GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- The Pentagon has quietly pulled the plug on plans to post a former Guantánamo prison camps commander to Pakistan, The New York Times reported Friday.
Army Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood ran the Joint Task Force overseeing the offshore detention center here from 2004 to 2006 -- a time of increasing scrutiny and emerging allegations of detainee abuse in both Iraq and at the Navy base in southeast Cuba.
He was also the chief spokesman for the camps before Congress and the media, maintaining that U.S. forces and civilians at the razor-wire-ringed detention center treated captives humanely and safely. He was a brigadier general at the time, and subsequently promoted to a second star while serving in a domestic post.
Then in March, the Times reported, the Defense Department decided to assign Hood to serve as the top American military officer in Pakistan, calling him ``a crisis-tested veteran in a critical job at a pivotal time in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan's tribal areas.''
But as of Friday, according to the paper, the Pentagon had without announcement withdrawn the assignment because of protest in Pakistan, where about 65 detainees have returned home -- some complaining of their treatment.
The Times called the Pentagon retreat a sign of ``the widening shadow that the military prison at Guantánamo is casting over American foreign policy.''
