Terrorism & Security
posted April 25, 2006 at 11:30 a.m.
[ Editor's note: The original version's post date was incorrect.]

US to release one-third of prisoners at Gitmo

Critics of the prison hail the announcement as a milestone.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

The same day that the Department of Defense announced that it was going to file charges against more of the detainees being held at the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, including the death penalty in some cases, it also quietly announced that it was going to release 141 of the prisoners.

The Los Angeles Times said the US plans to release about one-third of the men being held at the prison because they pose no threat to the United States.

Longtime critics of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility said the release announced Monday marked a significant milestone in the four years the base has been used as a prison for suspected terrorists. The prison has been dogged by allegations of torture and brought choruses of international condemnation, including calls from a UN panel and the European Parliament to shut it down.
Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, said the full significance of freeing the 141 detainees could not be assessed until their fate is clearer.

Reuters first reported on Sunday that about 30 percent of the prisoners had been freed to go home, but remained in custody because the US government had not been able to return them to their home countries. Of the 141 to be released, 22 will be freed in their home countries, while 119 will be transferred "to the control" of their home governments. Pentagon officials refused requests for specifics about the 141 men, even though the department had last Wednesday released the names of all those still being detained. A spokesman said that because of sensitive negotiations with the detainees' countries, their identities would not be released.


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Meanwhile, DPA, a German news and information site, reported Monday that human rights activists from Bosnia and Herzegovina will tell European lawmakers on Tuesday that they have proof that the US used airports in various European countries to transfer prisoners to Guant��namo.

European Parliament sources told DPA that a lawyer for six citizens and former residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina, currently being held in Guant��namo, is set to tell the EU assembly that he has official documents from Washington proving that the US secret service used air bases in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany and Turkey to take the terror suspects to Cuba.
The six detainees, who are of Algerian origin, were taken from Bosnia to Guantanamo in January 2002. At least one of the aircraft flew from a US military airbase in Germany, the lawyer is expected to tell a European Parliament special committee investigating charges against the CIA. He is also expected to say that the planes made a stop-over at a military base in Turkey.

The European parliament set up a body to investigate charges that the US used airports in Europe to transfer prisoners to secret prisons around the world and to Guantanamo. It is against European human rights law to transfer prisoners in this way. The group investigating the charges against the CIA will make an interim report on Wednesday and is expected to travel later this week to Macedonia to talk to government officials about charges that their country housed one of the secret CIA prisons.

Earlier this month, Agence-France Press reported on the six Algerian detainees who were sent to Guant��namo. The men were seized in 2002 by Bosnian police and turned over to American officials after the Bosnian Supreme Court dismissed charges against them that they had plotted to blow up the US embassy in Sarajevo.

Finally, in a related situation in the US, The Washington Post reports that a lawyer for the CIA agent dismissed last week said his client did not leak the information about secret CIA prisons in Europe to Post reporter Dana Priest, who last week won a Pulitzer Prize for the story. CIA officials had at first hinted that Mary O. McCarthy was the source of the leak about the prisons, but by Monday they were saying that they had not said that she was the source of the leak, but that she had been fired because of "undisclosed contacts" with various reporters.

Though McCarthy acknowledged having contact with reporters, a senior intelligence official confirmed yesterday that she is not believed to have played a central role in The Post's reporting on the secret prisons. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing personnel matters.
McCarthy, 61, who earlier held senior posts at the White House and the National Intelligence Council (NIC), has declined requests for comment. But [Washington lawyer Ty] Cobb [speaking for McCarthy] said she was "devastated" that her government career of more than two decades will "forever be linked with misinformation about the reasons for her termination," and he said that her firing 10 days before she was to retire was "certainly not for the reasons attributed to the agency." His comments constituted the first statement from her camp since her firing became public last week.

The Post also reports that despite the Bush administration's attempts to crack down on leaks, it appears unlikely that anyone will face criminal charges in the case of the secret prisons leak, or in the leak to The New York Times about a wiretapping program that included secret eavesdropping on US citizens.