Some Detainees at Guantanamo Bay Prison to Be Released

WASHINGTON--After holding detainees for 10 months at the naval base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.S. officials are now prepared to release a small number of the 598 once-suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in the war on terrorism, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced Tuesday.

The release will mark the first time any of the detainees have been repatriated. Although Pentagon officials declined to publicly reveal how many would soon be going home, or to what country, sources close to Rumsfeld’s decision said a “half-dozen or less” were being returned to Pakistan.

The move also signals that the U.S. has at last sorted through the backgrounds of some of the detainees and determined that some might be so-called “innocents,” instead of the “hardest of the hard,” as the Defense secretary first characterized the Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Asad Hayauddin, a spokesman at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, said that while his country had not been formally notified, any Pakistani detainees would be treated like returning prisoners of war.

“We vetted them once,” he said, explaining that his country does not believe that any of the Pakistanis at Guantanamo Bay are terrorists. “Nothing will happen to them now. They will be treated just like a POW is treated. They will be debriefed, and then repatriated.”

In recent months, pressure had mounted from several countries for the release of their citizens, especially as the time has dragged on without an announcement from the United States that any of the detainees are terrorists or that they will be tried in U.S. military tribunals.

Instead, the United States had only repeated the assertion that the detainees housed in Cuba beginning in January were “enemy combatants” and that extensive interrogations were needed to sort out their backgrounds. U.S. intelligence officials have sought to determine what they might know about future threats, as well as the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

Rumsfeld said that much of that investigative work for the returning detainees has been completed.

“If you think about the universe of detainees,” he said, “for the most part they’ve all been interrogated, the purpose being not law enforcement but intelligence gathering.”

The announcement brought new hope for other countries with detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

The families of 12 imprisoned Kuwaitis are seeking help through legal and diplomatic channels. Taraq Al-Mezrem, a spokesman at the Kuwaiti Embassy, said the release of detainees from any country boded well for their cause too.

“We are hoping, we believe, and we have faith in the American due process system,” he said. “If they are guilty, take them to justice. If they are not guilty, they need to be released.”

At the Saudi Arabian Embassy, Nail Al-Jubeir said there are believed to be about 100 Saudi detainees in Cuba, and that “we would like to have all our people.”

“We’ve made that clear,” he said. “If they are guilty of anything, they should stand trial in Saudi Arabia. We believe Saudi justice is a little more severe than American justice.”

The announcement also heartened Erwin Chemerinsky, a Los Angeles attorney who is suing the United States on behalf of all of the detainees. His suit argues that they should be afforded the legal protections of international law, rather than be held for so long without being formally accused of a crime.

“It’s excellent that the government will not keep all of them forever and throw away the key,” he said. “But it is also troubling that many of them have been held since January, and under international law, prisoners are entitled to certain rights.”

In explaining why some are now being released, Rumsfeld said the military interrogators had concluded that this small group of detainees are “very likely not to be of any additional intelligence value.”

Once that determination was made, he added, those detainees were “stuck in a different basket” and “looked at for law enforcement purposes.”

He said the U.S. next weighed whether the detainees were wanted for prosecution at home, and whether they were “people who ought to be kept off the street simply because they might be inclined to go back and again engage in activities that would be opposed to the Afghan government or to the United States.”

When it was deemed that their own government did not want them for prosecution, and that they were not considered a danger if set free, the U.S. decided, “Let’s get rid of them,” Rumsfeld said.

Pressed to divulge who and how many were going home, the Defense secretary would only say: “I don’t know that I even bothered to look at what the nationality of these folks are. But there are a small number that have now been moved through that process, [and] I’ve said that’s fine with me.”

He added: “It’s true that ... there are some people likely to come out the other chute.”

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added, “I know what we decided -- that we were willing to turn them back.”

Pentagon officials, citing privacy concerns, stressed that the U.S. will not reveal who has been released until after they are returned home. In some cases, they said, they may not even release the names then.

“We expect there will be a number of detainees released and transfers to other countries,” said Lt. Col. Barbara Burfeind, a Department of Defense spokeswoman. “But we won’t put those detainees at risk by talking about it beforehand.”

Hayauddin, the Pakistani Embassy official, said a group of his government’s foreign affairs, intelligence and interior department officials visited the Camp Delta prison on Guantanamo Bay several months ago. Since then, he said, his government has been “encouraged” that some of their countrymen might be released.

“It doesn’t surprise us,” he said. “It was something we had brought to the U.S. when our team came there and we didn’t get a negative response from the United States.

“Those people there were not a threat to the U.S. and did not pose a danger to any country.”

Rather, he said, “I personally think those who were caught and rounded up, a lot of them were just cannon fodder. They were people who were motivated by their village clerics, that Islam was in danger. They went to fight and got arrested, but they had no background in terrorism, they had no military training.

“It is very difficult to categorize someone who picked up arms and thought they were fighting for a pristine Islamic movement as someone who really wanted to go like a terrorist and blow up post offices and buses and trains.”