A controversial American general has said most of the alleged terrorist prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba should be released to take up arms again because "it may be cheaper to kill them in combat than to sit on them for the next 15 years".General Barry McCaffrey, now retired, is adjunct professor of international affairs at West Point, the US officer training academy. His comments are contained in a memo obtained by The Herald. It was written in late June this year, after he visited the Guantanamo detention centre on an inspection tour.
More than 450 al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are being held under military guard at the detention facility. Some have been captives since 2001.
General McCaffrey argues in his six-page memo that the "great value" of Guantanamo had been that its status under military law meant "no applicable foreign law, no foreign diplomatic intervention, no US Federal court civil orders, and no nosy intervention by a US ambassador" was possible until recently.
What he describes as "the perfect deal" in which no Federal court had primary jurisdiction was now being eroded and the military tied up "in a legal strait-jacket", ending decades of secret operations using Guantanamo. "Will we soon be required to read Miranda Rights - the standard rights to remain silent, have an attorney present, etc applicable to US citizens - to al Qaeda terrorists?" he asks.
In the absence of persuading an international body to accept legal jurisdiction for the site, General McCaffrey continues: "We need to weed out as many detainees as soon as possible and return them to their host nations with an evidence package as complete as we can produce. We can probably dump two-thirds of the detainees in the next 24 months.
"Many we will encounter again with an AK47 on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. It may be cheaper and cleaner to kill them in combat than sit on them for the next 15 years."
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