The Bush administration wants the detainees' home countries to commit taking steps to prevent them from re-engaging in hostile activity.

CAIRO, August 5, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – The United States is negotiating with three countries to move nearly 70 percent of the Guantanamo inmates as part of a plan to significantly reduce the "enemy combatants" in its custody, a leading US newspaper reported Friday, August 5.

The Bush administration is pursuing talks with Saudi Arabia and Yemen to move some 129 Saudi and 107 Yemeni inmates in the US naval detention facility to the custody of their home countries, the Washington Post said.

"We're now engaging the countries with the largest populations, so we expect to see the largest potential movement from Guantanamo," Pierre-Richard Prosper, ambassador at large for war crimes, who led a US delegation to the Middle East to reach such an agreement, told the paper.

"So if we can reach an understanding with these countries that will allow us to return them with the greatest assurances, then this will be the biggest movement yet out of Guantanamo."

The US official stressed that before such transfers can occur, the detainees' home countries must commit to taking steps that will prevent what he termed the "enemy combatants" from re-engaging in hostile activity.

Legal experts view the US move as running counter to human rights laws, arguing that had Washington been able to try and convict the inmates – mostly in captivity for almost four years – it would not have considered deporting them to countries known to be repressive and with bad human rights record.

The United States is holding more than 500 prisoners at Guantanamo, most of them were detained in Afghanistan after US-led troops invaded the country and ousted the Taliban in late 2001.

The Bush administration has already reached an agreement Thursday with the Afghan government to transfer most of the 110 Afghan detainees to Kabul's "exclusive" control and custody.

"The arrangement we have reached with the government of Afghanistan is the latest step in what has long been our policy -- that we need to keep dangerous enemy combatants off the battlefield," Matthew Waxman, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, was quoted by the Post as saying shortly after leaving Kabul.

The transfer of Afghan detainees will begin in the next six months, the US daily said.

US officials told the daily the agreement with the Afghan government is the first major step toward whittling down the Guantanamo inmates to what they name a "core group of people the United States expects to hold indefinitely".

"We, the US, don't want to be the world's jailer. We think a more prudent course is to shift that burden onto our coalition partners," Waxman said.

The negotiations to transfer the Guantanamo detainees come amid intense international and domestic pressure on the Bush administration on its detention operations and abuses of detainees in the US naval facility.

"The Guantanamo issue is clearly a liability for the Bush administration, and emptying it has become a priority," John Sifton, a specialist on Afghanistan and detainee issues at Human Rights Watch, told the US daily.

"It's not a victory for human rights if a whole set of people deprived of their liberty are then moved to another place and continued to be deprived of their liberty unlawfully."

The New York Times revealed October 17, 2004 that uncooperative detainees in Guantanamo were regularly tortured by US guards and subject to coercive treatment.

Once calling the prison the “gulag of our time,” Amnesty International said in a recent report that Guantanamo has become a “symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that is betraying the best US values.”

In June, 2004 the Human Rights Watch issued a report entitled “The Road To Abu Ghraib” linking the abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo to the policies adopted by Bush in his alleged war on terror.