User:Sherurcij/Gitmo

The United States delivered 20 prisoners to Camp X-Ray at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camps on January 11, 2002. A week after their arrival aboard a C-141 which had taken the detainees off their original C-17 Globemaster III, President George W. Bush announced that they would not be treated as Prisoners of War, but "enemy combatants". The United States has refused to give the identity of the prisoners brought to the camp in its first month of operation, who were identified by Rumsfeld as "the worst of the worst".

Undersecretary of Defense Jed Babbin and Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers clarified that these twenty men were being held in such draconian standards because they were "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".

They were changed out of their blue jumpsuits, shaved "from head to toe", and put into orange jumpsuits with blue masks and orange caps. As the plane taxied for take-off, tracer gunfire began tracking the northern section of the Kandahar airfield, but halted when Marines returned fire and two helicopters took off to engage the militants. One of the 20 had to be sedated during the flight.

On January 14, 30 prisoners arrived, bringing the total to 50 prisoners at Guantanamo. On January 16, 30 prisoners arrived, bringing the total to 80 prisoners at that time. Another 30 were scheduled to arrive on January 17.