Guantanamo Naval Base

The Obama administration could transfer Guantanamo inmates to be tried and detained at a hybrid military-civilian prison in the United States as part of a proposal being examined by U.S. security agencies, officials said Sunday. The proposal for creating a combined detention and trial facility for Guantanamo inmates in an existing U.S. maximum-security prison is likely to be controversial.

They make an unlikely pair, the world's most notorious captured terrorist and the Navy captain assigned to defend him against war-crimes charges that could lead to his execution. But together, the two men are quietly embarking on a legal odyssey that could last years, and may ultimately help define the constitutional parameters of the United States' role in the global war on terrorism.

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.

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 United States is holding dozens of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who have no meaningful connection to Al Qaeda or the Taliban, and were sent to the maximum-security facility over the objections of intelligence officers in Afghanistan who had recommended them for release, according to military sources with direct knowledge of the matter. At least 59 detainees -- nearly 10% of the prison population at the U.S.

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.

Juma al-Dossari is returning to his life the way a photograph in a darkroom gradually takes shape on paper. He is home after surviving six years and more than a dozen suicide attempts as a U.S. prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

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.

Four new windmill towers and turbines rising from the crown of John Paul Jones Hill will begin powering the U.S. Navy base here next month, saving $1.5 million in annual oil imports, reducing pollution and showing energy-starved communist neighbors what they are missing. The wind-generation project that will provide 25% to 30% of the base's energy needs is a rare embrace of renewable resources for the U.S.

Contending that the government had suppressed evidence that could help a young man facing life in prison, a prosecutor has quit the war crimes tribunals here, several military defense lawyers said Wednesday. Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld quit the case -- and the Office of Military Commissions -- after growing increasingly concerned about the lack of due process afforded to Mohammed Jawad and his legal team, according to Michael J. Berrigan, deputy chief defense counsel for the commissions.

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.

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.

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.

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.