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WASHINGTON, Sept 8: The Pentagon has determined for the first time that one of the nearly 600 Guantanamo Bay prisoners was improperly held by the United States as an "enemy combatant" and will be released to his home country, the Navy secretary said on Wednesday.
Navy Secretary Gordon England refused to identify the prisoner or his nationality, but said a military panel at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had determined the man was not an enemy combatant, the status under which the Pentagon has held foreign terrorism suspects at the remote base.
England, in charge of the process, said the Pentagon has asked the State Department to arrange for the man's return to his home country within days or weeks. A Pentagon spokeswoman said the man had been caught in May 2002 in Afghanistan.
Human rights groups have criticized the United States for holding prisoners at the base indefinitely and most without charges or legal representation, and critics call the base a "legal black hole".
Mr England did not reveal the information that persuaded the Combatant Status Review Tribunal and Rear Adm. James McGarrah, the official who reviewed the panel's decision, that the man was not an enemy combatant.
Mr England said the man appeared at a hearing at the base, but did not call any witnesses. Prisoners were not allowed lawyers for the hearings. During a Pentagon briefing, Gordon England did not directly answer a question of whether the prisoner was an innocent man mistakenly swept up into US detention and eventually imprisonment at Guantanamo.
'VERY BAD PEOPLE': "We have a lot of very bad people at Gitmo," Mr England said, using the military nickname for the base. "We do not want to keep anyone that we shouldn't keep," he added, but said there was "some risk" to releasing the wrong prisoners because some who previously were set free have come back to fight US forces anew.
The Pentagon has defined an enemy combatant as a person "who was part of or supporting Taliban or Al Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners. This includes any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported hostilities in aid of enemy armed forces."
The other 29 men whose cases were reviewed by these tribunals, which started last month, were determined to be enemy combatants, England said. The Pentagon created the tribunals after a June Supreme Court ruling that Guantanamo prisoners have the right to go into US courts to challenge the legality of their detention and seek their freedom.
The Pentagon classified the Guantanamo prisoners as enemy combatants rather than prisoners of war, which would have a given them a host of legal rights under international law.
