Why US plans to hold al-Qaida fighters at Guantanamo Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit South Florida Sun-Sentinel - Dec 27, 2001 U.S. to hold al-Qaida fighters at Navy base in Cuba By Tim Collie The U.S. military is planning to fly captured members of Osama bin Laden's terrorist group halfway around the world to a U.S. Navy base in Cuba, where they will be held until possible trial in centers that once housed thousands of Cuban and Haitian refugees. It's an unprecedented solution for an unprecedented problem: what to do with what could ultimately be hundreds of stateless, alleged terrorists and seasoned fighters who once fought for the Taliban regime and al-Qaida. In a Pentagon briefing Thursday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the 45-square-mile U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay was the "least worst place" to house the detainees. The United States currently has 45 in custody, but expects that number will grow. Preparing the base for the prisoners will take several weeks, Rumsfeld said, adding that there were currently no plans to hold military tribunals there. "We don't anticipate any trouble with Mr. Castro," Rumsfeld said when asked whether he thought Cuban President Fidel Castro would object. Experts on terrorism said Guantanamo Bay was a good choice. The base is isolated, well fortified and close enough to the United States to allow easy travel. If necessary, the prisoners could quickly be flown to bases in the United States. If the Bush administration did hold tribunals there, Guantanamo Bay's offshore status would make any verdict virtually appeal-free. A landmark 1950 Supreme Court decision established, in unusually direct language, that nonresident enemy aliens have "no access to our courts in wartime." Both the president and Attorney General John Ashcroft have said they prefer military tribunals because they better protect U.S. secrets and because they think enemy aliens are not entitled to constitutional guarantees. Still, the base may require extensive improvements to house the prisoners, some of whom were involved in a prison uprising in the Afghan town of Mazar-e Sharif that killed one CIA agent. Guantanamo Bay has only 10 high-security single cells in a Navy brig that is seldom used, said Richard Evans, a base spokeman. Though the base held up to 40,000 refugees at one time during the mid-1990s, it has never held large numbers of potentially dangerous prisoners. There are about 100 additional cells that housed troublemakers during the refugee crisis. Access to the base is only possible through the U.S. military. It is has long been a sore point in the United States' tense relations with communist Cuba. The perimeter is heavily guarded, with Cuban troops keeping a close watch. Castro has described the Guantanamo Bay base as a "dagger pointed at Cuba's heart" and has criticized the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. "In the past we've housed any number of Haitian and Cuban boat people, so we can handle a large number of people," said Lt. Col. Bill Costello, spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which includes Guantanamo Bay. "But the security and the facilities you need for boat people are quite different than you're going to need for people coming from Afghanistan." Twenty suspected al-Qaida fighters were transferred Thursday to a U.S. Marine detention center in Kandahar, Afghanistan. They were apprehended in Pakistan after fleeing eastern Afghanistan, where bin Laden was thought to have been hiding this month. The Marines already were holding 17 prisoners at Kandahar. Another eight, including John Walker Lindh, from the United States, were being held on the amphibious assault ship USS Peleliu in the Arabian Sea. There is no precedent for a country dealing with such a potentially large group of global terrorists, rootless men no longer linked to a specific country, said Magnus Ranstorp, a leading expert on international terrorrism. Many of the al-Qaida fighters are Arabs, Chechens and others who have been expelled by their countries. "There's really been nothing like this ever before =E2=80=94 it's a first," said Ranstorp, an expert on al-Qaida at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. "They seem to have been looking for an island. The talk earlier was of Diego Garcia, then you'd hear some remote place in the Pacific. I'm surprised they are bringing them so close to the United States, but that might be necessary." The move isn't likely to worsen relations between the United States and Cuba, said an expert on Cuba, but it also seems unnecessary. "It's wrong, really," said Wayne Smith, a former top U.S. diplomat in Cuba, now a scholar at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C. "It's a good, secure place for prisoners, but they're going to be isolated from everyone, which brings up human rights concerns. "The Cubans will complain, but I don't think this will be a serious problem for them," Smith said. "There's really nothing they can do about it." The oldest U.S. overseas outpost has repelled enemies and welcomed refugees since 1898, when U.S. Marines fighting the Spanish-American War established camp at the natural harbor on Cuba's southeast coast. [Information from The Associated Press was used to supplement this report. Tim Collie can be reached at tcollie@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4573.] Copyright (c) 2001, South Florida Sun-Sentinel ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytmid-12.29.01-08:53:47-2266