateline program on Monday, dismissed claims of a similar risk of suicide in the case of David Hicks because "he has a bed, toilet and books and gets to mix with others from time to time". Mr Downer then went on to acknowledge that Hicks is kept in isolation for 22 hours a day and that this is "consistent with maximum-security environments that exist in the United States".

Hicks and others have now been subject to extreme deprivation without any end in sight for four years. It would appear that the inhumane science of the past is now being justified by the political expediency of the present. Our governments are condoning such treatment on humans in the name of the war on terror, when any ethics committee would deem such deliberate sensory deprivation on animals and its known effects as unacceptable.

Sue Green, Wattle Glen

Hicks is being tortured

DAVID Hicks is being subjected to sensory deprivation having been returned to solitary confinement in a concrete cell after previously surviving 244 nights and days without sunlight or human contact. This is in clear violation of the third Geneva Convention. The Howard Government, then, is party to what the International Red Cross has concluded is the "construction of a system that cannot be considered other than an international system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture".

Britain's Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, has called for the closure of the prison, as have Germany and the European Parliament. Even Saudi Arabia has joined the protest and has won the release of 16 more Saudi citizens.

By failing to honour its commitment under domestic and international law to protect the human rights of all its citizens and treating David Hicks as an outcast, Australia now risks making itself a pariah in the community of nations by supporting the Bush Administration's decision to make torture a permanent weapon in the arsenal of American power, according to US history professor Alfred McCoy in his essay "The outcast of Camp Echo" in the current issue of The Monthly.

Mary Rimington, Ascot Vale

I'D LIKE to congratulate Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the head of the Guantanamo Bay re-educational facility and holiday camp, for coming out and saying openly what any right-thinking person already knows - that the suicides at Guantanamo are part of an ongoing attack on the US (The Age, 12/6).

Admiral Harris reports that of the 460 residents of Guantanamo, only between 30 and 40 attempted suicides have been officially reported, so that means that less than 10 per cent of the residents had officially tried to kill themselves and less than 10 per cent of those who officially tried officially succeeded. Hopefully those who officially failed to kill themselves have been punished severely so as to dissuade them from attacking the US in this way again.

To look at a wider context, in Iraq it is obvious that the terrorists are deliberately arranging for themselves to be tortured and shot so as to emotionally break the poor innocent US soldiers. And how could so many innocent women and children be killed as collateral damage to perfectly legitimate use of massive force if the terrorists weren't deliberately putting them there?

I can only say that if the terrorists continue to use such unfair tactics against US forces, they will only have themselves to blame if the US massively retaliates.

Stephen Ransom, McKinnon

After the U.S. Senate voted last year to strip Guantánamo detainees of the right to habeas corpus, you'd think it would have dashed the hopes of the desperate prisoners that the world's greatest deliberative body would prove their salvation. But Saifullah Paracha is apparently an eternal optimist. In March, after 18 months in Guantánamo, Paracha, 58, decided to write a letter to 98 U.S. senators describing his plight. The senators haven't responded, though it's hard to blame them. They don't know the letters exist. The Department of Defense won't release them for delivery.

"He lived in the United States," says Paracha's lawyer G. T. Hunt. "He's a pro-American person. He believes in American justice. He believes that if he can get a hearing he'll get out."

In 1986, after studying and working in New York for 16 years, Paracha moved back to Pakistan, to Karachi where he and his wife raised four children and he managed several business ventures. In July 2003, Paracha traveled to Bangkok for what he thought was a meeting about a business opportunity. He never made it out of the airport. Masked men abducted him, taking him to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan where he was interrogated and, according to Hunt, imprisoned in a cell with no toilet. His family spent a month with no idea of his whereabouts, until the International Committee of the Red Cross notified them he was in U.S. custody. After a year in Bagram, he was sent to Guantánamo in September 2004.

The United States believes that both Paracha and his son Uzair aided several Pakistani men alleged to be al Qaeda operatives. In November, Uzair was convicted in federal court of providing the operatives with "material support" and now faces up to 75 years in jail. Uzair maintains his innocence. He says he was an unwitting accomplice, merely helping his father's business associates with their U.S. immigration papers. Saifullah says he does have a relationship with the alleged terrorists, but only knew the men as investors, not al Qaeda operatives. Unlike his son, he hasn't been afforded an opportunity to make his case in court.

The rules guiding attorney/client correspondence at Guantánamo are frustratingly vague, lawyers for the detainees say, and the processing delays are maddening. Mail routinely arrives six months after it's been sent, if it arrives at all. "For months I sent him letters and he sent me letters and they were all just impounded," Hunt says. "Now, I think my letters get through but they take their sweet time about it."

The ostensible reason for the backlog is security. "The attorney/client communications go to a secure facility, which happens to be here in Washington," Hunt says. "And they can't leave there until the government clears it and says it's not sensitive and not classified."

In order to read Paracha's correspondence, Hunt must go to the secure location-"a grim featureless office, with blinds drawn 24 hours a day"-where he's allowed to read Paracha's letters to him before placing them back in a safe. Last month he saw the 98 letters, painstakingly copied in longhand, which Paracha had sent to him to review and distribute. But Hunt was told he couldn't remove them from the safe. He can't disclose what's in the letters-"it's a state secret," he quips-but says "the person with the right authority could sit down, take a glance at them and then say, 'OK they can go out.' "

A Pentagon spokesperson wouldn't comment directly on Paracha's letters but said that over a six-month span in 2005, there were 10,000 pieces of mail sent to or from detainees. The detainees are "in close contact with family and friends if they choose to be," the spokesperson said.

After Hunt sent an email to his fellow Guantánamo lawyers about the detained letters, several of them contacted their senators to inform them they had mail the Pentagon wasn't letting them read.

This prompted an indignant letter from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who wrote to Rumsfeld on June 5, asking if the Department of Defense has a "written or unwritten policy prohibiting all persons detained at Guantánamo Bay from writing to, or communicating in any manner with, Members of Congress?"

If so, "please explain what legal authority supports such a policy."

On the bottom of the letter, Leahy scrawled in pen: "Is this really happening!"

Paracha must be asking himself the same question.

Twenty-seven religious leaders, including megachurch pastor Rick Warren, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington, have signed a statement urging the United States to "abolish torture now -- without exceptions."

The statement, being published in newspaper advertisements starting today, is the opening salvo of a new organization called the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, which has formed in response to allegations of human rights abuse at U.S. detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Titled "Torture is a Moral Issue," the statement says that torture "violates the basic dignity of the human person" and "contradicts our nation's most cherished values." "Nothing less is at stake in the torture abuse crisis than the soul of our nation. What does it signify if torture is condemned in word but allowed in deed?" it asks.

The signers come from a broad range of denominations and include notable religious conservatives, such as the Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals; Archbishop Demetrios, primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America; and the Rev. William J. Byron, former president of Catholic University.

By suggesting that recent abuse of prisoners may not be just an aberration but a reflection of U.S. policy, the statement contains an implicit challenge to the Bush administration, according to some signers.

"I'm not persuaded that this issue has been put to bed yet by the Bush administration," said David P. Gushee, a philosophy professor at Union University in Tennessee who wrote an influential article against torture this year in Christianity Today, an evangelical magazine. "I'm worried that we still don't truly know what is going on in all our detention centers around the world."

Deputy White House press secretary Dana Perino said the administration has "the utmost respect for all these religious leaders." But, she said, "I'll simply repeat what the president has said many times, which is that this government does not torture, and we adhere to the international conventions against torture. That is our policy, and it will remain our policy."

On its Web site, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture urges Congress and the president to "remove all ambiguities" by prohibiting secret U.S. prisons around the world, ending the rendition of suspects to countries that use torture, granting the Red Cross access to all detainees and not exempting any arm of the government from human rights standards.

McCarrick said last night that he had signed on to "the general principle" that torture is unacceptable but had not seen the new organization's specific proposals. Gushee said he is "not sure that everyone who signed the statement would concur with that platform," though he said he, personally, does.

The American Medical Association on Monday voted to refine its ethical guidelines that forbid doctors from participating in torture or "coercive" interrogations of prisoners.

The action was prompted by unconfirmed allegations that physicians or psychiatrists played roles in harsh interrogations conducted at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The 544-member house of delegates, which sets policy for the leading U.S. physicians group, voted at its annual meeting to approve a seven-page report that outlined a physician's duty "as healer" not to take any part in interrogating prisoners.

Other stipulations called for doctors to provide medical care to detainees as they would to any patient -- in strict confidence.

Similarly, doctors are not ethically permitted to participate in executions, or to heal an inmate to make him well enough to be put to death, the AMA said.

"Physicians must not conduct, directly participate in, or monitor an interrogation with an intent to intervene, because this undermines the physician's role as healer," one of the report's recommendations said.

"The development of this new ethical policy removes ambiguity for physicians who must make decisions about their involvement in interrogations," the report said. "This policy builds on previous AMA efforts to assist physicians in the military who encounter such issues."

"We have to promote compassion, not coercion, wherever we find it," said Dr. Priscilla Ray, chairman of the AMA's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, which wrote the report

The human rights group urged EU leaders to say in their meeting this week that the so-called rendition flights were ''unacceptable'' and to make sure their airspace and airports were not used for such flights in the future.

It asked EU leaders to raise the issue with President Bush when they meet him in Vienna on June 21, saying the bloc's credibility was at stake.

Amnesty's report draws largely the same conclusions as those issued by EU lawmakers on Monday, and last week by the Council of Europe, a European human rights watchdog. None produced hard evidence.

The Council of Europe report said more than 20 mostly European countries colluded in a "global spider's web'' of secret CIA jails and flight transfers of terrorist suspects that stretched from Asia to Guantanamo Bay.

In a new report published on Wednesday, the Council's Secretary General Terry Davis said additional information from member states confirmed that many countries lacked adequate safeguards against human rights violations by foreign agents.

"Very few countries appear to have adopted adequate and effective procedures to monitor whether aircraft transiting through their airspace are used for purposes incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights,'' it said.

Davis would shortly make recommendations on legal measures that could be taken on the national and European levels to reinforce existing protection against rendition and illegal detention, the Council of Europe said.

Amnesty reported on six suspected cases of abuses by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in which it said seven countries -- Germany, Italy, Sweden, Britain, Bosnia, Macedonia and Turkey -- were involved.

Random inspections may be carried out on US aircraft, the Irish government has warned, after a handcuffed and manacled marine was discovered by cleaners on board a military charter flight at Shannon airport.

The transfer of the prisoner - deemed illegal because permission had not been sought in advance from Ireland's justice department - has aggravated the political row over CIA renditions of terrorist suspects through European airspace.

The US ambassador, James Kenny, was summoned to the Irish foreign affairs department to explain the failure to comply with regulations required under international law. He has been asked to produce a report on the incident.

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A report by the Council of Europe earlier this month named Ireland as one of 20 countries that had colluded in a "global spider's web" of CIA jails and clandestine transfers of terrorist suspects. The government has accepted Washington's insistence that there have been no US rendition flights through Irish airports.

Opposition parties and human rights groups are pressing for police checks on US military and charter flights stopping at Shannon airport, near Limerick, which is used as a refuelling point for flights between the US and the Middle East.

"We will look at all options, including if necessary, random inspections," Dermot Ahern, the republic's foreign affairs minister, said. "Given the fact that an incident like this has happened we would put the [police] on notice that perhaps they should start inspecting on a case-by-case basis."

The handcuffed US marine was found on board an Omni Air International plane along with 180 military personnel en route from Kuwait to the US city of Royston, Georgia. The prisoner had reportedly been convicted of stealing clothing and was being repatriated to serve his sentence. His presence was only reported after cleaning staff boarded the aircraft.

The Labour party's foreign affairs spokesman, Michael D Higgins, demanded to know whether this was an isolated incident. "What reliability can be placed on assurances by the US authorities that Shannon is not being used to facilitate the extraordinary rendition of prisoners?"

The US ambassador insisted that there had been no intention to break the law. "Unfortunately permission from the Irish government was not sought for the transit of this person," he told Irish papers. "We regret this incident and are reviewing procedures to ensure that this does not happen again.

Bush said he would designate Deputy Treasury Secretary Bob Kimmitt to lead the efforts on behalf of the United States.

"He'll be supported by State Department Counselor Phil Zelikow and other senior officials. And they will soon travel to the United Nations and then to Baghdad for consultations. And then they're going to travel across Europe and Asia and the Middle Eastto discuss the compact and secure support from governments for this new government," he said.

Bush added that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was working to develop "an international compact," under which Iraq would take a series of steps in the political, economic and security areas, and then the international community would provide more robust political and economic support.

Bush has vowed that U.S. troops will not leave Iraq until the new Iraqi government can sustain and defend itself.

The case tested previous court rulings that police armed with warrants generally must knock and announce themselves or they run afoul of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, said Detroit police acknowledge violating that rule when they called out their presence at a man's door then went inside three seconds to five seconds later.

"Whether that preliminary misstep had occurred or not, the police would have executed the warrant they had obtained, and would have discovered the gun and drugs inside the house," Scalia wrote.

But suppressing evidence is too high of a penalty, Scalia said, for errors by police in failing to properly announce themselves.

The outcome might have been different if O'Connor were still on the bench. She seemed ready, when the case was first argued in January, to rule in favor of Booker Hudson, whose house was searched in 1998.

O'Connor had worried aloud that officers around the country might start bursting into homes to execute search warrants. She asked: "Is there no policy of protecting the home owner a little bit and the sanctity of the home from this immediate entry?"

She retired before the case was decided, and a new argument was held so that Justice Samuel Alito could participate in deliberations. Alito and Bush's other Supreme Court pick, Chief Justice John Roberts, both supported Scalia's opinion.

Hudson's lawyers argued that evidence against him was connected to the improper search and could not be used against him.

Scalia said that a victory for Hudson would have given "a get-out-of-jail-free card" to him and others.

In a dissent, four justices complained that the decision erases more than 90 years of Supreme Court precedent.

"It weakens, perhaps destroys, much of the practical value of the Constitution's knock-and-announce protection," Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for himself and the three other liberal members.

Breyer said that police will feel free to enter homes without knocking and waiting a short time if they know that there is no punishment for it.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a moderate, joined the conservatives in most of the ruling. He wrote his own opinion, however, to say "it bears repeating that it is a serious matter if law enforcement officers violate the sanctity of the home by ignoring the requisites of lawful entry."