Most Gitmo detainees to be sent to home countries

[Leader]

US 'deal' to transfer Guantanamo inmates
05/08/2005 - 18:52:20

The US Government is in negotiations which could see almost 70% of detainees transferred from Guantanamo Bay to three countries in the Middle East.

A deal has been struck to transfer most of the 110 Afghan terror suspects to the “exclusive custody and control” of the Afghanistan government.

Similar deals are in the pipeline with authorities in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, a Pentagon spokesman said.

Matt Waxman, deputy assistant secretary of defence for detainee affairs, stressed the plan was not to shut down Guantanamo.

“We don’t want to be the world’s jailer,” he said. “We think a more prudent course is to share responsibility with our coalition partners for keeping these individuals from fighting us again.

“In waging the war against al Qaida and the Taliban we will continue to capture enemy fighters and need to prevent them from returning to the battlefield, but it need not be the US who detains them for the long term.”

The US has agreed to help Afghanistan build an appropriate prison and to train its guards.

Pierre-Richard Prosper, ambassador at large for war crimes, who led a US delegation to the Middle East this week, told the Washington Post the government was working to send 129 Saudis and 107 Yemenis from Guantanamo to the custody of their home countries.

The long-term goal is understood to be to reduce the Guantanamo population to those who pose the highest security risk and to shift the focus from intelligence gathering to long-term detention.

Some 510 prisoners are currently being held by the US at the Cuban detention camp which has been the subject of much criticism in recent months.

The Naval base has been the focus of alleged torture and human rights violations and detainees are held and interrogated without charge.

Guantanamo was initially established to hold terror suspects from Afghanistan.

At its peak it held 750 prisoners but more than 100 have been released and 65 dispatched to foreign countries, including seven Britons who were all later released without charge.

http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/stor...58&p=y5y75x464

[Ray]

The idea is interesting.

However, this would raise the following questions:

1. What were the problems which prevented this not being done earlier in the initial stages? If it had been done, then the US would have saved itself all the hassles that were raised along time.

2. Does it mean that there is no requirement to hold these men in custody;? Does it mean that there were no cases and were being held merely to keep doubtful cases out of circulation?

3. In the ME, no govt would be in a position to hold onto these "martyrs of the Islamic ideals". How far would this achieve the aim (for whatever be the reason) of having kept them so long in custody in the US base?

3. Further, even if they are kept in custody or even tried in the ME or Afghanistan, the rules of law are different for each country and hence some hardcore may get released because of the political and religious environment prevelant in such countries.

Afghanistan has many problems as such including the reappearance of the Taleban from across the borders. Will they be able to hold on to these people before a jailbreak occurs? If terrorists can escape from Bagram, then what is an Afghan prison?

Either they were not guilty or they were guilty. If there is even an iota of doubt of their being guilty and they are released where they are being sent or they make a "jailbreak", then would we not be putting them back into circulation?

What is the problem of charging them in the US and sentencing them or releasing them from the US, which in the first place captured or arrested them?

In the US they all would have an uniform legal platform.

[SloMax]

Chinese Detainees Are Men Without a Country
By Robin Wright

In late 2003, the Pentagon quietly decided that 15 Chinese Muslims detained at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could be released. Five were people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, some of them picked up by Pakistani bounty hunters for U.S. payoffs. The other 10 were deemed low-risk detainees whose enemy was China's communist government -- not the United States, according to senior U.S. officials.

More than 20 months later, the 15 still languish at Guantanamo Bay, imprisoned and sometimes shackled, with most of their families unaware whether they are even alive.

They are men without a country. The Bush administration has chosen not to send them home for fear China will imprison, persecute or torture them, as the United States charges has happened to other members of China's Muslim minority. But the State Department has also been unable to find another country to take them in, according to U.S. officials and recently filed court documents.

Other detainees cleared of terrorism charges have also languished for years at Guantanamo Bay, but all have been sent home or are in the process of being transferred. For the Chinese Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs ), there is no end in sight. About 20 countries -- including Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Turkey and a Latin American country -- have turned down U.S. overtures to give them asylum, according to U.S. officials.

The State Department says it is still working behind the scenes to find the Uighurs a home. A senior official called their situation "unfortunate."

This month, lawyers and human rights groups appealed to the United States to take in the stranded Uighurs. "It's not like these people were once considered to be a threat and now are not," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. "These people need to be released, either in another country or the U.S. They're America's responsibility."

But the Bush administration has balked at allowing them to enter the United States, even under restricted supervision, or to appear in a court that is hearing two of the men's cases, according to U.S. officials and court documents.

In the meantime, the men are still treated as prisoners. Sabin P. Willett, a Boston lawyer who volunteered to take the cases of two Uighurs in March, finally met with them last month, after he and his team went through their own FBI clearances. One of the Uighurs was "chained to the floor" in a "box with no windows," Willett said in an Aug. 1 court hearing.

"You're not talking about your client?" asked Judge James Robertson of the U.S. District Court in Washington.

"I'm talking about my client," Willett said.

"He was chained to a floor?" Robertson asked again.

"He had a leg shackle that was chained to a bolt in the floor," Willett replied.

For more than three years, Willett's clients -- Abu Bakker Qassim, 36, and Adel Abdu Hakim, 31 -- had been denied legal counsel. Then, in March, another detainee with an attorney asked his lawyer to help them find representation through a legal process called "next friend authorization."

Most facts in the Uighur cases are still classified secrets. Lawyers are not allowed to provide information unless facts are revealed in court papers or hearings. But the basics are beginning to come to light -- and Robertson is now pressing for action. This past Friday, the judge ordered the government to disclose the status of efforts to relocate the two men at a hearing on Thursday.

All 15 Uighurs have actually been cleared for release from Guantanamo Bay twice, once after a Pentagon review in late 2003 and again last March, U.S. officials said. Seven other Uighurs were ruled to be enemy combatants and will continue to be detained.

Even after the second decision, however, the government did not notify the 15 men for several months that they had been cleared. "They clearly were keeping secret that these men were acquitted. They were found not to be al Qaeda and not to be Taliban," Willett said. "But the government still refused to provide a transcript of the tribunal that acquitted them to the detainees, their new lawyers or a U.S. court."

Through the next friend authorization process, Willett and his team have now taken on the cases of 10 other Uighur detainees -- although they know only the first names of nine of their new clients.

Uighurs are a Muslim minority whose heartland is in northwestern China. They are a Turkic people who speak a language similar to others in neighboring Central Asian nations and have long sought autonomy in China's Xinjiang province -- a region Uighurs refer to as East Turkistan.

Uighur dissidents have engaged in sporadic attacks against the Chinese government in Xinjiang province. Chinese authorities accuse Uighur separatists of a committing a series of bombings and assassinations since 1990, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ironically, many view the United States as a "beacon of hope" that "will assist in the Uighurs' quest for fundamental freedom and human dignity," said Nury Turkel, a U.S.-trained lawyer and president of the Uighur American Association in Washington.

"They are not soldiers. They are not criminals. They are just Uighur people," Willett argued in court. ". . . There might not be a more pro-U.S. Muslim group in the world. The Uighurs have traditionally suffered under religious and political oppression at the hands of the Communist Chinese, and I can remember a time when that made a person someone we liked in this country."

Information on how the Uighurs ended up at Guantanamo is scarce and limited to U.S. summations from interrogations. Qassim and Hakim fled the city of Ghulja in China to Central Asia in 2001. They met in Kyrgyzstan and traveled to Pakistan, then to Afghanistan, where they received training in use of small arms, according to a recent court statement by Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo.

After the United States attacked Afghanistan in 2001, they fled to Pakistan, where they were captured by bounty hunters, according to their lawyers and court papers.

Transcripts from the tribunals, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, indicate why the Uighurs ended up in Guantanamo Bay and what their intentions were.

"That is true, I went to Afghanistan," said one detainee who is clearly a Uighur based on information in the transcript. "The reason is number one: I am scared of the torture from my home country. Second: if I go there I will get some training to fight back against the Chinese government."

"We have nothing to do with the Taliban or the Arabs. We have nothing to do with the U.S. government or coalition forces. We never thought about fighting with the Americans," another testified. "I want you to understand what our goal is: just to fight against the Chinese government. If there is nothing happening in the future, we would like to stay wherever, abroad, to do our business."

In court papers, the administration acknowledged the dangers facing Uighurs if they are returned to China. Yet Chinese officials were allowed to visit and question the Uighurs two years ago, according to their lawyers. In recently declassified material, Hakim said that a Chinese interrogator was allowed to take a photo of him with the help of Guantanamo personnel and despite his efforts to resist.

The Justice Department has argued in court that it has no obligation to release the Uighurs because of "wind-up power," which gives a government the time necessary at the end of a conflict to figure out what to do with detainees. As a precedent, it cited the treatment of Italians held in the United States after World War II.

Lawyers and human rights groups are concerned that incarceration has tainted the Uighurs forever.

"These people are branded by being in Guantanamo. Even if cleared for doing nothing wrong, it doesn't erase the stain," said Barbara Olshansky, deputy legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the New York-based nonprofit organization that found volunteer attorneys for Qassim and Hakim. "It's a terrible toll to place on people for our mistakes."

Staff writer Josh White and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/washpost/200...hout_a_country

Stuck in Guantanamo and nobody wants them. Taking about being in a wrong place at a wrong time…

[Asim Aquil]

There are many, wrong place, wrong time type cases. It will always happen when human beings are not given trials. And they only kept releasing the detainees, each time with an "oops". Now they're releasing (I'm still guessing, not all) the bulk of the 510 detainees. All the released detainees are now going to go rushing to the media. Everyone's being released as "not guilty", end result, a lot more people pissed off at America. All these people will go tell other people.

To deduce, Guantanmo was such an amature/novice move by the United States. It has caused more harm to their goals than benefit. With a little more effort they could've just arrested the key people, tried them in some terrorism courts, and then they would've been pronounced GUILTY.

I repeat 510 "not guilty" (your gut feeling may say otherwise, but it means nothing) people are being released now.

[Shek]

The idea is interesting.

However, this would raise the following questions:

1. What were the problems which prevented this not being done earlier in the initial stages? If it had been done, then the US would have saved itself all the hassles that were raised along time.

2. Does it mean that there is no requirement to hold these men in custody;? Does it mean that there were no cases and were being held merely to keep doubtful cases out of circulation?

3. In the ME, no govt would be in a position to hold onto these "martyrs of the Islamic ideals". How far would this achieve the aim (for whatever be the reason) of having kept them so long in custody in the US base?

3. Further, even if they are kept in custody or even tried in the ME or Afghanistan, the rules of law are different for each country and hence some hardcore may get released because of the political and religious environment prevelant in such countries.

Afghanistan has many problems as such including the reappearance of the Taleban from across the borders. Will they be able to hold on to these people before a jailbreak occurs? If terrorists can escape from Bagram, then what is an Afghan prison?

Either they were not guilty or they were guilty. If there is even an iota of doubt of their being guilty and they are released where they are being sent or they make a "jailbreak", then would we not be putting them back into circulation?

What is the problem of charging them in the US and sentencing them or releasing them from the US, which in the first place captured or arrested them?

In the US they all would have an uniform legal platform.

Sir,

These men were detained as illegal enemy combatants under the Geneva Convention, not on criminal charges. As such, there is no need for a trial, but rather can be held until the end of the conflict. Additionally, the decision was made to prioritize gaining information from interrogations that would prevent future terrorist attacks and attacks against US/coalition forces rather than follow Miranda and other procedures that are required to all evidence to be admissible in US courts of law, but would limit the ability to collect information that could save lives.

As far as not releasing detainees to their home countries earlier, my guess is that this is for several reasons. For starters, I know that Afghanistan for wasn't prepared to handle the security responsibilities. Also, I'm sure that we have required assurances from countries that they won't just turn around and put the detainees back into circulation where they can commit future terrorist attacks. Another reason is that many of the detainees have probably passed their point of utility - i.e. they no longer provide insights or information into the inner workings of AQ and thus, provide no actionable intel.

I'm not so sure on your analysis that ME governments will be forced to release these "martyrs." They have a pretty good track record on cracking down on extremists within their own countries, although I'd agree that it is a tough call for them due to the potential of causing internal dissidence in favor of the extremists.

[Shek]

There are many, wrong place, wrong time type cases. It will always happen when human beings are not given trials. And they only kept releasing the detainees, each time with an "oops". Now they're releasing (I'm still guessing, not all) the bulk of the 510 detainees. All the released detainees are now going to go rushing to the media. Everyone's being released as "not guilty", end result, a lot more people pissed off at America. All these people will go tell other people.

To deduce, Guantanmo was such an amature/novice move by the United States. It has caused more harm to their goals than benefit. With a little more effort they could've just arrested the key people, tried them in some terrorism courts, and then they would've been pronounced GUILTY.

I repeat 510 "not guilty" (your gut feeling may say otherwise, but it means nothing) people are being released now.

Asim,
I agree that they have been some wrong place at the wrong time cases. As these cases have been confirmed, the detainee status review boards have released these individuals. Additionally, detainees that were determined to no longer pose a threat have been released, although there have also been cases of these former detainees going straight back into action against Afghanistan and the US.

However, your argument that there are 510 "not guilty" cases is a strawman. They were never detained for criminal trials. As I stated in my post to Ray, they were detained under the Geneva Convention and declared illegal enemy combatants because they weren't following the requirements of the Geneva Convention.

I am curious as to your thoughts on what the anti-American propaganda would be if we had set up terrorist courts and had pursued convicting these individuals? My thoughts are that we would still be portrayed as the great Satan, although I do agree that there'd be less fodder of propaganda value. Would it really have changed anything?

[Leader]

There are many, wrong place, wrong time type cases. It will always happen when human beings are not given trials. And they only kept releasing the detainees, each time with an "oops". Now they're releasing (I'm still guessing, not all) the bulk of the 510 detainees. All the released detainees are now going to go rushing to the media. Everyone's being released as "not guilty", end result, a lot more people pissed off at America. All these people will go tell other people.

To deduce, Guantanmo was such an amature/novice move by the United States. It has caused more harm to their goals than benefit. With a little more effort they could've just arrested the key people, tried them in some terrorism courts, and then they would've been pronounced GUILTY.

I repeat 510 "not guilty" (your gut feeling may say otherwise, but it means nothing) people are being released now.

You’re right it is amateurish. We shouldn't be telling anyone who we're holding, where they are, or how they're being treated. It only serves to give people reasons to attack us. We should take these people in, do what we need to do. If they're not guilty, in our minds, release them. If they are, we get what we need and then put an end to their existence. No more press. No more whining.

[clovely81]

You’re right it is amateurish. We shouldn't be telling anyone who we're holding, where they are, or how they're being treated. It only serves to give people reasons to attack us. We should take these people in, do what we need to do. If they're not guilty, in our minds, release them. If they are, we get what we need and then put an end to their existence. No more press. No more whining.

That would be great if it wasn't for the bleeding-heart liberals that want to scream "Constitution!" in favor of those that have no rights or claim to it.

[Leader]

That would be great if it wasn't for the bleeding-heart liberals that want to scream "Constitution!" in favor of those that have no rights or claim to it.

I agree this has nothing to do with the Constitution. As far as I'm concerned in a time of war those that act outside the law aren't entitled to it's protections. If the terrorists want trails and fair treatment, they can put on uniforms and stop using civilians as shields.

[DalerMehndi]

I think they should just close Gitmo down. It is too controversial and the international community looks down on America now because of what has been happening at GItmo and the prisons in Iraq. I don't know about GItmo, but the stuff that happened in prisons like Abu Gharib is too horrible to even imagine. Children were raped in front of their parents by contractors as a form of torture, women and children were tortured and raped and some people were even executed. When we invade a country claiming that we are spreading democracy, freedom and human rights, we should not be torturing and killing innocent people.

[Leader]

I think they should just close Gitmo down. It is too controversial and the international community looks down on America now because of what has been happening at GItmo and the prisons in Iraq. I don't know about GItmo, but the stuff that happened in prisons like Abu Gharib is too horrible to even imagine. Children were raped in front of their parents by contractors as a form of torture, women and children were tortured and raped and some people were even executed. When we invade a country claiming that we are spreading democracy, freedom and human rights, we should not be torturing and killing innocent people.

**** you! That's ****ing bull ****. None of that happened. Get the **** out of here.

[DalerMehndi]

Do you want proof? I have pictures that were released by the pentagon. THey only show women being raped though. The Pentagon refused to release the other images of children being raped even though courts ordered them to(i kind of understand why they did that though...if a false story about soldiers flushing a quran down a toilet(is it even possible to flush a book down a toilet?) made all these crazy muslim people riot and kill each other, think what those pictures would do.).

Here are my sources:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,119632,00.html

http://www.sundayherald.com/43796

Nobody is perfect, other countries have done much worse. The only thing that makes this case stand out is the fact that the US said it was a champion of human rights and democracy. Other countries that did this kind of stuff never claimed to protect human rights.


By the way, i am not very fond of islamic countries and this islamic terrorism crap...so don;t think i am supporting terrorists or anything.

[DalerMehndi]

**** you! That's ****ing bull ****. None of that happened. Get the **** out of here.

I should have expected this. Right wingers will never accept that the Bush administration ahs made a lot of mistakes in Iraq. They will continue with this illusion that Bush is the greatest president in US history, that the Iraq war is going extremly well and that we are in Iraq for good reasons.

And by the way, i'm not blaiming individual soldiers for this stuff...i am blaming the officers who gave them commands and the unsupervised ocntractors that were roaming the prison. I don't think low level clerks like Lindie England and the others should have been thrown in prison for 15 years just because they were blindly following orders.

[Leader]

I should have expected this.

Damn right.

Right wingers will never accept that the Bush administration ahs made a lot of mistakes in Iraq.

You prove that bull **** and I'll accept it.

They will continue with this illusion that Bush is the greatest president in US history,

What are the other choices Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson?

that the Iraq war is going extremly well

Who did you imagine saying that?

and that we are in Iraq for good reasons.

Of course, anyone that disagrees with you just believes in "illusions."

And by the way, i'm not blaiming individual soldiers for this stuff...

You shouldn't since you can't prove it happened.

i am blaming the officers who gave them commands

To rape and murder children. **** you. I hope to God you don't live in this country.

and the unsupervised ocntractors that were roaming the prison.

Prove it.

I don't think low level clerks like Lindie England and the others should have been thrown in prison for 15 years just because they were blindly following orders.

Prove it.

[Asim Aquil]

Prisons in any place, have gross human rights violations. Just watch any Prison movie. Leader, it won't be a stretch if it happened there too, there's very little tying the hands down, no fear, no limits. I didn't bother checking links, since every side has their agenda, and has their people in the media.

These aren't really bleeding hearts speaking against Gitmo. The people who scream constitution are worried about that law document falling from grace. Once you cross that line, there's no coming back. What if Americans were caught in the wrong place, wrong time? As I said, the trial is very important. Illegal combatants is very new term. Arresting them is just like kidnapping. When America refused to give them trial, the world (including 50/50 divide in America) wondered what do they have to hide?