Published Saturday, December 29, 2001 in
The Miami Herald
U.S. expecting more prisoners in Afghanistan
WASHINGTON -- American forces in Afghanistan are expecting to receive a
growing stream of prisoners in the coming days from among the thousands captured
by Afghan fighters. Some could face U.S. military tribunals.
President Bush defended his plan to put terrorist suspects before a military
tribunal, saying Friday that they will be treated more fairly than Americans
were in the deadly attacks of Sept. 11.
The number of prisoners jailed at the makeshift detention center at
Afghanistan's Kandahar Airport has risen steadily this week, and the Pentagon
was expecting the addition of a couple dozen daily over the coming days, a
defense official said.
At a news conference Friday at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Bush pledged
again that the United States would bring Osama bin Laden to justice, "dead
or alive.''
And though he expressed total confidence in how the war in Afghanistan is
being waged, he emphasized that American troops will not be coming home soon.
"He is not escaping us,'' Bush said of bin Laden, whom he called a "parasite.''
The president said he had seen only snippets of the terrorist leader's latest
monologue on videotape. "Who knows when it was made?'' he said.
While conceding that bin Laden's pursuers do not know where he is, or even
whether he is alive, the president spoke of him as though he is on the run and
still a danger to Americans. "I hope 2002 is a year of peace,'' Bush said. "I'm
also realistic.''
BIN LADEN'S POSITION
Bush imagined the world from bin Laden's standpoint, assuming that he is
alive. "This is a guy who three months ago was in control of a country,''
the president said. "Now he's in control of a cave.''
As of Friday afternoon, the number of captured al Qaeda and Taliban figures
in U.S. custody was 70. Eight of these prisoners, including American John
Walker, were being held on the Navy's amphibious assault ship USS Peleliu in the
Arabian Sea, and the other 62 were in Kandahar.
Some U.S. Marines at the Kandahar base prepared to leave Friday, with Army
and possibly Air Force personnel expected to arrive soon, defense officials
said.
Afghan fighters hold thousands captured as they wrested control of the
country from the former radical Islamic rulers and the al Qaeda terrorist
network they harbored. Pakistan also holds hundreds of prisoners.
POOLED IN KANDAHAR
Now that a number of them have been determined to be of interest to the
United States, they are being sent to Kandahar, the official said.
More of them can be accommodated in Kandahar, he said, because Marines have
expanded the facility there to hold some 250. Afghan groups and U.S. officials
have been sorting through prisoners for weeks to determine which might be useful
for intelligence and which might be punished.
CIA and FBI agents are among Americans who have been interrogating prisoners
to learn bin Laden's whereabouts, to determine which ones should be brought to
trial and to try to get information about other terrorists or planned terrorist
attacks.
Many of the prisoners will be sent to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday. Getting facilities at
that base ready for the stream of detainees will take several weeks.
Bush has authorized the use of military tribunals to try terrorist suspects
from other countries, and the administration is working to lay out rules for how
such courts would operate. A draft of proposed rules for the tribunals states
that a unanimous vote of a tribunal's military officers would be required to
impose a death sentence on a foreign terror suspect, a U.S. official said Friday
on condition of anonymity.
Why Cuban embargo matters
Published Saturday, December 29, 2001
Re several recent Readers' Forum letters in support of lifting the U.S.
embargo against Cuba:
The 1962 imposition of the embargo against Cuba during the Kennedy
administration was because the Cuban goverment took American citizens' property
without compensation.
From 1962 to 1989, the Cuban government received billions of dollars in
subsidies from the Soviet Union, without any comfort going to the people of
Cuba.
That money was used to buy weapons for incursions by the Cuban military into
Grenada, the Congo, Ethiopia and to support the lethal guerrillas in Latin
America.
The Cuban government doesn't have foreign credit because it doesn't pay its
debts.
Yet, some people are asking for the embargo to end, but they never ask for
payment for the stolen U.S. property.
The problem with the Cuban economy is its goverment's economic system, which
failed in the Soviet Union and will do so in every other country where they
don't allow free, individual exercise of human potential through private
enterprise.
In 1958 Cuba had one of the world's best fed populations, not only because
of its rich soil and long coast line, but because of the high productivity of
its people. This productivity is reproduced by Cuban exiles in the United States
and every country where they find refuge.
The fact that this letter with its opinion can be published in a newspaper
in this country but not in Cuba shows only a small part of the Cuban tragedy.
Dario Miyares. Miami. | 
