New York Times

William Glaberson

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration released six Guantánamo detainees to other countries on Thursday, including four Chinese Muslims whose cases drew wide attention as the president has struggled to meet his goal of closing the prison by January.

The day’s events were the biggest steps the administration has taken toward that goal. But the moves did not address central questions, including whether political pressure had made the administration back away from meeting the demand of some countries that the United States accept some prisoners for resettlement to gain their cooperation in accepting others.

The Chinese prisoners, from the largely Muslim Uighur region of western China, arrived in Bermuda early in the day and expressed relief at their first taste of freedom in more than seven years.

“Today you have let freedom ring,” one of the Uighur men, Abdul Nasser, said in a statement thanking the Bermudans. In a long legal fight, a federal appeals court had ridiculed as inadequate the government’s evidence against one of the men and the Bush administration had conceded that none of the 17 Uighurs held at Guantánamo were enemy combatants.

Two other detainees, an Iraqi and a Chadian, were released Thursday to their countries. There were indications that the United States was close to releasing a few other detainees as well.

On top of Thursday’s departures there were numerous other signs of the aggressive diplomacy on Guantánamo that has taken place largely out of public view since President Obama was inaugurated.

European countries moved Thursday toward cooperating with one another to work with the Obama administration in evaluating other detainees for possible resettlement there. There have also been recent signs that the administration is increasingly hopeful of persuading Saudi Arabia to accept some of the 96 Yemeni detainees who remain at the prison camp.

Earlier this week the Pacific nation of Palau said it, too, would accept some of the Uighur prisoners, though it was not clear if it would take all of the 13 remaining men.

The developments amounted to more movement than there had been in a long time on closing the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a seemingly intractable issue for two administrations, said Ken Gude, a specialist on detention issues at the Center for American Progress in Washington.

“This is ‘closing Guantánamo.’ This is what it looks like,” Mr. Gude said.

President George W. Bush long said he wanted to close the prison but could not overcome the considerable difficulties of where to send the men and how to assure American security.

On his second day in office, Mr. Obama committed to closing the prison within a year. After the releases on Thursday, there were 232 detainees.

But the recent events also underscored the challenges that remain.

After the departures from Guantánamo became public on Thursday, American critics of the administration accused the president of releasing terrorists.

In addition, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry of China, which has long demanded the return of the Uighurs, called the four men in Bermuda terrorist suspects and asserted that the United States was ignoring international law by failing to turn them over to China. American officials have said for years that they could not return the Uighurs to China for fear of persecution or execution.

Bermuda’s acceptance of the men even brought unusual turbulence between it, a British territory, and Britain itself. The British government, which has control over Bermuda’s foreign policy, issued a terse statement indicating that Bermuda’s premier, Ewart F. Brown, did not advise it that Bermuda was planning to take the detainees.

The British statement said it would “carry out a security assessment of the men.” The statement added, “We have underlined to the Bermuda government that it should have consulted the U.K.”

Lawyers for the Iraqi who was released, Jawad Jabbar Sadkhan al-Sahlani, said he was an innocent man caught in the net of Guantánamo, an assertion that focused attention on disputes over the isolated prison that the Obama administration is trying to push into the past.

The criticism from at home and the intensity of the reactions abroad illustrate the challenges the Obama administration faces in closing Guantánamo, detention policy experts said.

They said the recent moves raised new questions about the administration’s strategy for closing the prison. Indications that the administration had negotiated with other countries to accept perhaps all of the 17 Uighurs made it appear that it had backed down in the face of intense political pressure in Congress and around the country from what had seemed to be its plan to resettle some of the Uighurs in the United States, the experts said.

Sarah E. Mendelson, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that there had been an understanding across the political spectrum that the Uighurs, enemies of China whose terrorism ties were sharply disputed, were the least controversial detainees to bring into the United States for potential release.

If the Obama administration has no plans to accept any detainees, Ms. Mendelson said, other countries are likely to ask, “Why are you asking us to do this if you are not willing to?”

Andrew Jacobs contributed reporting from Beijing, Judy Dempsey from Berlin and Sharon Otterman from New York.

New York Times

William Glaberson

In a diplomatic breakthrough that is likely to help the Obama administration close the Guantánamo detention camp, Portugal said this week that it was willing to resettle some detainees and urged other European countries to accept prisoners remaining at the camp, which has been a source of international criticism for nearly seven years.

The announcement was the first sign in the tangled history of the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that other countries might be willing to accept the Bush administration’s assertion that they should play a role in shutting it down.

“The time has come for the European Union to step forward,” Portugal’s foreign minister, Luís Amado, said in a letter to other European ministers released Thursday.

“We should send a clear signal of our willingness to help the U.S. government in that regard, namely through the resettlement of detainees,” the letter said. Mr. Amado pledged that Portugal would participate in a European Union resettlement program.

Although there is no specific agreement yet on the transfer of detainees, Bush administration officials described the announcement as a critical step toward solving the problem that has been referred to as “Guantánamo’s hard cases.” That refers to some 60 of the remaining 250 detainees whom the Pentagon has cleared for release but who cannot be sent to their home countries, often out of concern that they would be tortured or persecuted. They are from countries including Algeria, China, Libya and Tunisia.

“This is a major milestone in our efforts to secure help from the international community, and particularly from Europe, in closing Guantánamo,” said John B. Bellinger III, the State Department’s legal adviser.

Human rights groups and detainees’ lawyers welcomed the announcement, saying it could pave the way for the shuttering of Guantánamo in the early months of the new administration. “This step is an important one to usher us into a new era,” said Emi MacLean, a staff lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents detainees and has worked on the resettlement issue.

Mr. Bellinger said that Albania was the only country that had accepted detainees who were not its own former residents, when it accepted five Uighur detainees originally from western China in 2006. The State Department has been working for five years to persuade other countries to take some of the detainees who are in limbo because no country that the United States finds acceptable is willing to take them.

One obstacle has been resistance of some American officials to permitting detainees to be resettled in the United States.

Diplomats said the announcement by Portugal was partly a product of personal diplomacy by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a trip in September. But they said it also appeared that the logjam was breaking because other countries were eager to show the incoming Obama administration that they were willing to assist in the complex challenges of closing the camp.

If the 60 “hard cases” were resettled, the challenge of closing Guantánamo would be considerably diminished. About 100 of the remaining detainees are Yemenis, and American officials have long been working separately to get Yemen to promise to provide security assurances, monitoring and retraining so that many of the Yemeni detainees could be repatriated.

Resettlement programs in Europe and Yemen would leave about 100 detainees. With that smaller number, some officials say, it would be easier to close Guantánamo and transfer the remaining detainees to prisons in the United States.

President-elect Barack Obama has said he will close Guantánamo but has provided few details. He has suggested that some prisoners could be prosecuted in federal courts. Those men could be held in federal or military prisons. But the Obama transition office has not offered details of where the remainder might be held.

Mr. Bellinger said Portugal had received no promises of any assistance from American officials in exchange for its announcement.

But he described the announcement as a sign of a shift in attitudes in other capitals. “We kept telling them,” he said, “it’s fundamentally unfair to keep criticizing Guantánamo while doing nothing to help.”

In an interview, Luís Serradas Tavares, the legal adviser in the Portuguese Foreign Ministry, said his government was trying to lead the way toward a solution to what he called “a U.S. problem.”

Mr. Tavares said the details of a resettlement program would need to be worked out but might include some type of monitoring, like parole after a criminal conviction. But he said receiving governments would agree to free detainees cleared for release by the Pentagon.

He said he expected Portuguese people to be anxious about accepting men held at Guantánamo who the Bush administration said were dangerous.

But he said, “The U.S. has assured us that these people are the least dangerous people.”

New York Times

Guantánamo Bay, After Jan. 20, 2009

To the Editor:

Re “Next President Will Face Test on Detainees” (front page, Nov. 3):

While it is likely that the Guantánamo prison camp contains some very dangerous people, the American public and the rest of world may never know the real truth. After years of torture and abuse, the confessions of anyone still held at Guantánamo Bay are highly suspect, and the unconstitutional military commissions set up to try them make achieving justice impossible in any real sense of the word.

No responsible person who is calling for Guantánamo’s closure would argue that those suspected of terrorist activities should be automatically set free if Guantánamo is closed down.

What we’re demanding is that the Guantánamo prison camp be closed, the flawed military commissions be shut down and a real system of justice, based on the Constitution, be used to determine the guilt or innocence of those held there. Such a system will not rely on torture, secret evidence and hearsay.

Only by closing Guantánamo and trying detainees in civilian courts or in military courts, governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, will justice prevail. Guantánamo can be shut down with the stroke of a president’s pen through executive order on his first day in office.

Anthony D. Romero 
Executive Director
American Civil Liberties Union 
New York, Nov. 3, 2008

To the Editor:

Although the Bush administration has long misled the public about the dangerousness of many Guantánamo detainees, there is little doubt that some have committed serious crimes. The question is what to do with them.

Detaining them endlessly without trial has marred America’s reputation, providing a boon to terrorist recruiters and discouraging cooperation with international law-enforcement efforts, particularly by those most likely to learn of suspicious activity.

It has also allowed the detainees to glorify themselves as combatants rather than bear the opprobrium of being labeled convicted criminals.

The best solution is to close Guantánamo and provide suspects fair trials in regular federal courts, not the discredited military commissions that allow convictions based on coerced testimony.

Under the Classified Information Procedures Act, federal courts have long experience striking the proper balance between a suspect’s due process rights and the need to safeguard intelligence sources and methods.

Such criminal prosecutions are the best way to neutralize dangerous suspects while allowing America to regain the moral high ground so necessary for the long-term success of the fight against terrorism.

Kenneth Roth 
Executive Director
Human Rights Watch
New York, Nov. 3, 2008

To the Editor:

I almost always agree with what Nicholas D. Kristof has to say, and that includes his contention that the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, should be closed (“Rejoin the World,” column, Nov. 2).

May I suggest, however, that rather than turning it into “an international center for research on tropical diseases that affect poor countries,” it would be more appropriate — and a clear repudiation of the policies of the Bush administration — to convert the base into an international center for human rights.

That kind of a Guantánamo would not only represent an affirmation by the United States against torture, it would also make Guantánamo a very different kind of thorn in the side of Cuba than it has been over most of the last 100 years, and might be what brings human rights to the Cuban people.

It could be a place for cultural exchange, academic study and conferences, and stand as a beacon for people all over the world who are or have been victims of torture and other violations of human rights. It would stand as a reminder to all governments that torture is a violation of international law and is not to be tolerated anywhere.

Bruce L. Wilder
Pittsburgh, Nov. 2, 2008

To the Editor:

I disagree with the first of Nicholas D. Kristof’s three ways for the United States to “rejoin the world.”

After the necessary closure of the Guantánamo prison, all of Guantánamo should be returned to Cuba as a gesture of friendship and reconciliation after more than 40 years of hostility. Our continued presence there is militarily unjustifiable and politically stupid.

If the place were to be turned into “an international center for research on tropical diseases,” the Cubans could do that themselves. Their expertise in tropical medicine is internationally respected, and the United States could learn much from them.

Robert Skloot 
Madison, Wis., Nov. 3, 2008

New York Times

Tim Golden and Eric Schmitt

While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.

Pentagon officials have often described the detention site at Bagram, a cavernous former machine shop on an American air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees were Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison that is to be built with American aid.

But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as “enemy combatants,” military officials said.

Privately, some administration officials acknowledge that the situation at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal void that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantánamo to challenge their detention in United States courts.

While Guantánamo offers carefully scripted tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. The prison may not be photographed, even from a distance.

From the accounts of former detainees, military officials and soldiers who served there, a picture emerges of a place that is in many ways rougher and more bleak than its counterpart in Cuba. Men are held by the dozen in large wire cages, the detainees and military sources said, sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations, they rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard.

“Bagram was never meant to be a long-term facility, and now it’s a long-term facility without the money or resources,” said one Defense Department official who has toured the detention center. Comparing the prison with Guantánamo, the official added, “Anyone who has been to Bagram would tell you it’s worse.”

Former detainees said the renovations had improved conditions somewhat, and human rights groups said reports of abuse had steadily declined there since 2003. Nonetheless, the Pentagon’s chief adviser on detainee issues, Charles D. Stimson, declined to be interviewed on Bagram, as did senior detention officials at the United States Central Command, which oversees military operations in Afghanistan.

The military’s chief spokesman in Afghanistan, Col. James R. Yonts, also refused to discuss detainee conditions, other than to say repeatedly that his command was “committed to treating detainees humanely, and providing the best possible living conditions and medical care in accordance with the principles of the Geneva Convention.”

Other military and administration officials said the growing detainee population at Bagram, which rose from about 100 prisoners at the start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last year, according to military figures, was in part a result of a Bush administration decision to shut off the flow of detainees into Guantánamo after the Supreme Court ruled that those prisoners had some basic due-process rights. The question of whether those same rights apply to detainees in Bagram has not been tested in court.

Until the court ruling, Bagram functioned as a central clearing house for the global fight against terror. Military and intelligence personnel there sifted through captured Afghan rebels and suspected terrorists seized in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, sending the most valuable and dangerous to Guantánamo for extensive interrogation, and generally releasing the rest.

But according to interviews with current and former administration officials, the National Security Council effectively halted the movement of new detainees into Guantánamo at a cabinet-level meeting at the White House on Sept. 14, 2004.

Wary of further angering Guantánamo’s critics, the council authorized a final shipment of 10 detainees eight days later from Bagram, the officials said. But it also indicated that it wanted to review and approve any Defense Department proposals for further transfers. Despite repeated requests from military officials in Afghanistan and one formal recommendation by a Pentagon working group, no such proposals have been considered, officials said.

“Guantánamo was a lightning rod,” said a former senior administration official who participated in the discussions and who, like many of those interviewed, would discuss the matter in detail only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding it. “For some reason, people did not have a problem with Bagram. It was in Afghanistan.”

Yet Bagram’s expansion, which was largely fueled by growing numbers of detainees seized on the battlefield and a bureaucratic backlog in releasing many of the Afghan prisoners, also underscores the Bush administration’s continuing inability to resolve where and how it will hold more valuable terror suspects.

Military officials with access to intelligence reporting on the subject said about 40 of Bagram’s prisoners were Pakistanis, Arabs and other foreigners; some were previously held by the C.I.A. in secret interrogation centers in Afghanistan and other countries. Officials said the intelligence agency had been reluctant to send some of those prisoners on to Guantánamo because of the possibility that their C.I.A. custody could eventually be scrutinized in court.

Defense Department officials said the C.I.A.’s effort to unload some detainees from its so-called black sites had provoked tension among some officials at the Pentagon, who have frequently objected to taking responsibility for terror suspects cast off by the intelligence agency. The Defense Department “doesn’t want to be the dumping ground,” one senior official familiar with the interagency debates said. “There just aren’t any good options.”

A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.

Conditions at Bagram

The rising number of detainees at Bagram has been noted periodically by the military and documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which does not make public other aspects of its findings. But because the military does not identify the prisoners or release other information on their detention, it had not previously been clear that some detainees were being held there for such long periods.

The prison rolls would be even higher, officials noted, were it not for a Pentagon decision in early 2005 to delegate the authority to release them from the deputy secretary of defense to the military’s Central Command, which oversees the 19,000 American troops in Afghanistan, and to the ground commander there.

Since January 2005, military commanders in Afghanistan have released about 350 detainees from Bagram in conjunction with an Afghan national reconciliation program, officials said. Even so, one Pentagon official said the current average stay of prisoners at Bagram was 14.5 months.

Officials said most of the current Bagram detainees were captured during American military operations in Afghanistan, primarily in the country’s restive south, beginning in the spring of 2004.

“We ran a couple of large-scale operations in the spring of 2004, during which we captured a large number of enemy combatants,” said Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, who was the ground commander for American troops in Afghanistan at the time. In subsequent remarks he added, “Our system for releasing detainees whose intelligence value turned out to be negligible did not keep pace with the numbers we were bringing in.”

General Olson and other military officials said the growth at Bagram had also been a consequence of the closing of a smaller detention center at Kandahar and efforts by the military around the same time to move detainees more quickly out of “forward operating bases,” in the Afghan provinces, where international human rights groups had cited widespread abuses.

At Bagram, reports of abuses have markedly declined since the violent deaths of two Afghan men held there in December 2002, Afghan and foreign human rights officials said.

After an Army investigation, the practices found to have caused those two deaths — the chaining of detainees by the arms to the ceilings of their cells and the use of knee strikes to the legs of disobedient prisoners by guards — were halted by early 2003. Other abusive methods, like the use of barking attack dogs to frighten new prisoners and the handcuffing of detainees to cell doors to punish them for talking, were phased out more gradually, military officials and former detainees said.

Human rights officials and former detainees said living conditions at the detention center had also improved.

Faced with serious overcrowding in 2004, the military initially built some temporary prison quarters and began refurbishing the main prison building at Bagram, a former aircraft-machine shop built by Soviet troops during their occupation of the country in the 1980’s.

Corrals surrounded by stacked razor wire that had served as general-population cells gave way to less-forbidding wire pens that generally hold no more than 15 detainees, military officials said. The cut-off metal drums used as toilets were eventually replaced with flush toilets.

Last March, a nine-bed infirmary opened, and months later a new wing was built. The expansion brought improved conditions for the more than 250 prisoners who have been housed there, officials said.

Still, even the Afghan villagers released from Bagram over the past year tend to describe it as a stark, forsaken place.

“It was like a cage,” said one former detainee, Hajji Lalai Mama, a 60-year-old tribal elder from the Spinbaldak district of southern Afghanistan who was released last June after nearly two years. Referring to a zoo in Pakistan, he added, “Like the cages in Karachi where they put animals: it was like that.”

Guantánamo, which once kept detainees in wire-mesh cages, now houses them in an elaborate complex of concrete and steel buildings with a hospital, recreation yards and isolation areas. At Bagram, detainees are stripped on arrival and given orange uniforms to wear. They wash in collective showers and live under bright indoor lighting that is dimmed for only a few hours at night.

Abdul Nabi, a 24-year-old mechanic released on Dec. 15 after nine months, said some detainees frequently protested the conditions, banging on their cages and sometimes refusing to eat. He added that infractions of the rules were dealt with unsparingly: hours handcuffed in a smaller cell for minor offenses, and days in isolation for repeated transgressions.

“We were not allowed to talk very much,” he said in an interview.

The Rights of Detainees

The most basic complaint of those released was that they had been wrongly detained in the first place. In many cases, former prisoners said they had been denounced by village enemies or arrested by the local police after demanding bribes they could not pay.

Human rights lawyers generally contend that the Supreme Court decision on Guantánamo, in the case of Rasul v. Bush, could also apply to detainees at Bagram. But lawyers working on behalf of the Guantánamo detainees have been reluctant to take cases from Bagram while the reach of the Supreme Court ruling, which is now the subject of further litigation, remains uncertain.

As at Guantánamo, the military has instituted procedures at Bagram intended to ensure that the detainees are in fact enemy combatants. Yet the review boards at Bagram give fewer rights to the prisoners than those used in Cuba, which have been criticized by human rights officials as kangaroo courts.

The two sets of panels that review the status of detainees at Guantánamo assign military advocates to work with detainees in preparing cases. Detainees are allowed to hear and respond to the allegations against them, call witnesses and request evidence. Only a small fraction of the hundreds of panels have concluded that the accused should be released.

The Bagram panels, called Enemy Combatant Review Boards, offer no such guarantees. Reviews are conducted after 90 days and at least annually thereafter, but detainees are not informed of the accusations against them, have no advocate and cannot appear before the board, officials said. “The detainee is not involved at all,” one official familiar with the process said.

An official of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Shamsullah Ahmadzai, noted that the Afghan police, prosecutors and the courts were all limited by law in how long they could hold criminal suspects.

“The Americans are detaining people without any legal procedures,” Mr. Ahmadzai said in an interview in Kabul. “Prisoners do not have the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence.”

Under a diplomatic arrangement reached last year after more than a year of negotiations, Afghan officials have agreed to take over custody of the roughly 450 Afghan detainees now at Bagram and another 100 Afghans held at Guantánamo once American-financed contractors refurbish a block of a decrepit former Soviet jail near Kabul as a high-security prison.

Because of the $10 million prison- construction project and an accompanying American program to train Afghan prison guards, both of which are to be completed in about a year, military officials in the region have abandoned any thought of sending any of the Afghan detainees at Bagram to Guantánamo. Still, many details of the deal remain uncertain, including when the new prison will be completed, which Afghan ministry will run it and how the detainees may be prosecuted in Afghan courts.

Pentagon officials said some part of the Bagram prison would probably continue to operate, holding the roughly 40 non-Afghan detainees there as well as others likely to be captured by American or NATO forces in continuing operations.

Prisoner Transfers Stalled

Until now, military officials at both Bagram and Guantánamo have been frustrated in their efforts to engineer the transfer to Cuba of another group of the most dangerous and valuable non-Afghan detainees held at Bagram, Pentagon officials said.

Three officials said commanders at Bagram first proposed moving about a dozen detainees to Guantánamo in late 2004 and then reiterated the request in early 2005. In an unusual step last spring, the officials added, intelligence specialists based at Guantánamo traveled to Bagram to assess the need for the transfer.

But as Central Command officials were forwarding a formal request to the Pentagon for the transfer of about a dozen high-level detainees, at least one of them, Omar al-Faruq, a former operative of Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia, escaped from the Bagram prison with three other men. Mr. Faruq had first been taken to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives in late summer 2002, but was removed from the prison about a month later, a soldier who served there said.

Two officials familiar with intelligence reports on the escape said that last July, after Mr. Faruq had been returned to Bagram by the C.I.A., he and the other men slipped out of a poorly fenced-in cell and, in the middle of the night, piled up some boxes and climbed through an open transom over one of the doors.

In August, weeks after the escape, a Defense Department working group called the Detainee Assistance Team endorsed the Central Command’s recommendation for the transfer of nine Bagram detainees to Guantánamo, two officials familiar with the matter said.

Since then, the recommendation has languished in the Pentagon bureaucracy. Officials said it had apparently been stalled by aides who had declined to forward it to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld out of concern that any new transfers to Guantánamo would stoke international criticism.

“Out of sight, out of mind,” one of those officials said of the Bagram detainees.

Carlotta Gall, Ruhullah Khapalwak and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Afghanistan for this article.

New York Times

Sheryl Gay Stolberg

WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 — President Bush said Wednesday that 14 high-profile terror suspects held secretly until now by the Central Intelligence Agency — including the man accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks — had been transferred to the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to face military tribunals if Congress approves.

The suspects include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, thought to be the Sept. 11 mastermind, and other close associates of Osama bin Laden. Mr. Bush said he had decided to “bring them into the open” after years in which the C.I.A. held them without charges in undisclosed sites abroad, in a program the White House had not previously acknowledged.

The announcement, in the East Room of the White House, was the first time the president had discussed the secret C.I.A. program, and he made clear that he had fully authorized it. Mr. Bush defended the treatment the suspects had received but would not say where the so-called “high-value terrorist detainees” had been held or what techniques had been used to extract information from them.

The transfer of the high-level suspects to Guantánamo Bay effectively suspended the extraordinary program, in which the intelligence agency became the jailer and interrogator of suspects counterterrorism officials considered the world’s most wanted Islamic extremists.

The government says the 14 terror suspects include some of the most senior members of Al Qaeda captured by the United States since 2001, including those responsible for the bombing of the destroyer Cole in 2000 in Yemen and the 1998 attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Most of the detainees have been interviewed extensively and are believed to have little remaining intelligence value.

With the transfer of the suspects to Guantánamo, which is run by the Defense Department, the International Committee of the Red Cross will monitor their treatment, Mr. Bush said. He used the East Room appearance to urge Congress to authorize new military commissions to put terror suspects on trial, replacing rules established by the administration but struck down in June by the Supreme Court.

“As soon as Congress acts to authorize the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, can face justice,” Mr. Bush said, to an audience that included family members of the victims. He added, “To start the process for bringing them to trial, we must bring them out into the open.”

To that end, the president sent Congress legislation proposing new rules for the commissions and detailing specific standards for the humane treatment of detainees. Yet the proposal hews closely to the old commission model, and it retains several provisions the court found troublesome, including language that permits defendants to be excluded from their own trials.

At the same time, the Pentagon released a new Army Field Manual that lays out permissible interrogation techniques and specifically bans eight methods that have come up in abuse cases. Among the techniques banned is water-boarding, in which a wet rag is forced down a bound prisoner’s throat to cause gagging; intelligence officials have said Mr. Mohammed was subjected to that treatment while in C.I.A. custody.

Although the C.I.A. has faced criticism over the use of harsh techniques, one senior intelligence official said detainees had not been mistreated. They were given dental and vision care as well as the Koran, prayer rugs and clocks to schedule prayers, the official said. They were also given reading material, DVD’s and access to exercise equipment.

Administration officials said the timing of Mr. Bush’s decision to bring the terror suspects to trial was driven not by politics but by the need to respond to the Supreme Court’s decision and the fact that the suspects were no longer regarded as sources of valuable intelligence.

On Capitol Hill, some Republicans reacted warily. But even those who criticized the proposal said it was imperative for Congress to pass legislation setting up tribunals soon.

“I do not believe it is necessary to have a trial where the accused cannot see the evidence against them,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, a former military prosecutor who has played a central role in the debate. But Mr. Graham said he believed his differences with the White House “can be overcome.”

Mr. Bush’s speech was the third in a series he is delivering on the war on terror in the days before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and it carried potential political benefits for a White House that is intent on maintaining Republican control of Congress this November.

The address helped put a face on the enemy, reminding Americans that while Osama bin Laden — to whom Mr. Bush referred repeatedly in a speech on Tuesday — is still at large, many terrorists have been captured. Five years after the attacks, Mr. Bush gave the families of Sept. 11 victims something to cheer about, and those in the audience did, as he announced he wanted to put the suspects on trial.

By moving the high-profile suspects to Guantánamo just two months before the midterm elections, the administration is putting intense pressure on lawmakers to act before adjourning to campaign. If Democrats try to thwart legislation to try senior members of Al Qaeda, they will risk being labeled weak on national security, a label they can ill afford in an election that may turn on the question of which party is better suited to keep Americans safe.

“This is certainly a logical and very sound step both substantively and politically,” said David Rivkin, who served in the White House counsel’s office under the first President Bush and is sympathetic to this administration’s approach. “It’s reminding the country and the world of the folks we are fighting against. Nobody can say these are just pitiful foot soldiers; these are pretty senior guys.”

The C.I.A. program, though officially a secret, has been the subject of numerous news reports in recent months. By speaking publicly about it for the first time, Mr. Bush hopes to build support for it on Capitol Hill, and in the public.

The White House released biographies of the 14 suspects and details of the accusations against them. They include such well-known Qaeda operatives as Abu Zubaydah, who the administration said was trying to organize a terrorist attack in Israel at the time of his capture, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who the authorities say helped facilitate the Sept. 11 attacks.

Despite the new information, human rights organizations were critical of Mr. Bush’s announcement.

“It’s wonderful that at last the United States has acknowledged that these detention sites exist,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. But Mr. Cox described the program as “a form of torture,” and said the United States should suspend it.

In his speech, Mr. Bush fiercely resisted that characterization. “I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world,” he said. “The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it — and I will not authorize it.”

A senior intelligence official said there had been fewer than 100 detainees in the C.I.A. program since its inception shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Beyond the 14, the remainder have either been turned over to the Defense Department as so-called unlawful enemy combatants, returned to their countries of origin or sent to nations that have legal proceedings against them.

The official described the C.I.A. detainees as the government’s “single largest source of insight into Al Qaeda,” saying they accounted for 50 percent of everything the authorities had learned about the terrorist network. But, he said, “Some of these people have been held for a considerable period of time, and their intelligence value has aged off.”

Mr. Bush said the C.I.A. would not relinquish its capability to detain and question terrorism suspects, and the senior intelligence official said the administration intended that the program would continue. But agency officials — who feared employees might be subject to lawsuits or criminal prosecution — welcomed the hand-off of the detainees and the prospect that the C.I.A.’s role would be limited in future cases.

“I am confident that this will be greeted with relief by agency employees,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel for the C.I.A. “Many of them were uncomfortable with their role as jailers.”

Military justice experts say that if Congress passes the legislation, trials of some terror suspects at Guantánamo could begin relatively quickly, in three to four months. But the trials of the 14 high-value suspects, who are held in a special high-security facility separate from other detainees, might not begin for at least a year, because the government would have to build its case .

One expert who has been critical of the administration’s plan, Eugene R. Fidell, predicted that the proposal would attract a lawsuit.

“Going the way they have done this is in fact quite unfair to the very families of 9/11 victims who President Bush had at his meeting today,” Mr. Fidell said, “because those people need closure and in fact what he’s done is guarantee further protracted delay because of the inevitable litigation.”

On Capitol Hill, Democrats were also critical. Representative Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Mr. Bush should have disclosed the program years ago and called his speech “the opening salvo in the fall campaign.”

David Johnston and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting for this article.

June Mohammed El Gharani was transferred to Chad.

Four detainees were transferred to Bermuda.

Three detainees were transferred to Saudi Arabia.

Jawad Jabber Sadkhan was transferred to Iraq.

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was transferred to the United States.

Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi died at Guantánamo.

May Lakhdar Boumediene was transferred to France.

February Binyam Mohamed was transferred to the United Kingdom.

January Four detainees were transferred to Iraq.

Hassan Mujamma Rabai Said was transferred to Algeria.

Haji Bismullah was transferred to Afghanistan.

The Associated Press

New York Times

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Two retired generals were jailed Sunday in connection with a suspected plot to topple Turkey’s Islamic-rooted government, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

The two men, who were arrested late Saturday, are the highest-ranking former military officials to be detained in the inquiry. They are among 21 people held in the past week in connection with what investigators say is a pro-secular and nationalist network called Ergenekon, the news agency reported.

The two retired generals — Hursit Tolon, who once headed Turkey’s paramilitary force, and Sener Eruygur, a former top army commander, who helped organize a series of antigovernment rallies last year — were being held at an Istanbul jail.

No charges have been filed, and few details about the suspected plot have been made public. Some newspapers close to the government have said the suspects were plotting a series of events, including demonstrations and violent confrontations with the police, that could have created conditions leading to an army takeover.

The labor minister, Faruk Celik, urged people to be patient and to wait for indictments. “We have to trust the republic’s prosecutors,” Mr. Celik said Sunday. “I believe that as soon as the indictment is released, we will all learn what it is about.”

Critics have denounced the arrests as an attempt to silence government opponents. In Ankara, hundreds of people attended a peaceful demonstration against the arrests.

“The day will come when the AKP will be forced to account!” the protesters shouted, referring to the governing Justice and Development Party by its initials in Turkish.

Similar protests occurred in other Turkish cities.

The AKP, the party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been locked in a power struggle with secular groups supported by the military and other state institutions, including the judiciary.

Secularists see themselves as the defenders of the modern secular ideology espoused by the Turkish national founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and they oppose groups they say want to impose Islam on society.

The Constitutional Court heard a case last week accusing the governing party of antisecular activity. The prosecutor is seeking to have the party disbanded and Mr. Erdogan and 70 other party members banned from joining a political party for five years.

Mr. Erdogan’s party, formed in 2001 by politicians who once belonged to Turkey’s Islamist movement, denies that it has an Islamist agenda, noting that it has backed changes intended to help Turkey start negotiations toward membership in the European Union.

EDITORIAL

New York Times

Ever since President Bush rammed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 through Congress to lend a pretense of legality to his detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, we have urged Congress to amend the law to restore basic human rights and judicial process. Rulings by military judges this week suggest that the special detention system is so fundamentally corrupt that the only solution is to tear it down and start again.

 The target of the judges’ rulings were Combatant Status Review Tribunals, panels that determine whether a prisoner is an “unlawful enemy combatant” who can be tried by one of the commissions created by the 2006 law. The tribunals are, in fact, kangaroo courts that give the inmates no chance to defend themselves, allow evidence that was obtained through torture and can be repeated until one produces the answer the Pentagon wants.

 On Monday, two military judges dismissed separate war crimes charges against two Guantánamo inmates because of the status review system. They said the Pentagon managed to get them declared “enemy combatants,” but not “unlawful enemy combatants,” and moved to try them anyway under the 2006 law. That law says only unlawful combatants may be tried by military commissions. Lawful combatants (those who wear uniforms and carry weapons openly) fall under the Geneva Conventions.

 If the administration loses an appeal, which it certainly should, it will no doubt try to tinker with the review tribunals so they produce the desired verdict. Congress cannot allow that. When you can’t win a bet with loaded dice, something is wrong with the game.

 There is only one path likely to lead to a result that would allow Americans to once again hold their heads high when it comes to justice and human rights. First, Congress needs to restore the right of the inmates of Guantánamo Bay to challenge their detentions. By the administration’s own count, only a small minority of the inmates actually deserve a trial. The rest should be sent home or set free.

 Second, Congress should repeal the Military Commissions Act and start anew on a just system for determining whether prisoners are unlawful combatants. Among other things, evidence obtained through coercion and torture should be banned.

 And Congress should shut down Guantánamo Bay, as called for in bills sponsored by two California Democrats, Representative Jane Harman in the House and Senator Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. Both lawmakers are intimately familiar with the camp and have concluded it is beyond salvaging.

 Their bill would close Gitmo in a year and the detainees would be screened by real courts. Those who are truly illegal combatants would be sent to military or civilian jails in the United States, to be tried under time-tested American rules of justice, or sent to an international tribunal. Some would be returned to their native lands for trial, if warranted. The rest would be set free, as they should have been long ago.

 The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth — that the American judicial system could not handle prisoners of “the war against terror.” It was built on a lie — that the hundreds of detainees at Gitmo are all dangerous terrorists. And it was organized around a fiction — that Mr. Bush had the power to create this rogue system in the first place.

 It is time to get rid of it.

 Interview with Giorgio Agamben – Life, A Work of Art Without an Author: The State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private Life

http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=437

By Ulrich Raulff

 [Editors’ note: this interview, conducted by Ulrich Raulff in Rome on 4March 2004, was originally published, in German, by the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 6 April 2004. We are grateful to Ulrich Raulff and Giorgio Agamben for the permission to translate and publish this interview in German Law Journal. This translation was made by German Law Journal Co-Editor, Morag Goodwin, EUI, Florence. All notes have been provided for this publication by the editors.]

 [1] Raulff: Your latest book The State of Exception has recently been published in German. It is an historical and legal-historical analysis of a concept that we, at first blush, associate with Carl Schmitt. What does this concept mean for your Homo Sacer[1]project?

 [2] Agamben: The State of Exception belongs to a series of genealogical essays that follow on from Homo Sacer and which should form a tetralogy. Regarding the content, it deals with two points. The first is a historical matter: the state of exception or state of emergency has become a paradigm of government today. Originally understood as something extraordinary,an exception, which should have validity only for a limited period of time, but a historical transformation has made it the normal form of governance. I wanted to show the consequence of this change for the state of the democracies in which we live. The second is of a philosophical nature and deals with the strange relationship of law and lawlessness, law and anomy. The state of exception establishes a hidden but fundamental relationship between law and the absence of law. It is a void, a blank and this empty space is constitutive of the legal system.

 [3] Raulff: You wrote already in the first volume of Homo Sacer that the paradigm of the state of exception came into being in the concentration camps, or corresponds to the camps. The indignant outcry of last year as you applied this concept to the United States, to American politics, was predictably loud. Do you still consider your critique to be correct?

 [4] Agamben: Regarding such an application, the publication of my Auschwitz book[2] brought similar remonstrance. But I am not an historian. I work with paradigms. A paradigm is something like an example, an exemplar, a historically singular phenomenon. As it was with the panopticon for Foucault,[3] so is the Homo Sacer or the Muselmann or the state of exception for me. And then I use this paradigm to construct a large group of phenomena and in order to understand an historical structure, again analogous with Foucault, who developed his “panopticism” from the panopticon.[4] But this kind of analysis should not be confused with a sociological investigation.

 [5] Raulff: Nevertheless, people were shocked by your comparison because it seemed to equate American and Nazi policies.

 [5] Agamben: But I spoke rather of the prisoners in Guantánamo, and their situation is legally-speaking actually comparable with those in the Nazi camps. The detainees of Guantanamo do not have the status of Prisoners of War, they have absolutely no legal status.[5] They are subject now only to raw power; they have no legal existence. In the Nazi camps, the Jews had to be first fully “denationalised” and stripped of all the citizenship rights remaining after Nuremberg,[6] after which they were also erased as legal subjects.

 [6] Raulff: What do you understand the connection to be to America’s security policy? Does Guantánamo belong to the transition you have previously described from governance through law to governance through the administration of the absence of order?

 [7] Agamben: This is the problem behind every security policy, ruling through management, through administration. In the 1968 course at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault showed how security becomes in the 18th century a paradigm of government. For Quesnay, Targot and the other physiocratic politicians, security did not mean the prevention of famines and catastrophes, but meant allowing them to happen and then being able to orientate them in a profitable direction. Thus is Foucault able to oppose security, discipline and law as a model of government. Now I think to have to have discovered that both elements – law and the absence of law – and the corresponding forms of governance – governance through law and governance through management – are part of a double-structure or a system. I try to understand how this system operates. You see, there is a French word that Carl Schmitt often quotes and that means: Le Roi reigne mail il ne gouverne pas (the King reigns but he does not govern). That is the termini of the double-structure: to reign and to govern. Benjamin brought the conceptual pairing of schalten and walten (command and administer) to this categorization. In order to understand their historical dissociation one must then first grasp their structural interrelation.

 [8] Raulff: Again, is the time of law over? Do we live now in an era of rule by decree (Schaltung), of cybernetic regulation and of the pure administration of mankind?

[9] Agamben: At first glance it really does seem that governance through administration, through management, is in the ascendancy, while rule by law appears to be in decline. We are experiencing the triumph of the management, the administration of the absence of order.

 [10] Raulff: But do we not also observe, at the same time, the enlargement of the whole legal system and a tremendous increase in legal regulation? More laws are created on a daily basis and the Germans, for example, regularly feel that they are governed far more by Karlsruhe than Berlin.[7]

 [11] Agamben: Also there you see that both elements of the system coexist with one another, and that they both are driven to the extreme, so much so, that they seem at the end to fall apart. Today we see how a maximum of anomy and disorder can perfectly coexist with a maximum of legislation.

 [12] Raulff: From the way you have just described it, I see a rift that leads to an ever-starker polarization. Elsewhere, however, you say that the classical realm of the political will become ever narrower – and that sounds somewhat critical and decadently theoretical.

 [13] Agamben: Allow me to reply with Benjamin: there is no such thing as decline. Perhaps this is because the age is always already understood as being in decline. When you take a classical distinction of the political-philosophical tradition such as public/private, then I find it much less interesting to insist on the distinction and to bemoan the diminution of one of the terms, than to question the interweaving. I want to understand how the system operates. And the system is always double; it works always by means of opposition. Not only as private/public, but also the house and the city, the exception and the rule, to reign and to govern, etc. But in order to understand what is really at stake here, we must learn to see these oppositions not as “di-chotomies” but as “di-polarities,” not substantial, but tensional. I mean that we need a logic of the field, as in physics, where it is impossible to draw a line clearly and separate two different substances. The polarity is present and acts at each point of the field. Then you may suddenly have zones of indecidability or indifference. The state of exception is one of those zones.

 [14] Raulff: Does the endpoint – and therewith the reality – of the private still have a meaning, in the sense of your systematic examination too? Is there something there that is worth defending?

 [15] Agamben: It is firstly obvious that we frequently can no longer differentiate between what is private and what public, and that both sides of the classical opposition appear to be losing their reality. And the detention camp at Guantánamo is the locus par excellence of this impossibility. The state of exception consists, not least, in the neutralization of this distinction. Nonetheless, I think that the concept is still interesting. Think only of the multitude of organizations and activities in the United States that, at present, are devoted to the protection and defense of “privacy” and attempt to define what belongs within this realm and what does not.

 [16] Raulff: How does this then involve your work?

 [17] Agamben: Homo Sacer is supposed to, as I said at the beginning, comprise four volumes in total. The last and most interesting for me will not be dedicated to an historical discussion. I would like to work on the concepts of forms-of-life and lifestyles. What I call a form-of-life is a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to separate something such as bare life. And here too the concept of “privacy” comes in to play.

 [18] Raulff: At this point you clearly link up again with Foucault, perhaps with Roland Barthes as well, who held one of his later lectures on the topic of Vivre ensemble.

 [19] Agamben: Yes, but Foucault went back in history to the Greeks and the Romans when he had this idea. When you work on this topic, you suddenly no longer have a floor under your feet. And here you see clearly that we seem not to have any access to the present and to the immediate, except through what Foucault called an archaeology.[8] But what an archaeology could be, whose object is a form-of-life, that is to say an immediate life experience, this is not easy to say.

 [20] Raulff: As I understand it, almost every philosopher has had a vision of the good and the right or of a philosophical life as well. What does yours look like?

 [21] Agamben: The idea that one should make his life a work of art is attributed mostly today to Foucault and to his idea of the care of the self. Pierre Hadot, the great historian of ancient philosophy, reproached Foucault that the care of the self of the ancient philosophers did not mean the construction of life as a work of art, but on the contrary a sort of dispossession of the self.[9] What Hadot could not understand is that for Foucault, the two things coincide. You must remember Foucault’s criticism of the notion of author, his radical dismissal of authorship. In this sense, a philosophical life, a good and beautiful life, is something else: when your life becomes a work of art, you are not the cause of it. I mean that at this point you feel your own life and yourself as something “thought,” but the subject, the author, is no longer there. The construction of life coincides with what Foucault referred to as “se deprendre de soi.” And this is also Nietzsche’s idea of a work of art without the artist.

 [22] Raulff: For all those who have tried over the last thirty years to forge a non-exclusive form of politics, Nietzsche was the decisive reference. Why is he not that for you?

 [23] Agamben: Oh, Nietzsche was important for me also. But I stand rather more with Benjamin, who said, the eternal return is like the punishment of detention, the sentence in school in which one had to copy the same sentence a thousand times….

[24] Raulff: But the work of the Italian Philological School around and after Montinari has precisely shown us that Nietzsche is not a hard, despotic author, as one wanted us to believe for so long, but rather an open, traversed and criss-crossed system of readings and ideas – a work of art without author, like you just now called for.[25] Agamben: If that is so, then we need to learn to forget the presence of the subject. We must protect the work against the author.