WASHINGTON, 2 March 2006 — The US military plans to transfer about a third of the detainees at Gitmo to their home countries after a review carried out over the past year.
The US Defense Department announced Tuesday that 119 detainees no longer needed to be held at Gitmo, or the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and would be taken into custody by countries where they hold citizenship.
Another 14 detainees would be released outright because they no longer presented a threat to the United States and offered no “intelligence value,” US Navy Captain Tom Quinn told reporters.
Meanwhile the chief US prosecutor in a series of planned Guantanamo war crimes trials said that confronting the defendants with the evidence against them will be “like dragging vampires into the sunlight.”
The cases of two Guantanamo captives charged with conspiring with Al-Qaeda to attack civilians, commit murder and destroy property is scheduled to begin pre-trial hearings this week.
An appointed hearing for a third defendant was delayed at the request of his military lawyer, who sought more time to prepare his case.
The war crimes tribunals are the first held by the United States since World War II and convened in August 2004, more than two-and-a-half years after the first prisoners were brought to the detention camp in Cuba as part of the US war on terrorism.
Defense lawyers have sued to halt the tribunals, which they considered fundamentally unfair for numerous reasons. These include the use of secret evidence that defendants will not be allowed to see and the potential use of evidence obtained through torture.
The chief prosecutor, US Air Force Col. Moe Davis, blamed the delays on the detainees and their lawyers and compared them to movie vampires.
“Remember if you dragged Dracula out into the sunlight he melted. Well, that’s kind of the way it is trying to drag a detainee into the courtroom. The facts are like the sunlight to Dracula. The last thing they want is to face the facts in the courtroom,” Davis said. “But their day is coming.”
Only 10 of the 500 Guantanamo prisoners have been charged with crimes and Thursday’s session will be the fourth round of pre-trial hearings to formally read charges and address issues such as which lawyers will represent the defendants.
None of the cases has gone to trial and prosecutors said none will until after the US Supreme Court rules next summer on whether President George W Bush had authority to create the tribunals to try foreign terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Last Saturday, the Defense Department announced it would comply with a federal judge’s order to release the names and nationalities of hundreds of detainees held at Gitmo.
The decision came in response to a ruling last month following a lawsuit against them last year by the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act.
The lawsuit wants to force the Pentagon to release transcripts of military tribunal hearing held to determine whether the detainees at Gitmo had been properly categorized as enemy combatants.
“The Department of Defense will comply with the judge’s ruling” by March 3, Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, a Pentagon spokesmen told journalists Saturday. Last year, the Pentagon released transcripts of 558 tribunals, but blacked out names and other identifying infomraiotn about the prisoners.
