Guantanamo Naval Base

The Guantanamo Bay Naval Base tent cities set up to shelter Haitians and Cubans will close at the end of this month.

With a wide war on terrorism still being fought, an appellate court said Tuesday that Guantanamo Bay prison detainees had few legal rights, so long as the government could show they fought for or actively supported the Taliban or Al Qaeda. A three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the government's broad power to hold indefinitely suspected former Taliban fighters and their supporters who were captured abroad and sent to the U.S. military prison in Cuba.

Cuba said Saturday that a Soviet troop pullout would leave it open to U.S. attack and it demanded a simultaneous withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Guantanamo Naval Base on the island. Signaling a widening rift, Havana bitterly reproached President Mikhail S. Gorbachev for his announcement Wednesday that Moscow is planning to withdraw its 11,000 military personnel.

In a potential glitch in the administration's effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, President Obama on Tuesday ordered a halt to the transfer of detainees to Yemen, where the Christmas Day attack on a U.S. airliner is believed to have been planned. Obama's decision shows that the failed attack on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit is having a direct effect on a key objective of his presidency. "We will not be transferring additional detainees back to Yemen at this time," Obama told reporters at the White House.

Two days after he was pulled unconscious from the rubble of a bombed Al Qaeda compound in southern Afghanistan, 15-year-old Omar Khadr lay strapped to a gurney, his left eye blinded by shrapnel, gunshot wounds to his back still raw. U.S. agents who conducted the first interrogation of the Canadian teen at Bagram air base near Kabul on July 29, 2002, gauged the effects of their questioning by the blood pressure meter attached to their inert subject.

The Pentagon has determined that one of the nearly 600 prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba was incorrectly classified as an "enemy combatant" and would be returned to his home country, Navy Secretary Gordon R. England said. He declined to identify the prisoner or his nationality, but a Pentagon spokeswoman said the man had been captured in May 2002 in Afghanistan.

A Cuban refugee who wanted to cool off in the surf of Guantanamo Bay was killed Monday when he leaped 40 feet from a cliff, U.S. military sources said. The man, believed to be in his late 30s, left a hot, dusty tent city at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base along with other refugees. He jumped and struck rocks on a beach, said Army Maj. Rick Thomas, spokesman for the task force running the refugee camps. The death was the first since the camps opened in late August.

A former translator at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, who was arrested with classified documents in his luggage, pleaded not guilty in a brief federal court appearance in Worcester. Ahmed Fathy Mehalba was arrested Sept. 29 at Logan International Airport in Boston after 132 compact discs were found in his luggage, including one containing hundreds of classified documents labeled "SECRET," authorities said. He was charged Nov.

A federal judge in Los Angeles lambasted the Bush administration Tuesday for failing to make good on its promise to hold military tribunals for more than 600 war-on-terror detainees being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz's criticism came in a written opinion rejecting a habeas corpus petition brought on behalf of Falen Gherebi, a 45-year-old Libyan who has been held prisoner by U.S. authorities for more than a year.

The U.S. military has postponed for the fifth time in three months a hearing for a Muslim Army chaplain accused of mishandling classified material at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. A spokesman for the U.S. military's Southern Command declined to give a reason for the latest delay in the hearing to determine whether Capt. James Joseph Yee should face a court-martial. Yee's lawyer said the military's case was in disarray. Previous delays since December at Ft.

Yemen's emergence as a center for Al Qaeda activity has added another complication to the Obama administration's plan to close the U.S. military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Yemenis make up the largest bloc of the remaining detainees. This month, six men from that country were sent home, and their lawyers expected that up to 40 more could soon be released from Guantanamo. Now that an Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen has claimed to be behind the attempted bombing of an airline flight bound for Detroit on Christmas Day, however, the lawyers fear the administration will block further releases.

The Obama administration faces a number of hurdles in its effort to buy Illinois' Thomson prison and use it to house suspected terrorists now at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Among them: agreeing on a sale price, renovating the facility and getting Congress to change U.S. law so that some detainees can be held on American soil even though they won't face trial. Then there's the matter of paying for it. Last week, President Obama directed Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to act "as expeditiously as possible" to acquire the mostly vacant prison in northwestern Illinois.

Facing anxious citizens afraid of becoming terrorist targets, federal officials confirmed Tuesday that some of the most notorious Guantanamo detainees could be sent to Illinois if the Obama administration buys a state prison. The proposed federal prison in Thomson would be the site for military tribunals for five alleged plotters in the 2000 bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole, said Alan Liotta, the Defense Department's principal director for detainee policy, at a public hearing on the plan.

President Obama began the year with a pledge to close the Guantanamo prison, and to restore due process and the core constitutional values that he said "made this country great." But his administration has set out a multi-pronged legal policy for the remaining Guantanamo prisoners that bears a striking similarity to that of the final year of George W. Bush's presidency. Some detainees could be held indefinitely without being charged, if they're deemed impossible to prosecute but too dangerous to release.

As the White House on Tuesday detailed its proposal to move terrorism suspects from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a prison in rural Illinois, some lawmakers made it clear that they would try to derail President Obama's plans to shutter the controversial detention center. In addition to buying the nearly empty state prison in Thomson, Ill., to house the Guantanamo detainees, the government said, it plans to set up a courtroom in the facility for defendants who will be tried before a military commission.

An American document that allegedly describes the torture of a former Guantanamo Bay inmate should be made public, a British court ruled Friday, dismissing Britain's argument that it was suppressing the information to preserve its intelligence-sharing relationship with the United States and to uphold national safety. The document contains a seven-paragraph summary of the treatment that Binyam Mohamed received in 2002 after being detained as a suspected terrorist. Mohamed, 31, a British resident, alleges that he was subjected to torture, including beatings and sexual mutilation, by interrogators in Pakistan and elsewhere with the full knowledge of American and British intelligence agents.

Under gray skies all but obscured by an opaque canopy and high concrete walls topped with razor wire, two bearded young men in tan tunics are having "rec time" inside separate chain-link pens. One jogs frenziedly back and forth in the 30-foot enclosure; the other is curled like a fetus at the base of a cement block. It's a dreary winter afternoon, but the scene could be any time of the day or night. The hour for rec time is one of the few unpredictable features in a day in the life of a detainee.

A federal appeals court Tuesday refused to block military commission proceedings against a Canadian detainee at Guantanamo Bay. Lawyers for Omar Khadr had asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to halt the case, in which Khadr is charged with murder for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a Special Forces soldier in a firefight in Afghanistan. Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, also faces conspiracy and other charges.

Key Democratic lawmakers agreed Wednesday to allow detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be transferred to the United States for trial, removing one of several hurdles the administration must clear to meet its January deadline for closing the military prison. Left unresolved was whether the administration could also hold detainees indefinitely in this country without charging them. House and Senate Democrats who are negotiating the defense authorization bill included language that would prohibit only the "release" of detainees in the United States.

In late 2001, when the Pentagon decided to put detainees at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the task of setting up a camp and establishing its rules went to Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert. Lehnert planned to rely on what he learned while running a camp at Guantanamo in the mid-1990s for nearly 19,000 Cubans and Haitians trying to flee to the United States. And he was determined to follow the spirit, if not the letter, of the Geneva Convention, providing decent food, banning extreme interrogation and allowing religious services.