POWs Will Go to Base in Cuba

The Pentagon is readying the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold captured Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday.

Rumsfeld suggested that there are few options for imprisoning the militants once they are in U.S. custody. Other, more remote sites mentioned have included Guam and Wake Island in the Pacific.

“I would characterize Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the least worst place we could have selected,” Rumsfeld told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. “Its disadvantages . . . seem to be modest relative to the alternatives.”

The Guantanamo decision represents another step toward the prosecution of fighters in Afghanistan who are suspected of being terrorists. Many are expected to face military tribunals, although Rumsfeld said no decision had been made to hold tribunals at Guantanamo.

Rumsfeld’s announcement came as military operations continued in Afghanistan, with the Pentagon reporting that U.S. warplanes destroyed a Taliban compound near Kabul, the capital. As a Qatar-based television network aired the full version of a recently released videotape of Osama bin Laden, U.S. and Afghan fighters pressed on with their cave-to-cave search for the terrorist leader and his Al Qaeda followers.

The detention of possible Al Qaeda members has loomed large recently in the Afghan campaign. Guantanamo, which has long been resented by Cuban President Fidel Castro as a symbol of American incursion on the island, has figured repeatedly in U.S. history in Latin America. Today it is home to Navy and Coast Guard vessels that patrol the Caribbean in counter-narcotics and immigration investigations. In recent years, it has housed thousands of Haitian and Cuban refugees.

The naval station won’t be ready to accept prisoners for several weeks, Rumsfeld said. The base has detention facilities for about 100 people. So far, 45 detainees are in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and at sea.

On Thursday, 20 suspected Al Qaeda fighters who had been captured in Pakistan after fleeing the Tora Bora area of eastern Afghanistan were transferred to a U.S. Marine detention center in Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan.

The prisoners could have information useful to the hunt for Bin Laden and to the rest of the United States’ anti-terrorism campaign, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said.

“We want to talk to them pretty thoroughly,” Clarke said, adding that the interrogations will be performed by “a variety of U.S. officials, including military.” CIA and FBI agents have already been involved in such questioning.

The prisoners join 17 being held in Kandahar. Eight others, including the American John Walker Lindh, are being held on the assault ship Peleliu in the Arabian Sea.

Military intelligence agents are working with Afghan tribal groups to identify hundreds more Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners in the custody of the Afghans, U.S. officials said.

As the latest prisoners arrived in Kandahar, the U.S. continued to hit targets in Afghanistan.

Early Thursday, U.S. planes destroyed what the Pentagon described as a Taliban command compound near Ghazni, southwest of Kabul. B-52 bombers and an AC-130 gunship struck the compound in the village of Tori Khel about 2:30 a.m., the Pentagon said, dropping a combination of precision and non-precision bombs on a walled compound.

“We had very good indications that the compound was inhabited by Taliban leadership,” said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In the mountainous Tora Bora region, U.S. commandos and Afghan fighters continued to search the complex of hundreds of caves where Bin Laden and some of his most loyal fighters were believed to have taken refuge.

Although Rumsfeld said U.S. Marines and Army troops have been asked to be prepared to aid the Special Forces and Afghan fighters in the search, the Pentagon has made no decision to send them in.

Last Friday, Rumsfeld said “hundreds” of Marines and coalition forces were preparing to assist in the searches. But Thursday he dismissed reports of his comments as “newspaper talk.”

“Look, from the very beginning, we said that we were going to have the Afghan forces that were in that region work the problem. To the extent they needed additional help, we would try to get Afghan forces from other regions of the country. And to the extent they needed additional help, we would use U.S. forces,” Rumsfeld said. “There are U.S. forces currently with the Afghan forces doing that job. That is exactly the way it’s always been.”

Rumsfeld said he has no idea where Bin Laden may be. He also said he doesn’t know of any U.S. intelligence reports since mid-December that would indicate that Bin Laden was alive.

“He is either in Afghanistan or some other country or dead,” Rumsfeld said.

Late Thursday, the U.S. Central Command said helicopters ferrying U.S. Gen. Tommy Franks to the inauguration of Afghan leader Hamid Karzai may have been fired on Saturday, Reuters reported.

At least one aircraft took evasive action as a precaution, a command spokesman said.

“They think, though they’re not confirming it, that one of the helicopters may have been fired upon,” Navy Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Klee said. There were no injuries or damage.

Meanwhile, newly released excerpts from a Bin Laden videotape sent to the Al Jazeera satellite television network show Bin Laden making familiar criticisms of America but focusing on the importance of attacking the U.S. economy.

“If their economy ends, they will busy themselves away from the enslavement of oppressed people,” Bin Laden said. “It is important to concentrate on the destruction of the American economy.”

The first excerpts from the tape were released by Al Jazeera on Wednesday but contained only five minutes of a 33-minute tape, apparently made sometime between mid-November and mid-December.

Although CNN ran the first five-minute excerpt Wednesday, it and other U.S. news networks, under pressure from the Bush administration to avoid giving Bin Laden undue air time, declined to broadcast more of it Thursday. A CNN spokeswoman said the full tape had been deemed “not newsworthy.”

In a typical comment, Bin Laden accuses the United States and its Western allies of bearing a grudge against Muslims, according to an excerpt quoted by Associated Press.

“If America had sound evidence that those who carried out the attacks were Europeans, such as the IRA [Irish Republican Army], then it would possess many ways to solve this problem,” the 44-year-old Bin Laden said. “But since there was a mere suspicion that indicated the Islamic world, the real ugly face and the crusader hatred against the Islamic world were revealed.”

The latest speculation on Bin Laden’s whereabouts came Thursday from a spokesman for Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry, Mohammed Abeel, who said the terrorist mastermind is in a border area of Pakistan with associates of Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the leader of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam Party.

A party spokesman said the report was baseless. A Defense Department official said the United States does not have information to prove or disprove it.

The Washington Post and the New York Times reported in today’s editions that a Bush administration draft of rules for a U.S. military tribunal requires a unanimous vote of tribunal members to impose a death sentence on a foreign terrorist suspect, although conviction could come on a two-thirds vote.

Clarke called any draft irrelevant without Rumsfeld’s approval.

Guantanamo, on Cuba’s southeastern tip, was established when Cuba was briefly a U.S. protectorate.

In recent years, after it became a magnet for Cubans fleeing their country, the Cuban government substituted minefields for guards near the base and declared an area 15 miles wide around its perimeter a Cuban military zone with restricted access.

Asked whether he thought the Cuban government would protest the military’s plan, Rumsfeld said, “We don’t anticipate any trouble with Mr. Castro.”