Afghan Prisoners Arrive in Cuba
By JAMES DAO

(Reuters)
The U.S. military and its Afghan allies launched a full-scale investigation on Friday into a night attack by gunmen on U.S. Marines at Kandahar airport, officials said.

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ASHINGTON, Jan. 11 — A military cargo plane carrying 20 heavily guarded Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners arrived at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, this afternoon in the first wave of hundreds of detainees who will be held there.

The plane touched down a few minutes before 2 p.m., Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing. Mr. Rumsfeld said one prisoner had to be sedated for the flight as a security precaution. The plane was met by a contingent of American troops and a group of light armored vehicles.

The Pentagon provided few details about the flight from a Marine Corps base in southern Afghanistan, but senior military officials said more than 40 specially trained military police officers guarded the prisoners.

The prisoners, their hands and feet shackled and their heads covered by hoods, had been loaded single file onto the plane at Kandahar Airport. Pentagon officials had said that some prisoners might be sedated during the more-than-20-hour flight.

At Guantánamo, the prisoners will undergo extensive questioning. "They will be treated in the right way," Mr. Rumsfeld said, "not as prisoners of war, because they are not, but as unlawful combatants."

A Pentagon official said this week that the United States did not consider the detainees prisoners of war, but that they were still being afforded the protections under the Geneva Convention guidelines.

At Guantánamo Bay, the prisoners will be housed in a makeshift detention center known as Camp X-Ray, where they will be locked in 6-by-8-foot cages made of concrete and chain-link fence to await intensive interrogation and, possibly, trial before military tribunals.

Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed suggestions that the hoods and shackles somehow amounted to cruelty, calling the precautions "not in any way inappropriate" in view of the demonstrated dangerousness of the cargo.

As workers prepared the camp in Cuba for as many as 2,000 prisoners, search crews in Pakistan continued to comb the wreckage of a Marine Corps tanker plane that crashed on Wednesday in southwest Pakistan. Seven marines died in the fiery accident.

Mr. Rumsfeld said Thursday that there was no evidence that the crash had been caused by hostile fire.

Pentagon officials also said Thursday that the United States was preparing to send a force of more than 100 soldiers, many of them Special Operations forces, to the Philippines to help train Filipino troops to fight Muslim militants from the Abu Sayyaf group.

Though the American forces are expected to be involved initially in advising and training Filipino counterterrorist units, senior American military officials have said they could become involved in direct military action if the Philippine government requested it.

Amnesty International issued a statement on Thursday saying that sedating prisoners or shackling them for an entire flight would violate international standards prohibiting "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment. Mr. Rumsfeld said the Pentagon had closely studied violent uprisings by Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners held in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif and in Pakistan.

About 20 minutes after the plane lifted off from the base at Kandahar Airport on Thursday, marines came under small-arms fire near one of the runways. No one was injured and the identify of the snipers remained unknown hours afterward, military officials said.

Military officials also said John Walker Lindh, the American who was captured with Taliban forces near Mazar-i-Sharif, was not among the prisoners transferred. Mr. Walker is still being held aboard the assault ship Bataan in the Arabian Sea, the officials said.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said today that the count of Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees had now reached 445. The number keeps rising as American military and intelligence officials continue interviewing thousands of prisoners held by anti-Taliban militias.

Camp X-Ray has cells for about 100 detainees, and will soon be expanded to hold 220. During the next few months, military work crews will build permanent facilities for as many as 2,000 prisoners.

Mr. Rumsfeld declined to discuss details Thursday about the growing American involvement in the Philippines, where Abu Sayyaf guerrillas have been battling government troops in the southern island of Basilan. The rebels, who have been linked to Al Qaeda in the past, are holding two American hostages for ransom.

But this week Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz said that American Special Operations forces might become involved in "direct support of Philippine military operations," though he added that the government seemed "anxious" to do the job itself.

"There's no question that we believe that if they could clear the Abu Sayyaf group out of Basilan Island, that would be a small blow against the extended Al Qaeda network," Mr. Wolfowitz said.

In November President Bush promised to give the Philippines a $100 million antiterrorism aid package that would include weapons, training and shared intelligence. Since then the United States has sent an array of equipment to the Philippine military, including a C-130 cargo plane, 30,000 M-16 rifles and 8 UH-1 Huey helicopters.

In eastern Afghanistan, American B-1 and B-52 bombers dropped precision-guided weapons on the sprawling Al Qaeda training camp at Zhawar Kili near the Pakistan border Thursday for the sixth time in just over a week.

Senior military officials have said they are increasingly concerned that there are other equally sophisticated and well-fortified underground complexes elsewhere in Afghanistan that could become guerrilla bases for remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces.

At the Pentagon on Thursday Mr. Bush signed a $318 billion military spending bill for the 2002 fiscal year.

"Today more than ever we also owe those in uniform the resources they need to maintain a very high state of readiness," Mr. Bush said. "Our enemies rely upon surprise and deception. They used to rely upon the fact that they thought we were soft. I don't think they think that way anymore."