Guantanamo Detainees

The Obama administration has begun the process of reviewing files of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay to determine who can be prosecuted and who can be transferred to other countries, officials said Friday, a crucial first step toward closing the prison. The review, begun this week, is also key to a decision on whether the administration can turn the page completely on the Bush administration's detention policies.

Members of Congress are reacting sharply to a plan being considered by the White House to transfer abroad five of the most dangerous prisoners from Guantanamo Bay as a gesture to the Taliban in advance of Afghanistan peace talks. It would be the first time detainees from the "too dangerous to transfer" list have been relocated outside of U.S. control. The swift opposition from leading Republicans underscored President Obama's continuing difficulty to deliver on his promise to shut down the prison at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

The Obama administration is resuming military trials for terrorism suspects detained at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba ? another step back from Obama's 2008 campaign promise to close the prison. The president also announced Monday that he was setting new review guidelines for the prisoners that he said would "broaden our ability to bring terrorists to justice, provide oversight for our actions, and ensure the humane treatment of detainees" ? all signals that the White House does not foresee the facility being closed any time soon.

Of all the hangovers from the George W. Bush years, the thorniest may be what to do about the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There are still 171 detainees at Guantanamo and little consensus on what to do with them. Last spring, President Obama announced the resumption of military trials for some of those charged with participating in the 9/11 attacks. These trials, known as military commissions, have been stalled for years by legal challenges. Recently, the official in charge of the Guantanamo prison, Rear Adm. David Woods, issued a draft order that compounds these challenges.

U.S. officials have persuaded the tiny Pacific island nation of Palau to accept some of the Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, representing a major step in the Obama administration's plan to close the prison. In a statement released to the Associated Press today, Palau President Johnson Toribiong said his government had "agreed to accommodate the United States of America's request to temporarily resettle in Palau up to 17 ethnic Uighur detainees . . . subject to periodic review."

A federal appeals court Wednesday temporarily blocked a judge's decision to release 17 Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into the U.S. In a one-page order, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued the emergency stay at the request of the Bush administration. The three-judge panel said it would postpone Friday's scheduled release of the detainees at least until late next week to give the government more time to make arguments in the case.

Wheels are turning Re "Shifting gears in L.A.," Opinion, Dec. 14 While living in Denmark for eight years, I owned a car for only about six months. Your article makes it sound as if Danes are flocking to their bikes out of a superior duty to the environment. This is not correct. Danish taxes on cars and fuel are simply prohibitive and the public-transit system is superb. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to choose a bike or public transit. In Denmark, I rode my bike to the train, then took a bus from the train to work.

Twenty-three terrorism suspects tried to hang or strangle themselves during a weeklong protest orchestrated in 2003 to disrupt operations and unnerve new guards at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the U.S. military said. Officials had not previously reported the incidents, which the military called "self-injurious behavior" aimed at getting attention rather than serious suicide attempts.

Saudi Arabian authorities have released nine men once held as terrorism suspects at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a security official said. The nine were part of a group of 37 Saudis handed over by the United States to the Saudi government, Interior Ministry spokesman Mansour Turki said. He said they were released after investigations showed that they were not involved in any criminal acts under Saudi law. Three others from the group had been released in May.

If you won't take them, why should we? That question has ricocheted across Europe as the Obama administration tries to fulfill its promise to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Though Europeans laud that goal, many countries in the region remain skeptical about taking in former inmates, especially as the United States appears increasingly unwilling to allow any within its borders. That unwillingness is apparent as the U.S.

Said Shihri, who was captured in Pakistan in late 2001 and became one of the first suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay, was released six years later after he convinced U.S. officials that he would go home to Saudi Arabia to work in his family's furniture store. He emerged instead as the No. 2 leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based group that U.S. intelligence considers the world's most dangerous terrorist organization. Review panels at Guantanamo Bay also released at least six other detainees who later joined the militant group that has turned Yemen into a key battleground for Al Qaeda.

A senior Al Qaeda military commander strongly warned Khalid Shaikh Mohammed not to kill Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, cautioning him "it would not be wise to murder Pearl" and that he should "be returned back to one of the previous groups who held him, or freed. " But Mohammed told his U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay that he cut off Pearl's head anyway, according to U.S. military documents posted on the Internet on Monday by WikiLeaks. Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept.

Most of those remaining at the Guantanamo Bay military prison are considered "high-risk" detainees who if released would pose grave threats to the U.S. and its allies, as did a third of those set free earlier, according to thousands of pages of classified documents being made public by WikiLeaks. Release of the more than 700 separate documents dealing with the prison, opened under the George W. Bush administration to house detainees in the war on terrorism, drew a sharp rebuke Sunday evening from the White House, which said the documents were obtained illegally.

The Supreme Court this week ended the quest of five exonerated Guantanamo detainees who are seeking release in the United States. The defeat for the Uighurs, members of a Muslim minority group in China, shouldn't be the end of the story. The problem is that other paths to settling them here are strewn with obstacles. The Uighurs' story is a poignant one: They had traveled to Afghanistan, where they joined training camps run by a Uighur separatist group. After the United States launched a military offensive in Afghanistan, they fled to Pakistan, where they were swept up by Pakistani and other coalition forces and brought to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The lawyers who spent years fighting to free prisoners at Guantanamo Bay thought they had won in 2008, when the Supreme Court gave detainees a right to go to court and Barack Obama was elected president. But things haven't worked out as they had hoped. Last month, President Obama reversed a campaign promise and announced plans to keep prisoners at Guantanamo indefinitely. Congress has blocked moving any prisoners from the Cuba detention center to this country, even for a trial.

The first captive at the U.S. naval base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be charged in a military tribunal during the Obama presidency is expected to be one of the prison's most notorious inmates — Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole that killed 17 sailors. And his case, beset with Nashiri's allegations of torture and mistreatment, is fraught with complications for the administration, which this week reversed course and announced it would maintain the George W. Bush legacy of holding military tribunals inside the Caribbean fortress.

A new report estimates that one-fifth of the detainees who have been released from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have resumed extremist activity, a Defense Department official said Wednesday, a figure that intensifies the debate over the prison. The Pentagon report on the released detainees remains classified and officials refused to discuss it publicly. But Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell acknowledged the numbers had risen since April, when the department said about 74 former detainees -- about 14% of those released -- had returned to hostile action against the United States.

The Obama administration is resuming military trials for terrorism suspects detained at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba ? another step back from Obama's 2008 campaign promise to close the prison. The president also announced Monday that he was setting new review guidelines for the prisoners that he said would "broaden our ability to bring terrorists to justice, provide oversight for our actions, and ensure the humane treatment of detainees" ? all signals that the White House does not foresee the facility being closed any time soon.

A New York federal jury acquitted alleged Al Qaeda accomplice Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani on Wednesday of all major terrorism charges in the 1998 suicide bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. In the first trial of a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner in civilian court, the Tanzanian was convicted of one count of conspiracy to damage or destroy U.S. property but cleared of 276 counts of murder and attempted murder. The government said it would seek the maximum sentence of life without parole on the conspiracy count.