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Afghanistan Agrees To Accept Detainees
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One possible interim solution under consideration is that Afghan detainees at Guantanamo could be transferred to Bagram until permanent facilities are built. Prosper said such facilities could allow a gradual transfer over the next six months.
The United States considers all the remaining detainees to be medium- or high-risk and therefore not eligible for release once handed over, as has happened with about 70 detainees released earlier to about a dozen countries.
Over the past year, U.S. military authorities have released several dozen Afghans that have been determined as not posing a threat. But President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly called on the United States to hand over all Afghan citizens. He raised the issue during a meeting with President Bush in May.
"I don't expect it will be too long before the actual transfer of detainees will start. It should be a matter of months to build the facilities," said Karim Rahimi, a spokesman for Karzai.
Senior military officials and members of Congress have said in recent days that the goal is to reduce the population at Guantanamo to a point at which the detainees who are the highest security risks can be held at the modern prison buildings there, while the rest of the facility could be "mothballed" for possible future use. Guantanamo's Camp V and the future Camp VI are modeled after U.S. domestic prisons.
In a military fact sheet about "the future" of Guantanamo, developed in early July, defense officials indicated that the operational priority of the facility is to shift from intelligence gathering to long-term detention.
The document noted that "the significant majority of detainees are no longer regularly interrogated" and that officials expect the population to decrease.
"The way that we've looked at it is that in waging the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban, we will continue to capture enemy fighters and need to prevent them from returning to the battlefield," Waxman said. "But it need not be the U.S. who detains them for the long term."
Correspondent N.C. Aizenman in Kabul and researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
