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Jeff Levine: Pentagon calls detainees dangerous



(CNN) -- Twenty Afghan war detainees, the first of hundreds expected, are spending their first full day Saturday at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. CNN's Jeff Levine is in Washington and filed the following report on what Pentagon officials are saying about the treatment of the detainees:

LEVINE: Well, the Pentagon says that these individuals, these detainees, are so dangerous that they really have to be handled with great care. In fact, the United States does not consider them prisoners of war in the conventional sense but rather unlawful combatants.

And when they arrived at Guantanamo, the detainees were taken off one at a time. They were shackled and hooded, something that is considered a reasonable precaution by the Pentagon, considering the situation.

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Now, even though there have been objections by human rights groups to the way that these individuals were treated, the Pentagon says that it really had no choice. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that some of these people are so extreme, so fanatical, that they would literally chew the hydraulic cables apart in the back of a cargo plane simply so it would crash.

So that's what officials here are saying is the reason that they had to take these extreme precautions.

In the meantime, these folks are being kept in what some people would even term cavelike conditions on Guantanamo. However, the International Red Cross is monitoring their condition.



 
 
 
 



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