Fewer Detainees Will Be Held at Cuba Camp, Rumsfeld Says

By RICHARD A. SERRANO

Jan. 31, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted Wednesday that the number of detainees from the Afghan war taken to the U.S. naval base in Cuba will be far fewer than the 2,000 earlier projected, and he said U.S. military forces are still sorting through thousands of other captives to determine where they should be sent.

The lengthy process has prompted criticism of the Pentagon and of the Bush administration because U.S. officials have not yet spelled out how the detainees will be prosecuted. A growing number of civil liberties groups, such as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, is worried that the longer it takes, the less likely the system will be fair.

“We’re concerned they are setting themselves up to become the world’s prison,” said Liz Vladeck, a spokeswoman for the committee.

Rumsfeld offered new insight into the process of how the detainees are being handled, in the Middle East and in Cuba, and it suggests that it has been a learning process for the U.S. military.

For instance, while it originally was thought that as many as 2,000 detainees would end up at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Rumsfeld now believes that number will be much smaller.

“I’ll be honest,” he said. “The number is somewhere between, say, 400 and 2,000. I don’t know where it is. I suspect it’s closer to the bottom, and therefore, I’m so conservative and respectful of taxpayers’ dollars, I’m disinclined to start ordering 2,000 permanent cells for those people.”

So far, 158 detainees from at least two dozen countries are housed in open-air cages on the base, where they are being interrogated while the military begins the process of how to decide their fates. But the Pentagon last week suspended all flights of detainees to the base, saying that more interrogators were needed and additional cells had to be built.

Once the flights are reinstated, Rumsfeld said, he would like to send detainees to Guantanamo Bay in groups of about 30 at a time.

“One of the problems is, there is an issue of tuberculosis, and there is the question that the cells’ proximity to each other suggests that you may need two cells for a person that may have tuberculosis,” he said.

He said Navy Seabees are working “24 hours a day” to build more temporary cells. But Rumsfeld said the Pentagon has not yet ordered the construction of permanent cells, and that he is waiting to find out what the final number of detainees there will be.

He said “thousands of these people” still are being held in Central Asia by the Afghans, the Pakistanis and U.S. forces.

“As we go through and look at them, we’re giving a large number back to the Afghans as people that were foot soldiers in the Taliban, and a lot back to the Pakistanis that were foot soldiers in the Taliban,” he said. “And we’re trying to sort out the Al Qaeda and the more senior Taliban.”

U.S. officials have discussed four options for the detainees in Cuba--a military tribunal, a federal court trial, deportation home, or transfer to a third country for prosecution. Decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis, they said.

“We’re trying to find which countries may or may not be appropriate to return their nationals so that they can process them,” he said. “And therefore, getting a fix on the total number of people that ultimately would fit [and] would be appropriate to have at Guantanamo is an open question.”

Pentagon sources said there also have been differences among the various armed services about how the military tribunals should be set up, further delaying the announcement of what will happen for many of the detainees.

But “they will not be characterized as prisoners of war,” Rumsfeld said, “because that is not what they are. They’re terrorists.”