Parceling Guantanamo

Up to 70% of Prisoners being held at Guantanamo may be getting a ride elsewhere in the world. Though not their freedom. The heat on the controversial prison may be getting a little strong for political taste, and so the US is bargaining with 3 countries to take some detainees off their hands. Top of the list: Afghanistan.

The Bush administration is negotiating the transfer of nearly 70 percent of the detainees at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to three countries as part of a plan, officials said, to share the burden of keeping suspected terrorists behind bars.

U.S. officials announced yesterday that they have reached an agreement with the government of Afghanistan to transfer most of its nationals to Kabul's "exclusive" control and custody. There are 110 Afghan detainees at Guantanamo and 350 more at the Bagram airfield near Kabul. Their transfers could begin in the next six months.

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The decision to move more than 20 percent of the detainees at Guantanamo to Afghanistan and to largely clear out the detention center at Bagram is part of a broader plan to significantly reduce the population of "enemy combatants" in U.S. custody. Senior U.S. officials said yesterday's agreement is the first major step toward whittling down the Guantanamo population to a core group of people the United States expects to hold indefinitely.

This administration just doesn't get it. When the collective perception of alarm is raised, when it becomes known that abuses occur, when a culture decides to question the policy of holding human beings for 4 years without any charges or legal proceedings, when it becomes a political ordeal to hold prisoners, The Administration simply pawns them off. They don't hear the calls- which are for results rather than political games. We want to see a system that works and makes sense. If a policy of imprisonment of random Arabs resulted in massive Al Queda arrests and stopped terror plots [of which we don't know], then we need to be aware of it. Otherwise, anything other than granting these people legal human rights does nothing but hurt the American interest in the GWOT, or whatever the hell it's called.