No solitary confinement for ex-Guantánamo detainee

NEW YORK -- The first ex-Guantánamo detainee to be tried in a civilian court has avoided solitary confinement in the so-called Supermax prison.

The Bureau of Prisons website shows Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is at the United States Penitentiary in Florence, Colo. The high-security facility is in the same complex as the Supermax but keeps most of its prisoners in its general population.

Ghailani is serving a life sentence for his role in the August 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

The New York Times first reported the story on Tuesday. It says a federal prisons spokesman declined to say if Ghailani will be placed in the general population.

Ghailani's lawyer, Peter Quijano, told the Times he was pleased his client had avoided the Supermax.

The U.S. attorney's office had no comment.

While at Guantánamo, before the Obama administration moved him to New York for trial, Ghailani was segregated from the vast majority of war on terror captives there in a clandestine lockup called Camp 7.

The Pentagon established the special prison camp in 2006, but kept its existence secret, after President George W. Bush ordered the CIA to bring to southeast Cuba more than a dozen "high-value detainees" who were held and interrogated at so-called black sites across the globe out of reach of the Red Cross.

This story was originally published March 15, 2011 at 12:04 PM with the headline "No solitary confinement for ex-Guantánamo detainee."