San Juan, Puerto Rico – The Red Cross met at Guantanamo Bay with 14 new “high-value detainees,” including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a Pentagon spokesman said Thursday.
The encounters apparently marked the first time the 14 detainees had met with anyone other than their captors since they were arrested, held in CIA custody at secret locations and transferred weeks ago to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Among them are the alleged architects of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
Simon Schorno, spokesman in Washington for the International Committee of the Red Cross, declined to discuss specifics or even confirm the encounters had taken place. In meetings with prisoners, Red Cross officials explain that they are visiting as monitors.
“The detainee is not forced to speak to us,” Schorno said. “It is up to the detainee to raise any issues that fall within our concern, for example past detentions and current conditions. It’s up to the detainee to address whatever he wants to address.”
The Red Cross also can take messages the detainees write, subject to military censorship, for delivery to their families, he said.
But even as the Red Cross wrapped up a more than two- week visit to Guantanamo Bay, the detention center came under increasing criticism.
British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, releasing Britain’s annual report on human rights around the world, said holding hundreds of terrorism suspects at the camp for years was “unacceptable in terms of human rights” and “ineffective in terms of counterterrorism.”
“It’s widely argued now that the existence of the camp is as much a radicalizing and discrediting influence as it is a safeguard for security,” she said.
Beckett was the highest-ranking British official to criticize the United States so directly for holding suspects for years without trial at Guantanamo. Prime Minister Tony Blair has gone no further in public than calling the camp an “anomaly” that sooner or later must end.
In response to Beckett’s comments, Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said: “Look, we don’t want Guantanamo open forever. We don’t want to be the world’s jailers.
“We certainly would look forward to the day when Guantanamo is closed.”
