WASHINGTON, March 29 (UPI) -- Thirty-eight of 558 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base are not "enemy combatants" and will go free, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday.
Five of the 38 have already been released. The U.S. State Department is negotiating the return of 33 more prisoners with their home governments, Navy Secretary Gordon England told a Pentagon news conference.
That they have been judged not to be "enemy combatants" does not mean their initial detention was wrong, as additional information might have come to light after their capture, England said.
The prisoners are not being offered compensation for their time at the jail.
The prisoners to be freed are being held in separate quarters from other prisoners at Guantanamo, the Cuban island prison created shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to house prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Some have been waiting as long as two months to be returned home.
The prisoners were determined not to be enemy combatants through Combat Status Review Tribunals, which were created last year after the Supreme Court told the Defense Department it could not hold the prisoners without some kind of a formal review of the evidence against them.
