Posted: 12/12/2003 1:49:27 PM EDT
Senators Want Action on Gitmo Detainees 1 hour, 25 minutes ago Add Top Stories - AP to My Yahoo!
By ROBERT GEHRKE, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Three senators just returned from Cuba said Friday it was time the Pentagon (news - web sites) decided what to do with terror suspects who have been held for two years and longer at the Navy's Guantanamo Bay base.
AP Photo
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., spent Wednesday touring the military's high-security prison, which holds some 660 detainees from more than 40 countries.
"The treatment of the detainees is not an issue. However, a serious concern arises over the disposition of the detainees — a considerable number of whom have been held for two years," the senators wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
"We firmly believe it is now time to make a decision on how the United States will move forward regarding the detainees, and to take that important next step," wrote the senators. Graham and McCain are both members of the Senate Armed Services Committee (news - web sites).
The senators asked Rumsfeld to lay out how he plans to decide the detainees' status and when that process will begin.
A call to a Defense Department spokesman seeking comment was not immediately returned.
Cantwell told reporters Thursday that the process should not be arbitrary. McCain said conditions are, in many cases, beyond adequate, but the detainees need to be tried at some point or returned home.
An order issued by President Bush (news - web sites) in November 2001 allows captives to be detained if they were members of al-Qaida, engaged in or aided terrorism or harbored terrorists or if it is "the interest of the United States" to hold an individual.
Last week, the Pentagon assigned a military defense counsel to Australian detainee David Hicks, the first detainee to receive legal counsel. He was arrested on suspicion of fighting as part of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s terror network, but has not been charged with any crime.
"A serious process must be established in the very near term either to formally treat and process the detainees as war criminals or to return them to their countries for appropriate judicial action," the senators concluded.
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The only thing I would accept is a military tribunal followed by a mass execution.
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