Guantanamo is 'recruiting agent' for terrorism

Britain: Lord Charles Falconer, Britain's de facto justice minister and close ally of Prime Minister Tony Blair, has denounced the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as a "recruiting agent" for terrorism.

"I think that Guantanamo Bay is a recruiting agent for those who would attack all our values," the Lord Chancellor said Wednesday on BBC1's Question Time, in the most outspoken attack yet by a senior government minister.

"We live by the rule of law. What Guantanamo Bay is doing is placing people beyond the rule of law which I think is intolerable and wrong. It should never have been opened and it should be closed," he said.

His comments follow the suicide at the weekend of three of the detainees at the prison camp. Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith, the British government's top legal advisor, said last month it was time for the United States to close the camp as it undermined the US tradition as a "beacon" of freedom and justice.

"The existence of Guantanamo Bay remains unacceptable," Goldsmith said. -

Meanwhile President George W. Bush acknowledged the damage being done to the US image by the Guantanamo "war on terror" prison camp as a new controversy erupted Wednesday over journalists who were forced to leave the US base.

Days after three inmates committed suicide, triggering a new international row over the jail, Bush said he would like to shut down Guantanamo, but that some detainees were too dangerous to release. "I'd like to close Guantanamo," Bush told a White House news conference after returning from a surprise visit to Baghdad.

"But I also recognize that we're holding some people that are darned dangerous, and that we'd better have a plan to deal with them in our courts."

"No question, Guantanamo sends, you know, a signal to some of our friends - provides an excuse, for example, to say, 'The United States is not upholding the values that they're trying (to) encourage other countries to adhere to.'"

"My answer to them is, is that we are a nation of laws."

"Eventually, these people will have trials and they will have counsel and they will be represented in a court of law."

Bush said the best way to handle Guantanamo detainees, many picked off the battlefields of Afghanistan as suspected Taliban or Al-Qaeda operatives, was through military courts.

The US administration is waiting for the Supreme Court to make a decision in on the legality of military tribunals being held at Guantanamo. The Supreme Court ruling is imminent.

European governments, a UN human rights panel and various rights groups have called on the United States to shut down Guantanamo. Opponents of the camp have stepped up criticism since three suicides of inmates last Saturday.

The United States will soon extradite all 96 Afghans, including several senior Taliban officials, being held at its Guantanamo Bay prison camp for terrorist suspects, an Afghan government official said on Wednesday.

The prisoners were being extradited as part of an understanding reached between U.S. President George W. Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai last year and would be tried by Afghan courts, said Abdul Jabar Sabit, an interior ministry official.

Londob, Washington, Kabul, Thursday, AFP, Reuters