Prisoner Releases

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.

A joyful Roxana Saberi on Tuesday thanked those who helped win her release after four months in a Tehran prison on espionage charges. Speaking to reporters in Tehran for the first time since her release Monday, a smiling Saberi said she did not have any specific plans but wanted to spend time with her family. Saberi, who at one point was on hunger strike in prison, looked thin but energetic.

A copy of a classified Iranian government report about the U.S. war in Iraq in the possession of journalist Roxana Saberi was a key piece of evidence that led to her conviction on espionage charges, one of the Iranian American journalist's lawyers disclosed Monday.

James William Kilgore, the last captured member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, was released on parole Sunday morning from a Northern California prison. Kilgore, 61, was arrested in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2002 after almost three decades on the run. He was one of five SLA members who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the 1975 death of Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four who was killed by a shotgun blast after she arrived at a suburban Sacramento bank.

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.

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.

An American U.N. worker abducted more than two months ago turned up Saturday, lying alongside a road in western Pakistan with his hands and feet bound, pleading "Help me," said the man who found him. John Solecki was found in a village 30 miles south of Quetta near the Afghan border after his captors called a local news agency to tell them where to look, officials said. Mohammed Anwar, who owns a restaurant along the main highway to Karachi, said he found Solecki in the dirt near a wall.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has granted the Obama administration's request to block the release of certain sex offenders who have completed their federal prison terms. A federal appeals court earlier had invalidated a law allowing the indefinite commitment of "sexually dangerous" prison inmates. Roberts, in his order, said as many as 77 inmates can continue to be held at a prison in North Carolina at least until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear the administration's appeal of the lower court's ruling.

Northern Ireland's senior judge ordered the immediate release of six suspected IRA dissidents being interrogated about recent killings of soldiers and a policeman, ruling that their 11-day detention was illegal. Detectives released the suspects but rearrested the most prominent figure in the group, former Irish Republican Army prisoner Colin Duffy, without explanation. The other five covered their faces as supporters drove them away from a police interrogation center. Lord Chief Justice Brian Kerr ruled that all six were being held illegally.