Guantanamo Naval Base

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.

Hozaifa Parhat, a fruit seller from China's Muslim west, spoke passionately before a Guantanamo tribunal about his love for America and swore he never planned to fight the United States. The Chinese, however, were another matter. "I left my country to try to get something, get back and liberate my people and get our country independence," the ethnic Uighur testified in November 2004.

A former Guantanamo Bay prisoner has accused British intelligence of feeding questions to the CIA that he says were put to him while he was tortured in Pakistani and Moroccan jails. The allegations by Binyam Mohamed, a British resident, are expected to fuel demands by human rights groups for a full investigation into whether Britain's support for the Bush administration's "war on terror" amounted in his case to complicity with torture.

There will no longer will be "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration said Friday. Moreover, the new president no longer claims that his title as commander in chief allows him to order people deemed to be dangerous captured and held without trial.

President Obama's early moves to condemn torture, order the closure of Guantanamo and commit to combat climate change won him accolades from international human rights advocates turned off by the go-it-alone attitude of the Bush administration. Now the world's lawyers are worried that those goals could languish on the diplomatic back burner as the president and his team concentrate on the global economic crisis.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday that he expected staunch opposition in Congress to the Obama administration's plans to release some of the Chinese Muslims detained at Guantanamo into the United States. Confirming the plans for the first time, Gates said that the administration intended to release some of the 17 Chinese Uighurs into the U.S. as part of the process of closing the prison, although he added that a final decision had not been made.

President Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, one of his first acts after taking office, is putting fellow Democrats on the political hot seat as word spreads that terrorism suspects and other detainees would be relocated to the U.S. or transferred to domestic prisons. States and municipalities around the country are saying "not in my backyard," and Republicans are raising the prospect of relocated detainees putting Americans in danger.

A bill by Senate Democrats would fund the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but it would block the transfer of any of the detainees to the United States. The move is aimed at sidestepping a political minefield that President Obama has confronted in his promise to close the military prison during his first year in office. Lawmakers of both parties have bristled at the notion of bringing Guantanamo terrorism suspects to detention facilities in the United States.

Bowing to anxiety among their constituents and pressure from Republicans, Senate Democratic leaders on Tuesday decided to drop plans to give President Obama money to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility for terrorism suspects. The administration had asked Congress for $80 million to fulfill Obama's promise to close the prison, which has become an international symbol of unpopular U.S. anti-terrorism policies.

Five percent of Guantanamo Bay detainees have participated in terrorist activities since their release from the U.S. military prison, the Pentagon said Tuesday. An additional 9% are thought to have joined -- or rejoined -- the fight against the United States and its allies, according to Defense Department data released amid a political fight over where to send the detainees if the prison closes in January as planned. Constitutional scholars have long cast doubt on the Pentagon's detainee data.