Guantanamo inmates ‘no longer any use’

MOST of the detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp no longer face regular interrogation and some have not been questioned for six months or longer, its base commander said yesterday.
Rear-Admiral Harry Harris acknowledged that 75 per cent of the 450 inmates were no longer deemed useful intelligence sources, increasing pressure on President Bush to either release or charge detainees. Rear-Admiral Harris’s comments to Time magazine came after a decision by the Supreme Court on Friday that the military tribunal system at the Cuban base was illegal, forcing the White House to come up with a trial procedure that conforms with US law, and increasing calls for Mr Bush to close the camp.

Far from causing Mr Bush a big political headache, the judicial defeat has been seized on by the White House as yet another chance to criticise the Democrats. Republican strategists now see Guantanamo as a way to achieve political advantage before the mid-term elections in November.

After a month in which the White House largely succeeded in turning the chaos in Iraq to its short-term advantage — by highlighting Democrats’ disunity on the issue and branding their calls for troop withdrawals as “cut and run” — it is again using bad news on Guantanamo as a way to portray Democrats as soft on terrorism.

In outlawing the military tribunal system, the Supreme Court is inviting Congress to come up with legislation to establish new rules for trying Guantanamo inmates.

Republican leaders have pledged debates on the issue in both chambers of Congress in the autumn and hope to use them to ask whether Democrats believe that terrorists deserve the same legal protections as US troops.

John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, denounced Democrats as advocating “special privileges for terrorists”. He was responding to comments by Nancy Pelosi, the senior Democrat in the House, who said that the court decision “affirms the American ideal that all are entitled to the basic guarantees of our justice system”.

Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.