Members of the Amnesty International human rights organization stage a protest outside the US Embassy in London in January 2008 against the US military prison camp in Guantanamo Bay.

This was a sleepy Navy outpost before the US began using it to hold prisoners in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks--and it may soon become one again.
It is increasingly obvious that the days of this US offshore prison are numbered. The Bush administration’s main rationale for holding terrorism suspects without trial vanished when the Supreme Court ruled on June 12 that they have certain legal rights.
According to AP, John McCain and Barack Obama have both called for the detention center to be shut.
But whoever becomes the new president will have to figure out what to do with those left at Guantanamo--roughly 270 at present.
“It’s pretty easy to say ’Let’s close Guantanamo,’“ Navy Rear Adm. Mark Buzby said in an interview before leaving as commander of the detention center last month. “But the fact of the matter is there are some pretty dangerous people that have to be kept someplace.“
The Pentagon now plans to try about 80 prisoners at military commissions but another 130 are considered too dangerous to let go and won’t be prosecuted. About 60 are slated for transfer from Guantanamo, but the Pentagon says they can’t go home because their governments won’t accept them, might release them and create a security risk for the US, or might even torture them.

Careful Scrutiny
Just before he was nominated attorney general last year, Michael Mukasey wrote an opinion column saying a national security court deserves “careful scrutiny by the public and particularly by the US Congress.“ He also suggested looking at a proposal to lock up suspected terrorists using legal norms that allow the insane to be involuntarily committed.
The Supreme Court’s latest ruling gave all detainees the right to petition federal judges for immediate release. In a separate case for an individual detainee, a federal appeals court on Monday decided he was not an enemy combatant and ordered the military to release him, transfer him or hold a new proceeding promptly.
Ready to Move
Commanders on this 45-square-mile base encompassing arid hills and a broad bay say they are ready to move the prisoners out if given the order.
Flexibility is literally built in. If Washington decides the war crimes trials should be moved to the US, a new high-tech courthouse and related facilities built on an abandoned airfield here can be dismantled and shipped over.
The $12 million Expeditionary Legal Complex was completed in May instead of a proposed $100 million permanent structure that Gates rejected in February 2007. Air Force Maj. Gail E. Crawford of the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions said Guantanamo is not bound by law to be the site of the war crimes trials. “We are making concerted efforts to decrease the population at Guantanamo,“ said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman. “We have no desire to be the world’s jailers, as we have often stated.“
Defense lawyers want the detention center closed and say the war crimes trials are unfair because they allow evidence obtained under harsh interrogations, even possibly by waterboarding, and permit hearsay. They say the prisoners include innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were sold to US forces for bounties.

Slippery Slope
“President Bush, our commander in chief, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not, started the US down a slippery slope, a path that quickly descended, stopping briefly in the dark, Machiavellian world of the ends justify the means, before plummeting further into the bleak underworld of barbarism and cruelty, of anything goes, of torture,“ attorney Air Force Maj. David Frakt said in military court last week. Frakt represents an Afghan detainee who records show was subjected to sleep deprivation at Guantanamo months after he attempted suicide.
Guantanamo Bay, which was first taken by US Marines in the Spanish-American war, has seen many mission expansions and contractions. In the early 1990s, it housed tens of thousands of Haitian boat people. Johnston said if the detention center is closed, some facilities--like buildings where guards and interrogators live--could be repurposed.

South Korean protesters have battled riot police at a rally opposing the resumption of American beef imports, hours after the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice vouched for the health of US cattle.
About 15,000 people--some wielding steel pipes and hurling stones at police--staged a street demonstration in Seoul on Saturday night, demanding the government withdraw its decision to lift a ban on US beef imports, AP reported.
The rally turned violent after some protesters used ropes to try to drag away police buses used as barricades to prevent them from marching into the presidential Blue House.
Riot police immediately fired water cannons and sprayed fire extinguishers to repel them.
In other development, Rice arrived in Beijing on Sunday for talks expected to focus on pushing forward six party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program.
Later Sunday, she was scheduled to meet with her Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi for talks and a working dinner, officials said.
Her visit comes after North Korea Thursday handed in a key declaration outlining its nuclear activities and Friday destroyed the cooling tower of its key Yongbyon nuclear power plant that is also being dismantled.
Rice was traveling from South Korea as part of an Asian tour that included Japan last week where she attended a meeting of foreign ministers from the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations.

Vladimir Putin

Russia will end its cooperation with Ukraine in the field of sensitive military technologies if Ukraine joins the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Saturday after talks with his Ukrainian counterpart Yulia Tymoshenko.
“As for sensitive technologies, and first of all rocket technologies, such production facilities will be moved to Russia,“ Putin was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.
Russia “believes any NATO enlargement is counterproductive from the point of view of international security,“ he said, adding that “this enlargement will not eliminate new threats but create new dividing lines.“
Meanwhile, Putin hailed Tymoshenko’s statement that the issue of the Black Sea Fleet presence in Ukraine should be discussed in a civil and calm manner.
Putin said that any unilateral action in this matter will be destructive and will ruin the Russian-Ukrainian relations.
“We believe it is our common legacy and there are appropriate agreements ratified by the two countries’ parliaments, which have to be complied with,“ he said.

Macedonia opened more than a dozen polling stations on Sunday after election authorities ordered a second rerun following voting irregularities at a June 1 general election.
The voting in ethnic Albanian areas, involving some 14,500 voters, will not affect the result of the election, which was won by conservative incumbent Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski. But they could spur fierce rivalry between two parties representing Macedonia’s ethnic Albanian minority, AP reported.
“All 15 polling stations were opened on time,’’ Zoran Tanevski, the State Election Commission spokesman told The Associated Press. Macedonia’s parliamentary elections were affected by violence and irregularities, leading to reruns in 183 polling stations June 15.
Those reruns were also marred by complaints of irregularities, including ballot stuffing and multiple voting, prompting election authorities to annul the results from 15 polling stations.
Sunday’s vote will finalize results in two ethnic Albanian constituencies, allowing the last five seats to be allocated in Macedonia’s 120-member parliament.
The rival DUI and DPA ethnic Albanian parties are competing for the most seats and a place in Gruevski’s next government. The DUI currently has 15 seats, while DPA has 10.
Gruevski, 37, has started talks with both parties and is expected to pick the winner as his partner in the new government.