The military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will be needed for years to come, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested, saying there is no alternative location to hold and interrogate the suspected terrorists held there.
"I don't know any place where we have infrastructure that's appropriate for that sizable group of people," Rumsfeld said during a Pentagon news conference on Tuesday.
"The United States government, let alone the US military, does not want to be in the position of holding suspected terrorists any longer than is absolutely necessary," he said, "but as long as there remains a need to keep terrorists from striking again, a facility will continue to be needed."
Rumsfeld defended the US handling of hundreds of detainees at the prison, many of whom captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan. About 520 are there now; others have been released or turned over to their home countries.
Rumsfeld said Guantanamo's operations have been more open to scrutiny than any military detention facility in history. He said valuable information has been extracted from the detainees, most of whom are threats to US security.
He said the prisoners include terrorist trainers, bomb makers, extremist recruiters and financiers, bodyguards for Osama bin Laden and would-be suicide bombers.
"They're not common car thieves. They're believed to be determined killers," he said.
Last week President George W. Bush left open the possibility that the Guantanamo Bay facility might be closed, but Rumsfeld gave no such indication. He said US taxpayers have already spent US$100 million to build the facility in Cuba, which he said costs US$90 million to US$95 million a year to operate.
Prominent Senate Republicans said Tuesday that closing the Guantanamo Bay prison will not fix a US image tarnished by allegations of US troops mistreating terrorism suspects.
"To cut and run because of image problems is the wrong, wrong thing to do," Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said.
Arizona Republican Senator John McCain said there's no doubt that the US has an image problem because of allegations of abuse and torture at the prison in Cuba.
However, he added, "The key to this is to move the judicial process forward so that these individuals will be brought to trial for any crime that they are accused of rather than residing in the Guantanamo facility in perpetuity."
A few of their Republican colleagues are raising questions about keeping the prison in Cuba open, arguing that it has given the US a bad name abroad and undermined the war on terrorism.
Human-rights activists and some lawmakers -- mostly Democrats -- want the administration to close the prison because of the allegations of torture and abuse of detainees.
Amnesty International has called the prison "the gulag of our time," and former US president Jimmy Carter also has said it should be closed.
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