A long-running effort by the Bush administration to send home many of the terrorism suspects imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been stymied in part because of concern among U.S. officials that the prisoners may not be treated humanely by their own governments, officials said.
Administration officials have said they hope eventually to transfer or release many of the roughly 490 suspects now at Guantanamo.
As of February, military officials said, the Pentagon was ready to repatriate more than 150 of the detainees once arrangements could be made with their home countries.
But those arrangements have been more difficult to complete than officials in Washington anticipated or have previously acknowledged, raising questions about how quickly the administration can meet its goal of scaling back detention operations at Guantanamo.
“The Pentagon has no plans to release any detainees in the immediate future,” said a Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon of the Navy.
He said the negotiations with foreign governments “have proven to be a complex, time-consuming and difficult process.”
The military has so far sent home 267 detainees from Guantanamo after finding that they had no further intelligence value and either posed no long-term security threat or would reliably be imprisoned or monitored by their own governments.
Most of those who remain are considered more dangerous militants; many also come from nations with poor human-rights records and ineffective justice systems.
But Washington’s insistence on humane treatment for the detainees in their native countries comes after years in which Guantanamo has been assailed as a symbol of American abuse and hypocrisy – a fact not lost on the governments with which the United States is negotiating.
“It is kind of ironic that the U.S. government is placing conditions on other countries that it would not follow itself in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib,” said a Middle Eastern diplomat from one of the countries involved in the talks. He asked not to be named to avoid criticizing the United States in the name of his government.
U.S. officials said the talks had been particularly difficult with Saudi Arabia and Yemen, two nations that account for almost half of the detainees now at Guantanamo.
A State Department human rights report released in March said the Saudi authorities have used “beatings, whippings and sleep deprivation” on Saudi and foreign prisoners. The report also noted “allegations of beatings with sticks and suspension from bars by handcuffs.”
Mindful of such allegations, officials of the State Department’s human rights bureau, among others, have insisted that any transfer deal include assurances that the prisoners will not be tortured and will be treated in accordance with international humanitarian law, and that those pledges can be verified, officials familiar with the discussions said.