No more Mr. Nice Guantanamo

After five years in dentention in beautiful Guantanamo Bay, the prisoners held there are clearly a threat to swim to Florida.

The yard, where the detainees were to have played soccer and other sports, had been part of a plan to ease the conditions under which more than 400 men are imprisoned here, nearly all of them without having been charged. But that plan has changed.

“At this point, I just don’t see using that,” the guard commander, Col. Wade F. Dennis, said.

After two years in which the military sought to manage terrorism suspects at Guantánamo with incentives for good behavior, steady improvements in their living conditions and even dialogue with prison leaders, the authorities here have clamped down decisively in recent months.

Security procedures have been tightened. Group activities have been scaled back. With the retrofitting of Camp 6 and the near-emptying of another showcase camp for compliant prisoners, military officials said about three-fourths of the detainees would eventually be held in maximum-security cells. That is a stark departure from earlier plans to hold a similar number in medium-security units.

Ok, so maybe they can't swim over hear to kill us in our beds, but this is surely in response to some threat they pose to others...

Officials said the shift reflected the military’s analysis — after a series of hunger strikes, a riot last May and three suicides by detainees in June — that earlier efforts to ease restrictions on the detainees had gone too far.

Oh, right. Suicide as a tactical weapon. Talk about your asymetrical warfare.

Anyway, as Rumsfeld would say, these are the worst of the worst, right?

The commander of the Guantánamo task force, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., said the tougher approach also reflected the changing nature of the prison population, and his conviction that all of those now held here are dangerous men. “They’re all terrorists; they’re all enemy combatants,” Admiral Harris said in an interview.

He added, “I don’t think there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist.”

Admiral Harris, who took command on March 31, referred in part to the recent departure from Guantánamo of the last of 38 men whom the military had classified since early 2005 as “no longer enemy combatants.” Still, about 100 others who had been cleared by the military for transfer or release remained here while the State Department tried to arrange their repatriation.

[Shortly after Admiral Harris’s remarks, another 15 detainees were sent home to Saudi Arabia, where they were promptly returned to their families.] [sic]

Something tells me Admiral Harris is not a great scholar of Islam.

Well, I'm sure that when we do release some of these "terrorists," they'll speak well of us when they get home.

KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec.16 — Seven Afghans freed after up to five years of detention at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay arrived in Kabul on Saturday, desperate to get back to their home villages.

The long-bearded men, mostly farmers and simple villagers, dressed in dark blue jeans and jackets, arrived at the offices of the Afghan Commission for Peace and Reconciliation here to receive an official guarantee of freedom from the Afghan government.

Most of them were from Helmand, the southern province that has become the most volatile area of Afghanistan. Government and foreign troops there have come under repeated attack by the Taliban and other insurgents.

One of the seven men, Haji Alef Muhammad, 62, from the Baghran district in Helmand, said he lost his brothers four years ago in a United States bombardment of his village. After that, he said, he was taken into custody during a raid, and sent to Guantánamo.

“Is this my fault that I believe in the words, ‘There is no God but Allah?’ ” he said. “Other than that there is no witness and no evidence of my guilt.”

“We had to eat, pray and go to the toilet in the same cell that was two meters long and two meters wide,” he said in disgust.

Another prisoner, Abdul Rahman, 38, said he was an unwilling fighter for the Taliban. He said he was from Helmand, but was arrested in Kunduz Province in northern Afghanistan in late 2001 by Northern Alliance soldiers led by the Uzbek leader Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.

“The Taliban sent me there by force as they made every family provide one fighter or give money instead,” he said.