Guantanamo Naval Base

The Obama administration is preparing to admit into the United States as many as seven Chinese Muslims who have been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay in the first release of any of the detainees into this country, according to current and former U.S. officials. Their release is seen as a crucial step to plans, announced by President Obama during his first week in office, to close the prison and relocate the detainees.

Like many folks in this tranquil town, Patty Liberty has no problem living just down the road from some of the world's most notorious terrorists. Zacarias Moussaoui, known as "the 20th hijacker" for his attempts to join in the Sept. 11 attacks, resides at the supermax prison just outside the city limits. So do would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid and Ramzi Yousef, who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski lives there too.

Accused in a 2002 grenade blast that wounded two U.S. soldiers near an Afghan market, Mohammed Jawad was sent as a youth to Guantanamo Bay. Now, under orders by President Obama, he could one day be among detainees whose fate is finally decided by a U.S. court. But in a potential problem, Pentagon officials note that most of the evidence against Jawad comes from his own admissions. And neither he nor any other detainee at the U.S.

The Pentagon has concluded that the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay meets the standards for humane treatment of detainees established in the Geneva Convention accords.

President Obama signaled his intention Wednesday to press forward on his plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, despite a growing challenge from both political parties and a limited set of options to make his detainee policy work. In a sign of his lost momentum, the Senate on Wednesday voted 90 to 6 to block funding for the shutdown. The vote followed criticism that the administration was backtracking on Americans' security.

The chief judge at the Guantanamo Bay war crimes court Thursday rejected President Obama's call to halt the prosecution of terrorism suspects, ruling that a delay in the case of a Saudi accused in the Cole attack would "not serve the interests of justice." Army Col. James L. Pohl said the government's request to postpone until May the Feb. 9 arraignment of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri was "not reasonable."

Stephen Abraham, a Newport Beach lawyer and lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, hardly seemed like whistle-blower material. A decorated intelligence officer, he served after 9/11 as lead counter-terrorism analyst at the Joint Intelligence Center at Pearl Harbor. He was a longtime Republican, a patriot devoted to protecting national security.

A federal appeals court refused Friday to reconsider a ruling broadening its own authority to scrutinize evidence against detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The decision is a setback for the Bush administration, which was displeased by the court's three-judge ruling in July and had urged all 10 judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review it. The administration said the decision jeopardized national security.

The Pentagon announced Monday that it was seeking the death penalty against alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and five other men, in a move that will probably ensure that the controversial military commissions at the Guantanamo Bay prison live on into the next presidential administration.

The Defense Department had an eye on history Monday when it announced capital murder and war crimes charges against six detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying the alleged Sept. 11 plotters would be given an "extraordinary set of rights" when they go on trial. They will receive more rights than the top Nazis tried at Nuremberg, military officials pointed out, and far more than the plotters in the assassination of President Lincoln, who were hanged within three months.