Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority

[darrels joy]

Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.

When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois.

But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them.

“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and supports the Illinois plan. He added that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration.

And Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who also supports shutting it, said the effort is “on life support and it’s unlikely to close any time soon.” He attributed the collapse to some fellow Republicans’ “demagoguery” and the administration’s poor planning and decision-making “paralysis.”

The White House insists it is still determined to shutter the prison. The administration argues that Guantánamo is a symbol in the Muslim world of past detainee abuses, citing military views that its continued operation helps terrorists.

“Our commanders have made clear that closing the detention facility at Guantánamo is a national security imperative, and the president remains committed to achieving that goal,” said a White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt.

Still, some senior officials say privately that the administration has done its part, including identifying the Illinois prison — an empty maximum-security center in Thomson, 150 miles west of Chicago — where the detainees could be held. They blame Congress for failing to execute that endgame.

“The president can’t just wave a magic wand to say that Gitmo will be closed,” said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking on a sensitive issue.

The politics of closing the prison have clearly soured following the attempted bombings on a plane on Dec. 25 and in Times Square in May, as well as Republican criticism that imprisoning detainees in the United States would endanger Americans. When Mr. Obama took office a slight majority supported closing it. By a March 2010 poll, 60 percent wanted it to stay open.

One administration official argued that the White House was still trying. On May 26, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, sent a letter to the House Appropriations Committee reiterating the case.
But Mr. Levin portrayed the administration as unwilling to make a serious effort to exert its influence, contrasting its muted response to legislative hurdles to closing Guantánamo with “very vocal” threats to veto financing for a fighter jet engine it opposes.

Last year, for example, the administration stood aside as lawmakers restricted the transfer of detainees into the United States except for prosecution. And its response was silence several weeks ago, Mr. Levin said, as the House and Senate Armed Services Committees voted to block money for renovating the Illinois prison to accommodate detainees, and to restrict transfers from Guantánamo to other countries — including, in the Senate version, a bar on Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. About 130 of the 181 detainees are from those countries.

“They are not really putting their shoulder to the wheel on this issue,” Mr. Levin said of White House officials. “It’s pretty dormant in terms of their public positions.”

Several administration officials expressed hope that political winds might shift if, for example, high-level Qaeda leaders are killed, or if lawmakers focus on how expensive it is to operate a prison at the isolated base.
A recent Pentagon study, obtained by The New York Times, shows taxpayers spent more than $2 billion between 2002 and 2009 on the prison. Administration officials believe taxpayers would save about $180 million a year in operating costs if Guantánamo detainees were held at Thomson, which they hope Congress will allow the Justice Department to buy from the State of Illinois at least for federal inmates.

But in a sign that some may be making peace with keeping Guantánamo open, officials also praise improvements at the prison. An interagency review team brought order to scattered files. Mr. Obama banned brutal interrogations. Congress overhauled military commissions to give defendants more safeguards.

One category — detainees cleared for release who cannot be repatriated for their own safety — is on a path to extinction: allies have accepted 33, and just 22 await resettlement. Another — those who will be held without trials — has been narrowed to 48.

Still, the administration has faced a worsening problem in dealing with the prison’s large Yemeni population, including 58 low-level detainees who would already have been repatriated had they been from a more stable country, officials say.

The administration asked Saudi Arabia to put some Yemenis through a program aimed at rehabilitating jihadists but was rebuffed, officials said. And Mr. Obama imposed a moratorium on Yemen transfers after the failed Dec. 25 attack, planned by a Yemen-based branch of Al Qaeda whose members include two former Guantánamo detainees from Saudi Arabia.

As a result, the Obama administration has been further entangled in practices many of its officials lamented during the Bush administration. A judge this month ordered the government to release a 26-year-old Yemeni imprisoned since 2002, citing overwhelming evidence of his innocence. The Obama team decided last year to release the man, but shifted course after the moratorium. This week, the National Security Council decided to send the man to Yemen in a one-time exception, an official said on Friday.

Meanwhile, discussions have faltered between Mr. Graham and the White House aimed at crafting a bipartisan legislative package that would close Guantánamo while bolstering legal authorities for detaining terrorism suspects without trial.

Mr. Graham said such legislation would build confidence about holding detainees, including future captures, in an untainted prison inside the United States. But the talks lapsed.

“We can’t get anyone to give us a final answer,” he said. “It just goes into a black hole. I don’t know what happens.”

In any case, one senior official said, even if the administration concludes that it will never close the prison, it cannot acknowledge that because it would revive Guantánamo as America’s image in the Muslim world.

“Guantánamo is a negative symbol, but it is much diminished because we are seen as trying to close it,” the official said. “Closing Guantánamo is good, but fighting to close Guantánamo is O.K. Admitting you failed would be the worst.”


Thom Shanker contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us...s/26gitmo.html

[darrels joy]

Opinion: What Happens to Guantanamo and KSM Now?

18-05:00>Updated: 4 hours 17 minutes ago




J.D. Gordon
Special to AOL News

(Nov. 9) -- If President Barack Obama thought emptying Guantanamo and trying terrorists in civilian courts was tough before, he hasn't seen anything yet.

In one of the first acts of his new administration, President Barack Obama signed an executive order calling for closing the much ballyhooed detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year.

Guantanamo Timeline

Jan. 22, 2009: President Obama signs executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center within a year.

July 21, 2009: White House closure extends key closure deadline by six months.

May 19, 2010: House Armed Services Committee votes unanimously to prohibit creating a detention center in the U.S. for Guantanamo detainees.

June 25, 2010: Administration admits it has sidelined efforts to close Guantanamo, according to the New York Times.

KSM Trial Timeline

Nov. 13, 2009: Attorney General Eric Holder announces plans to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Guantanamo detainees in a Manhattan civilian court.

Jan. 28, 2010: The White House, under pressure from Republicans and Democrats, asks Justice to look for other locations for the KSM trial.

Mar. 5, 2010: Administration advisers reportedly near recommending that KSM be tried in a military tribunal.

July 10, 2010: Holder blames politics for delaying KSM trial.
And in November 2009, the administration announced to great fanfare that it would try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a Manhattan Civilian Court.

In both cases, the administration tried to make the argument that the moves would enhance U.S. security by showing how we uphold our values as a country. But the reality of the situation made living up to this lofty-sounding rhetoric difficult.

As a result, even with super majorities in the House and Senate, the administration thankfully was unable to make progress on either front. Guantanamo is still open, and the KSM trial is in limbo.

Now, with the GOP in the driver's seat in the House, and with Democrats having just the slimmest majority in the Senate, Republicans have the opportunity to force the administration to change course.

Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., next in line to serve as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, sent a telling signal to the Obama administration on Nov. 1, after a Canadian-born Guantanamo detainee named Omar Khadr finally pleaded guilty to murder after stalling for time in his five years of military commission hearings.

"The president should correct his mistaken decision, made within days of being sworn into office, that terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay would be prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts," McKeon wrote. He added that Obama "should immediately direct his administration to focus their efforts on prosecuting Guantanamo detainees in military commissions."

Meanwhile, Rep. Peter King, R- N.Y. -- next in line to head the House Homeland Security Committee -- wrote in an op-ed on Sunday that as chairman, he will "work to stop the transfer of admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators from Guantanamo to lower Manhattan for trial."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also has been a powerful counterweight to the Obama administration on its plans to shutter Guantanamo and afford civilian trials to its detainees. In an interview on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace last year he said, "I agree with the family of Daniel Pearl. You know, KSM murdered their son. And they said, 'Why in the world would we want to give him the show trial that he desires'." Now just a few seats shy of a Senate majority, Sen. McConnell will be further empowered to insist that 9/11 pre-trial hearings be re-started at Guantanamo.

Given the fact that the country remains at war, while military commissions have historically been used for prosecuting war crimes, al-Qaida operatives captured overseas should logically face justice in this forum. Critics who claim that military commissions do not provide sufficient legal protections for detainees are simply misinformed, as evidenced by the fact that two of the five detainees convicted were handed relatively light sentences and are now free men in Yemen and Australia.

Using civilian trials in the mainland U.S. for al-Qaida leaders merely gives them a megaphone to broadcast anti-Western and anti-Semitic rhetoric, a dangerous recruiting tool for homegrown and international terrorists.

Now that the American public has sent a strong message to Obama on his presidency and policies, I predict we will see KSM, et al., back in Guantanamo's ultra-secure Courtroom II in 2011. And that's a good thing.

J.D. Gordon, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, is a retired Navy commander who served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2009 as the Pentagon spokesman for the Western Hemisphere.

http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/artic...trial/19703175