Guantanamo Bay won't be closed
2005-06-13 08:16
Washington - Vice-president Dick Cheney said in comments made public on Sunday that the US government has "no plan" to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba detention centre, where Washington is holding about 540 terror suspects from 40 countries.
Asked in a television interview about the prison, Cheney told the Fox News network: "At present, there's no plan to close Gitmo."
President George W Bush said on Wednesday he was ready to examine alternatives to the camp for "war on terror" detainees at Guantanamo after former president Jimmy Carter called for its closure amid criticism from rights groups over detainee treatment.
US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters last week he knew of no government plans to close the camp.
Plunging into the debate, Cheney, in an interview to be broadcast on Monday, said: "I think the way to look at what the two of them (Bush and Rumsfeld) said, they both emphasised the importance that you need to have the capability to imprison detainees that we capture during the course of the war on terror.
"They both emphasised that. At present, there's no plan to close Gitmo. The president says we review all of our options on a continuous basis," Cheney said.
"The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantanamo are bad people.
"I mean, these are terrorists for the most part. These are people that were captured in the battlefield of Afghanistan or rounded up as part of the al-Qaeda network," the US vice-president said.
Hard-core
"We've already screened the detainees there and released a number, sent them back to their home countries. But what's left is hard-core," Cheney said.
The prison has been at the centre of a political storm here. A recent Newsweek report - since retracted - said military interrogators at the camp flushed a Qu'ran in a toilet to rattle Muslim inmates.
The controversy was stoked further when Amnesty International in a May 25 report referred to Guantanamo as the "gulag of our times".
Bush called such claims "absurd", and has stressed the US applies principles consistent with the Geneva Conventions to "unlawful combatants", subject to military necessity, at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger told CNN on Sunday that the US government should establish a commission to assess the methods being used at Guantanamo.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that Guantanamo inmates can contest their detention in a civil court, but no prisoner has yet done so, and no detainee has yet been brought to trial by the government.