US Senate to hold hearings on Guantanamo detainees
Regional-USA, Politics, 6/10/2005

Asked "The President seemed to kind of leave the door open to possibly closing it, but then Rumsfeld said there was no talk at all of closing down Guantanamo," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said yesterday : No, what the President said was that we're -- essentially what I said in the briefing yesterday, that we're -- well, one, I want to back up, because talking about these detainees -- these are enemy combatants who were picked up on the battlefield and are either involved in plots to do harm to America or -- well, they are people that seek to do harm to America and to the civilized world. They're there for a reason, and we must remember that we are a nation at war. That's one of the messages the President will talk about today in his remarks, that the terrorists are patient and they want us to grow complacent. We will not, under this President. And that's why not only are we staying on the offensive abroad to go after those who seek to do us harm, but we're also taking -- doing everything we can at home to protect the American people here.

McClellan added: In terms of Guantanamo Bay, the President said that we're always looking at all alternatives when it comes to dealing with these detainees and how we protect the American people. You recall that a number of these detainees have been returned to their country of origin. That is when we either thought that we had -- they were no longer a threat and we had obtained all the information we needed from them to be able to disrupt plots, or we had assurances from that government that they would look after those individuals.

Asked if the president has completely ruled out closing Guantanamo, McClellan said: I would leave it -- I would say what the President said, that we're always looking at all alternatives for dealing with detainees. That's what he said yesterday and that's where we are.

Meantime, the Senate Judiciary Committee will conduct a hearing June 15 to determine whether hundreds of people from around the world who have been labled by the US as "enemy combatants" and "suspected" terrorists currently held at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere are being given adequate legal protection, the committee announced June 8.

A witness list for the hearing, set for June 15 at 9:30 a.m. in Washington, has not been announced. But Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, is planning to introduce legislation to provide detainees with certain legal rights that will allow them to challenge their detention before a special federal court established under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), according to committee staff.

The act prescribes procedures for U.S. attorneys requesting a court order for electronic surveillance, like wiretaps on telephones, and physical searches of property or persons who may be engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States on behalf of a foreign power. A special 11-member U.S. federal court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court hears such requests.

FISA judges, appointed by the chief justice of the United States to seven-year terms, are selected from the seven federal circuit courts, and three of the judges must come from the immediate Washington metropolitan area. The chief justice also appoints one member of the panel as the presiding judge of the court.

Currently, U.S. guidelines do not entitle so-called "enemy combatants" and foreign terror suspects due process protections under federal law, although the detainees are accorded protections consistent with the Geneva Conventions, the US says. Teams from the International Committee of the Red Cross visit the detention centers routinely and forward any concerns directly to the U.S. military.

Tracy Schmaler, a spokeswoman for Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said, "we look forward to the hearing," because Leahy has been calling for such an inquiry for a number of months.

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