Tuesday, May 06, 2003

Leave No Child Behind

General Myers on the Gitmo Kids, 4/25:


Myers: I would say, despite their age, these are very, very dangerous people. They are people that have been vetted mainly in Afghanistan and gone through a thorough process to determine what their involvement was. Some have killed. Some have stated they're going to kill again. So they may be juveniles, but they're not on a little-league team anywhere, they're on a major league team, and it's a terrorist team. And they're in Guantanamo for a very good reason -- for our safety, for your safety.


Administration officials today on some Gitmo kids:

WASHINGTON, May 5 — Bush administration officials said today that they would soon release an additional group of prisoners, about a dozen, from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Officials said that the prisoners, captured in the war in Afghanistan, had been determined to have no further intelligence value and that there was no evidence that they had been involved in any crimes.

The impending release comes after officials said that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that he was hearing a rising number of complaints from other countries about the indefinite detention of their citizens at Guantánamo.

Those to be released will probably include one or more of the three youths the military recently acknowledged were being held at Guantánamo. The three are believed to be 13 to 16 years old, and the disclosure of their detention by an Australian television network produced a barrage of criticism from human rights groups.