WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 — Senior Defense Department officials said Thursday that they were planning to keep a large portion of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, there for many years, perhaps indefinitely.
The officials said they would soon set up a panel to review those long-term prisoners' cases annually to determine whether the men remained a threat to the United States or could be released.
The officials described the panel as a "quasi-parole board" that would comprise three members before whom prisoners could personally plead their case for release. At the same time, the officials said, in the coming months they will continue to release to the home governments many other prisoners deemed not to be a continuing danger.
The officials spoke as part of a Pentagon effort to counter sharp criticism by members of human rights groups and foreign governments about the situation at Guantánamo, where some 650 people, most of them captured in Afghanistan, are being held under maximum security, some as long as two years without being charged with any offense. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is scheduled to discuss the matter in a speech Friday in Miami.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/13/politics/13GITM.html?hp