Some Guantánamo detainees to get laptops
To better prepare them for life in asylum, the U.S. military is setting up a virtual computer lab for some Guantánamo captives now cleared for release.
BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- These captives already get to order fast-food takeout from the base and have access to a phone booth for weekly calls. Now some 17 Uighur Muslims awaiting a nation to grant them asylum are about to go high-tech, with laptops and web training.
While awaiting details of President Barack Obama's order to close the prison camps by Jan. 22, commanders here have ordered 20 laptops for the captives of Camp Iguana.
''As you know, detainees are leaving this place,'' said Army Lt. Col. Miguel Mendez, who oversees detainee classes, a multilingual library and now-emerging virtual computer lab. ``We're getting them computer classes to prepare for their return.''
E-MAIL LESSONS
The Uighur detainees won't be sending electronic mail to their lawyers or family members back in communist China anytime soon.
Instead, the military is setting up an internal intranet web at the half-acre compound ''to teach them how to e-mail,'' Mendez said.
A federal judge last year ordered that the men be set free after reviewing the American military's reasons for holding them in habeas corpus petitions that reached the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. by order of the Supreme Court.
But the Chinese citizens in exile have no place to go.
As devout Muslims, they fear religious persecution in their homeland, in part because of the stigma of having been held at Guantánamo for allegedly getting paramilitary training in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001.
Attorney General Eric Holder said some could come to the United States for resettlement, triggering protests from members of Congress around Virginia, where other Uighurs live and have offered to settle them.
Nury Turkel, a Washington, D.C.-based Uighur rights activist, hailed the computer training development. Internet access could allow the men to listen to Uighur broadcasts of Radio Free Asia, he said.
Moreover, laptops would help the men ''be reintroduced into a modern society,'' said Turkel, who noted that after eight years in U.S. custody the computer training ``also would give hope to the men that their freedom is nearing.''
Some Uighurs sent from Guantánamo to asylum in Albania several years ago now e-mail with Turkel regularly, he said.
Attorneys for the men did not respond to requests for comment.
LANGUAGE SKILLS
The computer training will offer DVD language training as well as a basic users skill-set to help in any future employment options, Mendez said. For example, detainees bound for Spain would get basic Spanish language classes.
The virtual computer lab is part of an emerging administration effort to persuade both Americans and European allies that some detainees are safe enough to resettle in their communities.
On the one hand, the Pentagon released a report last week that said 5 percent of detainees released by the Bush administration later turned to terrorism -- and that U.S. intelligence had their suspicions about another 9 percent who were freed.
On the other, a State Department diplomat is peddling detainee portfolios to Europe in a bid to find some asylum in new nations.
Rear Adm. David Thomas Jr., commander of the detention center, spent this week briefing the 2,000 sailor guards and other staff that operations would continue unchanged, with improvements until the prison camps are emptied.
'DRAMATIC' CHANGE
''Change is coming,'' he told 200 Navy guards at a town meeting at a military chapel.
``It's coming a little slow, but when it does it's going to be dramatic.''
He provided no timetable for closure. Two detainees have departed the prison since Obama took office, both for Europe, and a third is to be transferred to New York City for trial in the 1998 twin suicide bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
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