Andy Worthington: Obama’s Failure to Close Guantánamo by January Deadline Is Disastrous
[Andy Worthington is a journalist and the author of "The Guantanamo Files" (Pluto Press), the first book to tell the stories of all the prisoners in Guantanamo. He maintains a blog here.]
President Obama’s admission in China that he will miss his self-imposed deadline for the closure of Guantánamo is disastrous for the majority of the 215 men still held in the detention facility, and for those who hoped, ten months ago, that the president would move swiftly to close this bitter icon of the Bush administration’s lawless detention and interrogation policies in the "war on terror."
Despite announcing the closure of Guantánamo on his second day in office as part of a number of executive orders rolling back the Bush administration’s executive overreach, Obama then failed to follow up with a detailed plan. He missed the opportunity to bring a number of wrongly imprisoned men to the US mainland (the Uighurs, Muslims from China whose release into the US had been ordered by a district court judge), and allowing Republican fearmongers to seize the initiative, mobilizing lawmakers (including some in Obama’s own party) to pass legislation preventing any cleared prisoner from being released into the United States.
Recently, lawmakers were even prepared to go so far as to prevent the administration from bringing prisoners to the US mainland for any reason, even to face trials. Senior officials successfully fought back against this proposal, and announced last week that ten prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, were to be brought to the US mainland to face trials, either in federal courts or in a revamped version of the much-criticized military commissions, introduced in November 2001, and revived by Congress in 2006 after the Supreme Court ruled that they were illegal.
However, administration officials have also explained, as The Washington Post described it, that the government does not intend to put more than 40 prisoners in total on trial, leaving 175 men in Guantánamo in a predicament that has been troubling since Congress rose up in revolt against Obama’s intentions, and that has suddenly become even more alarming...
... The other group - numbering around 75, according to administration officials - are those whom the government does not wish to either charge or release. It either claims that they are too dangerous to be released but that not enough evidence exists to put them on trial, or that the evidence is tainted through the use of torture (or, as the Washington Post put it, "because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material"). This is deeply disturbing, as there is simply no excuse for holding people in what is essentially an identical form of "preventive detention" to that practiced by the Bush administration.
For a small number of these men - eight, to date - the administration can justify its actions because they lost their habeas corpus petitions before district court judges, who ruled that the government had established, by a preponderance of the evidence, that they were associated with al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. As a result, the government can continue to hold them under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the founding document of the Bush administration’s "war on terror." Through this authorization, Congress permitted the president "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons."...
Read entire article at Truthout
President Obama’s admission in China that he will miss his self-imposed deadline for the closure of Guantánamo is disastrous for the majority of the 215 men still held in the detention facility, and for those who hoped, ten months ago, that the president would move swiftly to close this bitter icon of the Bush administration’s lawless detention and interrogation policies in the "war on terror."
Despite announcing the closure of Guantánamo on his second day in office as part of a number of executive orders rolling back the Bush administration’s executive overreach, Obama then failed to follow up with a detailed plan. He missed the opportunity to bring a number of wrongly imprisoned men to the US mainland (the Uighurs, Muslims from China whose release into the US had been ordered by a district court judge), and allowing Republican fearmongers to seize the initiative, mobilizing lawmakers (including some in Obama’s own party) to pass legislation preventing any cleared prisoner from being released into the United States.
Recently, lawmakers were even prepared to go so far as to prevent the administration from bringing prisoners to the US mainland for any reason, even to face trials. Senior officials successfully fought back against this proposal, and announced last week that ten prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, were to be brought to the US mainland to face trials, either in federal courts or in a revamped version of the much-criticized military commissions, introduced in November 2001, and revived by Congress in 2006 after the Supreme Court ruled that they were illegal.
However, administration officials have also explained, as The Washington Post described it, that the government does not intend to put more than 40 prisoners in total on trial, leaving 175 men in Guantánamo in a predicament that has been troubling since Congress rose up in revolt against Obama’s intentions, and that has suddenly become even more alarming...
... The other group - numbering around 75, according to administration officials - are those whom the government does not wish to either charge or release. It either claims that they are too dangerous to be released but that not enough evidence exists to put them on trial, or that the evidence is tainted through the use of torture (or, as the Washington Post put it, "because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material"). This is deeply disturbing, as there is simply no excuse for holding people in what is essentially an identical form of "preventive detention" to that practiced by the Bush administration.
For a small number of these men - eight, to date - the administration can justify its actions because they lost their habeas corpus petitions before district court judges, who ruled that the government had established, by a preponderance of the evidence, that they were associated with al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. As a result, the government can continue to hold them under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the founding document of the Bush administration’s "war on terror." Through this authorization, Congress permitted the president "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons."...