The Obama administration said Monday it has made no decisions on how many of the 240 or so Guantánamo detainees will be moved to U.S. soil, and whether they will be scattered around lockups throughout the United States or concentrated in one place.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd also declined to say whether any sites had been ruled out as possible lockups for the men from 30 nations, many of whom have been held at the remote U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba for seven-plus years.

Sixteen others were held for years by the CIA in so-called black sites, whose closure President Barack Obama also ordered in a series of executive orders on Jan. 22. He ordered the prison camps emptied within the year, after a process of case by case review of each detainee file.

The men range from confessed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, for whom the Pentagon's war crimes prosecutor has sought trial and military execution, and 17 Chinese citizens from the Uighur ethnic minority whom the U.S. government no longer calls enemies and for whom it seeks third-nation political asylum.

''There have been no final determinations made at this point with respect to individual detainees and whether or not they might be transferred to one location on U.S. soil, or several locations, or none at all,'' Boyd said in response to a query from The Miami Herald.

Both The Washington Post and New York Daily News have published speculative articles in recent weeks that focused on whether the Alexandria Detention Center near Washington, D.C., might be used to house some of the men.

Other sites mentioned in media reports have included Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas, and the Navy Brig near Charleston, S.C., in part because local leaders in those states have preemptively opposed any notion of moving Guantánamo captives to those jails.

Boyd noted that a Cabinet-level task force's case-by-case review had so far decided to send to Britain Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed, once accused of being an al Qaeda conspirator; release Yemeni doctor Ayman Batarfi ''to an appropriate destination country'' and charge former ''enemy combatant'' Ali al Marri, a Qatari who had never been held at Guantánamo but spent five-plus years in a South Carolina naval brig.

Obama administration officials have been lobbying European and Arab nations to help resettle some of the men, and are considering which of the others to bring to trial in U.S. courts.

France said recently it would take a detainee slated for release, but did not name the man.

One candidate may be Nabil Hadjarab, 29, an Algerian born former resident of Lyon, who has family still there. He was turned over to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in December 2001 for interrogation as an alleged al Qaeda sympathizer.

Another may be Lakhdar Boumediene, a former resident of Sarajevo in whose name lawyers sued and won the right of Guantánamo detainees to challenge their cases through habeas corpus petitions.

Last month, the White House also appointed a senior U.S. diplomat, Daniel Fried, as a globe-trotting envoy to argue specific detainee resettlement cases in Europe and the Arab world.

But Fried has yet to take up those duties because the Senate has yet to confirm his successor, Philip Gordon, to replace as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.

Join the discussion

The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. In order to post comments, you must be a registered user of MiamiHerald.com. Your username will show along with the comments you post. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.

     Showing: Oldest first Newest first Most-recommended first Least-recommended first

@Nyx.AuthorDisplayName@ wrote on @Nyx.PostedAtTime@:

@Nyx.repliedToText@

@Nyx.replyAnswerText@

Reply to this Comment @Nyx.Recommender@ @Nyx.AbuseReporter@