Scientists Protest U.S. Treatment Of Prisoners

A group of prominent scientists say they are ???deeply concerned??? about U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other locations around the world.

???The secrecy and the disdain for international law and opinion are contrary to the very ideals that our country has long stood and fought for,??? write 19 members of the National Academy of Sciences in a letter published in the New York Times on April 30.

The scientists say there is no way to know if the individual prisoners being held are enemy combatants, al Qaeda terrorists, or merely innocents wrongly caught in a blind sweep.

???It is one of the most fundamental principles of a democracy that all accused should be tried without unreasonable delays and freed if innocent. In no case do our moral principles permit humiliating and degrading treatment,??? the letter states.

The scientists claim the Bush Administration ???has crossed the limits of acceptable practices??? in its treatment of prisoners and ???has cynically used fear to justify behavior that the civilized world has long considered criminal.???

The signatories include University of California, Santa Barbara, chemistry professor Walter Kohn, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Richard N. Zare, chair of the department of chemistry at Stanford University.