Suspected Terrorists in Guantanamo ‘Orientation’
The 14 terrorism suspects transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention center from overseas CIA prisons two weeks ago are undergoing “orientation” and are not being interrogated, a U.S. commander said Wednesday.
“It seems to be working fine,” Army Gen. Bantz J. Craddock said in an interview with a group of reporters at the Pentagon.
Craddock, who oversees U.S. military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean as commander of U.S. Southern Command, said representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross would be given access to the new arrivals, but it was not clear how soon.
He said the 14 men were in a 30-day “orientation, acclimatization period” that is standard for new arrivals at Guantanamo.
He did not explicitly say they were being held apart from the rest of the detainee population; he said only that the 14 were not “segregated.”
The new arrivals include the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and suspected architects of the 2000 bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole off Yemen and the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa.
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