BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@miamiherald.com
The Pentagon sent three more war-on-terror captives home from Guantánamo this weekend — two to Afghanistan and one to Pakistan, the Defense Department said Tuesday.
In keeping with Pentagon policy, no details were released of the latest transfer from the remote prison camp, which has been soaked by rains from a string of hurricanes buffeting the Caribbean.
And there was no independent word from either allied governments Pakistan or Afghanistan on the identities of the captives.
The Pentagon announcement said the transfer reduced the detainee population to ”approximately 255” housed in a series of prison camps at a sprawling complex overlooking the Caribbean.
At its height, the Bush administration held more than 600 men and teens at the interrogation and detention center it set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Bush administration officials have said they want to place about 80 of the detainees on trial through its special war court, called military commissions.
Meantime, military panels regularly review the cases of the other 180 or so captives — some held since January 2002 — among whom there are at least 60 the U.S. no longer wants to detain.
U. S. diplomats have been seeking to negotiate repatriation of a portion of the 100 or so detainees from Yemen, Osama bin Laden’s ancestral homeland.
After years of transfers to Afghanistan, Europe and Saudi Arabia, the Yemenis make up the largest citizenship bloc at the Navy base in southeast Cuba where this summer military jurors convicted Bin Laden’s Yemeni driver Salim Hamdan of war crimes.
