141 Guantanamo detainees to be freed
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL STATION, Cuba – The Pentagon plans to release nearly a third of those held at the prison for terror suspects here because they pose no threat to U.S. security, an official of the war crimes tribunal said Monday.
Charges are pending against two dozen of the remaining 330 prisoners, the chief prosecutor said. But he left unclear why the majority face neither imminent freedom nor a day in court after as much as four years in custody without an indictment.
Only 10 of the roughly 490 alleged enemy combatants currently detained at the U.S. naval facility have been charged so far, and none with capital offenses, leaving the majority of the U.S. government’s prisoners from the war on terror in limbo and the war crimes tribunal exposed to allegations by international human rights advocates that it is illegitimate and abusive.
The decision to release the 141 detainees – the largest group to be reclassified and moved off the island – follows a yearlong review of their cases in which interrogators also determined that these men hold no further intelligence value.
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 U.N. 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.
Explaining the first comprehensive accounting of what happened to Guantanamo arrivals since the camps here were established in January 2002, Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler of the Pentagon office in charge of reviewing detainee status said those deemed by last year’s Administrative Review Boards to pose no threat to U.S. national security are “no longer enemy combatants.”
He insisted that the detainees were justly held in the past because battlefield commanders in Afghanistan and Pakistan had determined at the time of their arrests that they were a threat to U.S. forces in the region.
“Every detainee who came to the Combatant Status Review Tribunals went though multiple reviews” prior to arrival at Guantanamo, Peppler said of initial evaluations by commanding officers in the field held to determine whether each suspect was properly detained.
While Peppler said the majority would be leaving the island “in the near future,” he noted that some cleared of offenses worthy of prosecution might have to stay in detention until an appropriate release site can be found. For detainees like minority Muslim Uighurs from China, the government has decided they shouldn’t be handed over to their home governments for fear they would face persecution, torture or execution.