The Obama administration was working furiously to prevent the reignition of international criticism and Arab fury over the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba where hundreds of terror suspects have been kept in extra-judicial limbo, after leaked documents revealed the flimsy intelligence on which many of the detentions have been based.
The US insisted that the documents, originally handed to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks and then obtained by the New York Times, painted an incomplete and outdated picture of life at the camp, which scarred President George Bush's relations with the rest of the world and which President Barack Obama has failed to close as he promised.
In a statement that completed the 180-degree turn in President Obama's approach to Guantanamo, the Pentagon yesterday weighed in to support President Bush's approach to dealing with the people picked up and brought to the camp on suspicion of being what he called "enemy combatants".
Condemning the leaks, it said: "Both the previous and the current administrations have made every effort to act with the utmost care and diligence in transferring detainees from Guantanamo. The previous administration transferred 537 detainees; to date, the current administration has transferred 67.
Both administrations have made the protection of American citizens the top priority, and we are concerned that the disclosure of these documents could be damaging to those efforts."
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