Guantanamo Bay

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Fourteen more captives were sent home to Saudi Arabia from this detention center, the Department of Defense announced yesterday. "The department expects that there will continue to be other transfers or releases of detainees," the Pentagon said, estimating the prison camps' population as of yesterday at "about 450 detainees." The transfer was also the first since three Arab captives were found hanging in their cells two weeks ago in what the military described as the first detainee deaths at this four-year-old detention and interrogation center.

The hunger strike by inmates protesting conditions at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba is forcing the Obama administration to revisit its policy of indefinite detention without trial for terrorist suspects. It's about time. As Mr. Obama noted Tuesday, the current policy is legally and morally unsustainable, and continuing it damages America's standing around the world without making the country any safer. The president needs to finally make good on his 2009 pledge to close Guantanamo, repatriate low-risk detainees to prisons in their home countries and bring the rest to the U.S. for trial.

Alfredo Perez is glad to be in Baltimore, but the water-stained picture of him kneeling beside his little daughter is a constant reminder of why he's not happy yet.The picture was damaged when he set out on a flimsy raft from his native Cuba to escape the government of Fidel Castro. He held tightly to the photo when he was picked up by the Coast Guard and taken to the Guantanamo Bay refugee camp.Even now, eight months later, he becomes emotional when he talks about his 5-year-old Sheila, who remained behind with his wife in Cuba.

As a teenager in the mid-1990s, he moved with his parents to the United States from Pakistan. The family sought and received political asylum. They settled in Baltimore County and operated a gas station. The boy attended Owings Mills High School. His cricket skills helped him excel at baseball, the quintessential American game. "He always seemed like such a nice young man," said the chair of the English department. The nice young man graduated in 1999. He picked up a job as a data administrator with the Maryland Office of Planning.

In their first decisions, military tribunals considering the status of the people held at the United States naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ruled yesterday that four detainees had properly been designated as enemy combatants who may be held there indefinitely. The tribunals, which opened for business on July 30 and which resemble courts only in broad outline, will ultimately consider the status of all of the nearly 600 people held at Guantanamo. Their rulings yesterday were more surprising for their speed than their substance.

WASHINGTON -- In the past few months, the small commercial air service to the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been carrying people military authorities had hoped would never be allowed there -- American lawyers. And they have been arriving in increasing numbers, providing more than a third of about 530 remaining detainees with representation in federal court. Despite considerable obstacles and expenses, other lawyers are eagerly lining up to challenge the government's detention of people the military has called enemy combatants and possible terrorists.

MIAMI - Ten months after the fact, the Pentagon disclosed yesterday the death of a Navy doctor at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Pentagon spokesmen would not explain the circumstances surrounding the death of Cmdr. Adrian Basil Szwec, 43, of Chicago, a 19-year career naval medical officer who died at the base April 12. An announcement described Szwec's death only as "a noncombat related incident." Szwec's death was still under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a Navy spokeswoman said at the Pentagon, declining to be identified.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush travels to Austria today hoping to spotlight the improved relations with Europe that have marked his second term, but a strong undercurrent of international outrage about the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay is threatening to mar the atmosphere. The president's efforts to work with the Europeans on Iran, particularly his recent agreement to participate in direct negotiations with Tehran if it suspends uranium enrichment, exemplify a more collaborative foreign policy.

WASHINGTON - Navy Cmdr. Sheldon Stuchell always imagined that if al-Qaida were going to pull a prison break on Guantanamo Bay, the terrorists would sneak up the Cuban coastline. He pictured enemy agents slinking toward the fortress in submarines with periscopes up, trolling the Caribbean waters for Camp Delta's weakest link. But Stuchell, a Navy Reserve officer who spent much of last year overseeing external prison security, may have been off the mark. If authorities are correct, it appears the soft spot was not outside.

SYDNEY, Australia -- The decision by the U.S. military to charge an Australian citizen with one terrorism-related offense comes as Prime Minister John Howard is under mounting pressure, even from conservatives in his own party, to have the man charged, tried and brought home. The man, David Hicks, is the first detainee from the American base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be charged under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. But the single charge, of providing "material support for terrorism," after Hicks has been held for five years in Guantanamo, has been met with skepticism, disbelief and some anger here, from conservatives and liberals alike.

Four years ago, a telegenic, charismatic senator from Illinois cobbled together a New Deal coalition of labor, environmentalists, progressives, African-Americans and young people to capture the presidency. It was an exciting time. America had elected its first mixed-race president. Another glass ceiling had been broken. Even those of us who opposed his policies recognized that the election of Barack Obama conveyed a positive message about America to the world. In D.C., a jubilant media speculated about a "post-partisan" Capitol Hill.

Before self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was brought into court Saturday, Carole Reuben of Potomac said his arraignment would mark "the beginning of the end of the process. " Her son, Todd Hayes Reuben, was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77, the airliner that was hijacked by five al-Qaida operatives and flown into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. The Potomac man was 40. But any hope that the arraignments of Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators might bring some healing to family members, a decade after they lost loved ones in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, was stymied Saturday by a halting proceeding in which the defendants refused to participate.

Members of the public may watch the arraignment of self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terror suspects Saturday at Fort Meade, a Pentagon spokesman said Monday. Mohammed and his co-defendants are to be arraigned at Guantanamo Bay on charges of terrorism and murder in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and United Airlines Flight 193. Fort Meade is one of four military bases scheduled to receive a secure, closed-circuit television feed of the proceedings, Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said.

A studious young man with an aptitude for computers, Majid Shoukat Khan was working as a database administrator in a high-rise office building in Tysons Corner, Va., on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. After American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the western face of the Pentagon, the recent Owings Mill High School graduate watched from his office window as the smoke rose over the capital. Osama bin Laden would claim credit for the attacks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad would boast of planning them.

The conviction of a former Baltimore County man in a deadly hotel bombing in Indonesia is seen as a turning point in the long-delayed prosecution of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay. Majid Shoukat Khan, who on Wednesday admitted to conspiring with Osama bin Laden and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad in plots in Indonesia, Pakistan and the United States, is the first of the 14 so-called high-value detainees at Guantanamo Bay to be convicted....

President Barack Obama partially fulfilled a campaign promise Tuesday when he announced plans to transfer up to 100 terror suspects currently held at the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to a federal maximum-security prison in Illinois. Moving the inmates to the American mainland brings his administration a step closer to begin putting them on trial in civilian courts here and shutting down the Guantanamo facility, which Mr. Obama said has become a global symbol and recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.

Amnesty International called the U.S. military's prison at Guantanamo Bay the "gulag of our times" yesterday and warned that American leaders might face international prosecution for mistreating prisoners. "When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a license to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity," Amnesty Secretary-General Irene Khan said at a London news conference releasing the group's annual report on global human rights, a blistering, 308-page survey.

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- Amid days of secret Pentagon proceedings against those suspected of being al-Qaida terrorists, the U.S. military is reopening its war-crimes court today with a single charge against an alleged war-on-terror foot soldier with no explicit links to the Sept. 11 attacks. Australian David Hicks, 31, is slated this afternoon to become the first Guantanamo captive to appear before a newly constituted Military Commission. In a nine-page charge sheet, he is accused of providing material support for terrorism.

WASHINGTON - - President Barack Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison by Jan. 22 was followed by a series of mistakes and missteps by his administration that will delay the prison's closure for months, according to a report from a policy organization with close ties to the White House. Those mistakes - which ranged from initially having too few people on board to handle the workload to misreading Congress - have put the timetable months behind schedule and will push the prison's closure well beyond the January deadline, which Obama announced with great fanfare two days after he took office.