WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is negotiating the transfer of nearly 70 percent of the detainees at the U.S. detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to three countries as part of a plan, officials said, to share the burden of keeping suspected terrorists behind bars.

U.S. officials announced yesterday that they have reached an agreement with the government of Afghanistan to transfer most of its nationals to Kabul's "exclusive" control and custody. There are 110 Afghan detainees at Guantánamo and 350 more at the Bagram airfield near Kabul. Their transfers could begin in the next six months.

Pierre-Richard Prosper, ambassador at large for war crimes, who led a U.S. delegation to the Middle East this week, said similar agreements are being pursued with Saudi Arabia and Yemen, whose nationals make up a significant percentage of the Guantánamo population.

The decision to move more than 20 percent of the detainees at Guantánamo to Afghanistan and to largely clear out the detention center at Bagram is part of a broader plan to significantly reduce the population of "enemy combatants" in U.S. custody to a core group of people the United States expects to hold indefinitely.

"This is not an effort to shut down Guantánamo," said Matthew Waxman, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs.

The negotiations come amid intense international and domestic pressure on U.S. detention operations, with allegations of mistreatment and abuse as well as concern that detainees have been held for years without being prosecuted for their alleged crimes.

Psychologists' role

as advisers criticized

LONDON — A leading British medical ethicist is calling on medical organizations in the United States to take a stronger stand against psychologists and psychiatrists working alongside U.S. military interrogators at detention centers from Guantánamo Bay to Abu Ghraib.

Writing this week in The Lancet medical journal, Dr. Michael Wilks singles out the American Psychological Association as "a disgrace" for sanctioning the idea that psychologists can act as advisers to interrogators.

Debate over the role of psychologists and psychiatrists in interrogations has intensified over the past few months following reports that some were involved in the abuse scandals at Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Some experts have questioned whether it is possible for doctors and psychologists to maintain ethics while acting as consultants to military interrogators.

Chinese men remain

at Guantánamo Bay

The Pentagon has acknowledged continuing to imprison at least two members of a persecuted Chinese Muslim minority at Guantánamo Bay despite having concluded in March that they were not "enemy combatants."

The case of the two men, Abu Bakker Qassim and A'Del Abdu al-Hakim, marks the first time the Bush administration has asserted in court that it can continue to hold people at Guantánamo after the Pentagon's fact-finding tribunals have found no basis for their detention.

The Pentagon says that it has continued to imprison the men because they would be mistreated if returned to China, and that it has been unable to find another country that will accept them.

Lawyers for Qassim and Hakim asked U.S. District Judge James Robertson in Washington on Monday to either release them to quarters at Guantánamo that are not for terrorist suspects, or to send them to Washington, which has a substantial Uighur expatriate community, while the State Department seeks a country that will take them.

Maryland man suspected

of supporting terrorists

NEW YORK — A Maryland man was charged with conspiring to help a terrorist organization after describing the time he spent at a terrorist-training camp in Pakistan as "one of the better decisions in my life," prosecutors said yesterday.

Mahmud Faruq Brent of Gwynn Oak, Md., allegedly boasted that he had agreed to provide whatever assistance was necessary. Authorities found an address book with telephone numbers for him when they arrested Tarik Shah, 42, of New York. Shah pleaded not guilty to terrorism charges earlier this summer.

Brent was charged in a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan with conspiracy to provide material support to the Lashkar-e-Taiba organization, which the U.S. designated a terrorist organization in 2001.

Also

Jordan has arrested 17 people linked to al-Qaida followers in Iraq and an affiliated Saudi group who were plotting to attack U.S. military personnel in the kingdom, security sources said yesterday.

Compiled from The Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post and Newsday