Twenty al-Qaida prisoners headed to U.S. base in Cuba

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- U.S. Marines began an extraordinary security mission on Thursday night -- flying the first 20 of hundreds of al-Qaida prisoners to a U.S. base on Cuba, where they are to be held for questioning and possible trial.

Gunfire broke out near the heavily guarded Marine base at Kandahar airport as the U.S. Air Force C-17 took off -- a sign of how the area around the city that was once a stronghold of the Taliban remains insecure.

Shortly after the aircraft left the runway, the base received small arms fire, and Marines responded with heavy outgoing fire, Marine Lt. James Jarvis told The Associated Press. He said he knew of no U.S. casualties in the firefight, which witnesses said lasted about a half-hour.

The prisoners are being taken to the American base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- and the U.S. military is taking no chances with them, since other al-Qaida and Taliban fighters captured in the Afghan conflict have staged bloody uprisings against their captors.

"These are dangerous individuals," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Washington on Thursday. "There are among these prisoners people who are perfectly willing to kill themselves and kill other people." He said those overseeing the transfer have been told to use "appropriate restraint."

During the flights to Cuba, prisoners were to be chained to their seats -- and possibly be sedated, forced to use portable urinals and be fed by their guards -- according to USA Today and television reports.

At Guantanamo Bay, a temporary detention area called Camp X-Ray has room for 100 prisoners and soon could house 220. A more permanent site under construction is expected to house up to 2,000.

There, prisoners will be isolated in individual, open-air fenced cells with metal roofs. They will sleep on mats under halogen floodlights. They could get wet from rain, but officials say they will be treated humanely. The Red Cross and other organizations will monitor conditions.

The Pentagon subsequently barred news organizations from transmitting pictures taken as the prisoners board the plane, citing Red Cross objections. The Red Cross denied it had raised the issue with the U.S. military.

Security is tentative

The exchange of fire at the base brought U.S. warplanes out hours later patrolling around Kandahar, a rare event since U.S. bombing ended in the area. To the north of the base lies a highway running parallel to the east-west runway. Mud houses on the other side of the road provide some of the only cover in the area; the rest of the base is surrounded by bare fields, a few houses, and an old mine field.

Although the Taliban lost control of Kandahar and other major Afghan cities under the combined assault of U.S. airstrikes and offensives by Afghan fighters, security in the country is tentative at best.

Many of the deposed militia's fighters have disappeared into Afghanistan's rugged terrain or have blended into civilian populations.