The Obama administration said Monday it has made no decisions on how many of the 240 or so Guantanamo 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.
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