Detainees: Officials Detail a Detainee Deal by 3 Countries

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Rated 3 in World Affairs on Jul 8, 2004 at 15:34:32 GMT.

American officials agreed to return five terrorism suspects to Saudi Arabia from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, last year as part of a secret three-way deal intended to satisfy important allies in the invasion of Iraq, according to senior American and British officials. Under the arrangement, Saudi officials later released five Britons and two others who had been convicted of terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, the officials said. British diplomats said they believed that the men had been tortured by Saudi security police officers into confessing falsely. Officials involved in the deliberations said the transfer of the Saudis from Guantánamo initially met with objections from officials at the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department.

Those officials questioned whether some detainees were too dangerous to send back and whether the United States could trust Saudi promises to keep the men imprisoned. "To get people to take a chance on detainees who posed a threat was a new endeavor, so everyone moved cautiously," said one senior American official who supported the releases. "It was the first time we were doing this, and people did not want to do it." The Saudi prisoners were transferred to Riyadh, the capital, in May 2003. The five Britons and two others were freed three months later, in August.

The releases were public-relations coups for the Saudi and British governments, which had been facing domestic criticism for their roles in the Iraq war. At the time there was no indication the releases were related. But an American official with knowledge of the negotiations said, "There is a link," adding, "This was two courses that converged and had a mutual attractiveness to them." On Friday, a spokesman for the National Security Council denied that the Saudi detainees had been transferred in exchange for the British prisoners. "There is no recollection here of any linkage between these two actions," said the spokesman, Sean McCormick. He described the return of the Saudis as "part of the normal policy of transferring detainees from Guantánamo for prosecution or continued detention."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/04/international/middleeast/04SWAP.html?hp