Top U.S. Attorney Defends Guantanamo Camp

ED JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer
AP Online
06-17-2005
Dateline: SHEFFIELD, England

US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, left, answers a question while British Home Secretary, Charles Clarke watches in the background during the concluding Ministerial press conference on the final day of the UK Presidency G8 Justice and Home Affairs Ministers meeting in Sheffield, England, Friday June 17, 2005. Britain currently has the chair of the G8 and will host a leaders summit in Gleneagles, Scotland early in July 2005. (AP Photo/Jane Mingay)

The U.S. attorney general defended the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay on Friday, saying the U.S. government would evaluate the detention center but had no immediate plans of shutting it down.

Alberto Gonzales was speaking on the final day of a summit that drew interior ministers from the Group of Eight industrialized nations.

President Bush's government is under growing pressure to evaluate the usefulness of the U.S. prison camp in eastern Cuba, where some 520 men accused of links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime or the al-Qaida terror network are being held.

Some have been held for three years without charge.

"We have Guantanamo because there are people that are captured on the battlefield, and we need to hold them somewhere so they do not go back and fight against American soldiers or the soldiers of our allies fighting in Afghanistan," Gonzales said.

"There are no present plans to close Guantanamo, but we continue to look at every activity that we are engaged in, in the war on terror, to make sure that we are doing everything we can to effectively protect the people of the United States," he said.

Gonzales has been criticized for approving an August 2002 memo while he was White House counsel that said laws prohibiting torture do "not apply to the president's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants." The document also said "injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions" must occur for an incident to qualify as torture.

The men being held at Guantanamo Bay are considered enemy combatants, a classification that gives them fewer legal protections than prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

Among other issues discussed at the two-day summit was terrorism and the leaders agreed to launch a study on the motivation of terrorists and their recruitment.

Ministers from Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Russia, Japan, Italy and Canada also agreed to set up an international database to help tackle child pornography on the Internet, and develop another database to tackle human trafficking.

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