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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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November 11th,
2009 - White House Allies Say Obama Bungled Guantanamo Closing |
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White House Allies Say Obama
Bungled Guantanamo Closing By Steven Thomma McClatchy Newspapers November 11, 2009 Washington - President
Barack Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison by
Jan. 22 was followed by a series of mistakes and missteps by his
administration that will delay the prison's closure for months, according to
a report from a policy organization with close ties to the White House. Those mistakes - which
ranged from initially having too few people on board to handle the workload
to misreading Congress - have put the timetable months behind schedule and
will push the prison's closure well beyond the January deadline, which Obama
announced with great fanfare two days after he took office. The White House declined to
comment on the report. The administration is
expected to announce within days the results of its review of legal cases
against the remaining detainees at Guantanamo, a review that originally was
scheduled to be finished in July. Among its conclusions, the administration
is expected to say whether it will prosecute the accused mastermind of the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and four alleged co-conspirators in a
federal civilian court. "We hope we'll see the
announcement very soon on the 9/11 case, that they're going to prosecute
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other conspirators in federal court,"
said Ken Gude, a scholar at the Center for American Progress and the author
of its new report on Guantanamo. The liberal policy organization enjoys close
relations with the Obama administration, which has hired several of its
scholars for senior positions. In his study, Gude said the
White House made mistakes in implementing the high-profile Guantanamo policy
from the very beginning. "It was always going to
be difficult, but some unforeseen obstacles were thrown in its path, and the
new administration made some mistakes that have cost time and sucked energy
away from the core mission of closing the prison," he said in the
report. Two task forces - one set up
to study the case files of the more than 200 detainees still held at the
prison and the other charged with examining the overall detention policy -
fell behind almost from the start. A key problem was that the
Obama administration was hours old and didn't have enough people to follow
through quickly after Obama announced the closing plan. Those who were there
couldn't find needed files quickly. "The task forces
struggled right out of the gate," Gude said in the report. Then, he said, they made a
critical mistake by not moving quickly to move some detainees out of
Guantanamo. For example, he said, the administration should've worked with
the Virginia congressional delegation to smooth the way politically to
release a group of Uighurs to Northern Virginia, where there's a community of
the Chinese Muslims. "They could have put
that together in six to eight weeks," Gude said in an interview.
"It would have taken some of the sting out of the criticism of bringing
them into the United States." With little groundwork done
to move some Guantanamo detainees to the U.S. or elsewhere, the Obama
administration made what Gude called its "biggest mistake" in April
by asking Congress for $80 million to finance the prison closing. "Asking Congress for
money for Guantanamo opened the door for conservatives on Capitol Hill, and
the Obama administration was caught completely off guard when they began
aggressively pushing back against the funding," Gude said in his report. Gude called the backlash
"ridiculous" because it was based on the implied argument that the
country's maximum security prisons couldn't hold terrorists transferred from
Guantanamo and that the closing of Guantanamo thus would endanger Americans. Nonetheless, Gude said,
"The White House failed to support its allies in Congress that were
willing to push back against the fear mongering. The lack of early backing
from the administration sealed the defeat. The result was a blowout, with
Congress overwhelmingly voting to bar the release of any Guantanamo detainees
into the United States and placing severe restrictions on any other kinds of
transfers." That also made it harder for
the U.S. to convince other countries to take some of the detainees, either
for release or detention. "Many American allies
are willing to help the United States and accept detainees, but quite
reasonably expected the United States to share in the responsibility,"
Gude wrote. "It is a hard sell for America's allies to tell their
citizens that they are accepting Guantanamo detainees even though the U.S.
Congress feels that they are too dangerous for release in America." Gude thinks the prison will
be closed, and noted that 16 countries now have accepted or pledged to accept
some of the detainees there. However, he and the Center
for American Progress, which is headed by former Obama transition chief John
Podesta, urged several steps to get the closing on track. They include: - Setting a new deadline of
July, rather than simply letting the January deadline slip. - Prosecuting the alleged
Sept. 11 conspirators in federal court and limiting military commissions to
what they called battlefield crimes. - Limiting military
detention to those captured in combat zones and using criminal law to try
those captured "far away" from any battlefield. - Sending those convicted in
federal courts to maximum security prisons in the U.S., and sending those
remaining in military custody to the prison at Bagram air base in
Afghanistan. External link: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/AP/story/1328375.html |