Sergeant
Major Daniel Polinski, a spokesman for the base, refused comment on
the report, only confirming the latest transfer of 34 prisoners from
Afghanistan, which occurred August 5, 2002.
The
daily said that the failure of U.S. interrogators to identify
lieutenants in the network of Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, considered
the mastermind of the attacks by four hijacked commercial aircraft,
severely restricts the intelligence and military communities' capacity
to better understand and thwart future actions by Al-Qa’eda.
A
U.S. official quoted by the daily on the condition of anonymity said
that while some information provided by the detainees, nationals of
some 40 countries, has been useful, "it's not roll-up-plots,
knock-your-socks-off-kind of stuff."
They
are mostly "low and middle-level" fighters, he said, not the
"big-time guys" counter-terrorism experts were hoping would
aid in the harvesting of valuable information about global terror
structures and operations.
"Some
of these guys literally don't know the world is round," another
official quoted by the daily said.
The
prisoners held at the maximum security facility have been classified
as "enemy combatants," not prisoners of war - a murky legal
status that keeps them outside the realm of the Geneva Conventions on
treatment of prisoners of war and holds them at the mercy of secret
U.S. military tribunals that would have the power to impose the death
penalty, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
Even
efforts to identify the prisoners have been thwarted, as a court last
week postponed by two weeks the forced release of their names while
the administration appeals the verdict in a U.S. District Court here.
Additionally,
the United States decided this week to free 30 Yemenis arrested in the
United States after last year's September 11 attacks, Expatriate
Affairs Minister Abdo Ali Qabati said Tuesday, August 13.
"The
U.S. authorities ordered the release of 30 Yemenis ... of the 65
arrested after the deadly attacks of September 11," the minister
said, quoted by the semi-official September 26 weekly.
He
added the other 35 Yemenis were imprisoned in the United States for
violating immigration regulations.
The
September 26 weekly recently reported that 32 Yemenis were among the
prisoners detained at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay.
The
United States has detained an undisclosed number of alien residents
since the September 11 attacks, under the auspices of trying to
uncover any alleged U.S.-based cells of Al-Qa’eda.
According
to civil and human rights organizations and activists, the U.S. has
detained over 1,000 Arab and Muslim men in what is being criticized as
a broad-based “fishing expedition” based solely on ethnic and
religious discrimination on the part of the U.S. government.
The
U.S. has failed to bring charges against all but one detainee,
Zacarias Moussaoui - who is believed to have been the “twentieth
hijacker”.
The
U.S. has been slammed by American citizens for constitutional
violations for its refusal to adhere to constitutionally guaranteed
rights of due process.
The
Department of Justice, headed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, has
been ordered to release the names of all those detained in connection
with September 11 amid charges of the illegal usage of “secret
arrests and detentions” and the apparent targeting of Arabs and
Muslims, despite a lack of evidence to support almost all of the
searches, arrests and detentions.
It
has also been reported by U.S. officials late Thursday, August 15,
that four prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay have tried to commit
suicide. Neither the names nor the nationalities of the four men have
been revealed.
But
the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said one of the
detainees had attempted to slash his wrists with a plastic razor while
the others tried to hang themselves using items like bed sheets and
towels.
The
officials could not recall the exact dates of the attempted suicides
but said they occurred over the past two months.
They
withheld comment about the possible motives of the attempts, all of
which have been unsuccessful
