BRUSSELS, July 2, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - The US must close the notorious Guantanamo prison, where its treatment of prisoners fans hatred of the West and recruits more people to join Al-Qaeda, Europe’s main human rights representative concluded in a new report made public on Friday, July 1.

“The longer the detention is in the camps the more the hatred against the US and the West becomes anchored in hearts and minds,” said Belgian Senate President Anne-Marie Lizin.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which commissioned the report from its human rights representative, will vote next week whether to accept its findings, Reuters reported.

The OSCE, consisting of 55 member states from Europe, North America and the former Soviet republics, is an organization that aims to maintain security and flag conflicts and human rights issues in its region. The United States is a member.

Guantanamo has been at the center of a political storm since a Newsweek report that military interrogators at the camp flushed a Qur’an down a toilet to rattle Muslim detainees.

The US military also detailed on June 3 five cases in which Guantanamo jailers had desecrated copies of the Noble Qur’an, including one incident which occurred as recently as March.

Once calling the prison the “gulag of our time,” Amnesty International said in a recent report that Guantanamo has become a “symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that is betraying the best US values.”

Lizin has further joined a growing chorus of US Congressmen and rights activists calling for the closure of the notorious military prison in the Cuba-based naval base.

“Being fully aware of the US authorities' dilemma between national and world security and long procedures, we recommend terminating the Guantanamo detention facility by announcing a calendar of closure,” the report added.

Chief among the Guantanamo critics are former US presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, who both called on the Bush administration to shut down the prison to demonstrate to the world America's commitment to human rights.

Last month, Democrat Senator Dick Durbin compared interrogation practices at Guantanamo with methods used by the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot in Cambodia. He later apologized after a storm of criticism.

Defying the mounting pressures at home and abroad, the administration decided in June to expand the prison, where it has been holding some 500 detainees, mostly scooped up in Afghanistan, incommunicado.