Britain seeks release of 5 in Guantanamo

A British Embassy spokesman said it will take an
international effort to close Guantanamo Bay.

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

In a reversal, Britain’s new government has asked the White House to free five former British residents who’ve been held for years as terrorism suspects at the remote U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo, Cuba.

Among them: Ethiopian exile Binyam Mohammed, 29, who two years ago was charged as an al-Qaida co-conspirator in the Bush administration’s first effort to hold war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo and who claims that the U.S. outsourced his interrogation to torturers in Morocco.

Britain’s Foreign Office made the repatriation request Tuesday in a letter from Foreign Secretary David Miliband to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The British Embassy in Washington wouldn’t offer a timetable for when a deal might be sealed.

“We’ve said for quite a while now that we see Guantanamo Bay as an anomaly and that it should be closed,” said Steve Atkins, an embassy spokesman. “It’s going to take an international effort to close Guantanamo, and we’re willing to do our part.”

Why Britain is involved

None of the five men is a British subject, but all were legal residents of the United Kingdom at the time of their capture. Their residency expired, however, because of their absence from Britain while they were being held as enemy combatants at Guantanamo, and the British government under Prime Minister Tony Blair had declined to seek their release.

In a letter to attorneys for the five men, a British Foreign Office official, Paul Welsh, said the government, now led by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, had decided to seek their release now to help the U.S. lower the population at Guantanamo.

In Washington, Defense Department spokesmen declined to say whether the request would fit into an ongoing military assessment of the threat and intelligence value of Guantanamo detainees, a process that’s been reducing the prison camp’s population.