World Briefs

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – For the first time at Guantanamo, defense lawyers have seen a top-secret prison where the alleged 9/11 plotters and other high-value detainees are held.

The military lawyers were allowed to view Camp 7 under a judge's order. Even the location of the prison camp within the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay Cuba is secret. The remaining prisoners are held at other facilities inside the base.

Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier says she and her co-counsel spent 90 minutes at Camp 7 but are barred from revealing what they saw.

The lawyers represent accused Sept. 11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh. They are trying to determine if he is mentally competent to stand trial on charges that carry a possible death sentence.

MADRID, Spain – A Basque separatist militant arrested this week in France was the overall leader of the armed group ETA and a retaliatory attack is likely, Spain's interior minister said Wednesday.

Until now Spanish authorities have said Mikel de Garikoitz Aspiazu, whose alias is Txeroki, was in charge of ETA's commando units, which carry out attacks.

But Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said in an interview with Cadena Ser radio that Aspiazu was actually ETA's top figure.

He rose to the top position after the arrest of Francisco Javier Lopez Pena, then believed to be ETA's boss, in May near Bordeaux, France, the minister said.

"Txeroki ended up in charge of everything — the political apparatus, the so-called military apparatus. The one who ordered killings was Txeroki," Perez Rubalcaba said.

CAIRO, Egypt – Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader used a racial epithet to insult Barack Obama in a message posted Wednesday, describing the president-elect in demeaning terms that imply he does the bidding of whites.

The message appeared chiefly aimed at persuading Muslims and Arabs that Obama does not represent a change in U.S. policies.

Ayman al-Zawahri said in the message, which appeared on militant Web sites, that Obama is "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X, the 1960s African-American leader.

In al-Qaida's first response to Obama's victory, al-Zawahri also called the president-elect — along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — "house negroes."

The message also includes old footage of speeches by Malcolm X in which he explains the term, saying black slaves who worked in their white masters' house were more servile than those who worked in the fields.