Some at Guantanamo Mark 5 Years in Limbo

So far, 10 detainees have been designated to stand trial before special military commissions, and the Defense Department expects that 80 more will face a similar fate.

"In Guantanamo, we have held the engine of al-Qaeda -- the recruiters, smugglers, trainers, facilitators, financiers, bombmakers and potential suicide bombers -- detained and out of the fight," said Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler, a Defense Department spokesman. "We have no desire to be the world's jailer and do not hold detainees for any longer than necessary. We have in place a rigorous process to ensure those held at Guantanamo Bay belong at Guantanamo."

The prison has changed dramatically since its inception, after a battlefield crisis in north-central Afghanistan over Thanksgiving weekend in 2001. For four days, U.S. and British forces fought a prisoner uprising in a fortress used by the CIA as an interrogation site in Mazar-e Sharif. By Nov. 28, hundreds of prisoners were dead and the U.S. military had taken custody of an estimated 200 survivors and suspects.

Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, in charge of the assault on Afghanistan's al-Qaeda and Taliban strongholds, urged the military to find a site outside the country to hold and evaluate this expanding group of suspects. The job had also overwhelmed his detention facility, a converted machine shop at Bagram air base.

Back in Washington that December, someone floated an idea: What about taking the prisoners to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay? Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld liked it. By the next month, military cargo planes were bringing Muslim men seized in Afghanistan and Pakistan to Cuba, 20 and 30 at a time.

President Bush, relying on advisers' untested legal theories, declared a week after the prison opened that the captives were not entitled to Geneva Conventions protections or prisoner-of-war status and could be held in Cuba, without charges, indefinitely.

Between its opening and Feb. 14, 2002, the number of prisoners at Guantanamo swelled to 300. In late January of that year, Vice President Cheney said the detainees were "the worst of a very bad lot" and added: "They are very dangerous. They are devoted to killing millions of Americans."

But of the 773 detainees who have spent time in Guantanamo, the government has released roughly half, most because they had no information and no role in any fighting. The majority were sent home after the evidence against each was formally reviewed at military hearings required in 2004 by the Supreme Court, which rejected the Bush administration's claim that it could detain foreign nationals indefinitely without such sessions.

Of the 393 prisoners who remain today, the military has determined that 85 pose so little threat, they should be transferred to their home countries. Officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because some evidence about the prisoners is classified, estimate that about 200 pose a danger to Americans.

It is unknown what classified evidence exists to hold Ruhani, who said he was newly married and trying to help his elderly father run an electrical supply store when he was arrested on Dec. 9, 2001. The military tribunal that reviewed his case in 2004 publicly concluded that he was a danger because he was captured with a senior Taliban intelligence officer, was carrying rounds for his pistol and had worked as a part-time aide in a Taliban security office.

Ruhani told the three-officer tribunal that he had been waiting for three years to set the record straight, transcripts show. He contended that the Taliban required all young men to fight in its army but said he was able to avoid going to the front lines by agreeing to do menial cleaning and clerical jobs at a nearby police office.

"I was afraid I would be killed," he told them.