There was an excellent article in the Washington Post this week in regards to status of the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba that shows what a complex issue trying to close the prison actually is:
Efforts to explore ways of closing the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay have reached a standstill due to legal and practical problems, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday.
“The brutally frank answer is that we’re stuck and we’re stuck in several ways,” Gates told a U.S. Senate hearing when asked about his desire to shut down the detention site for terrorism suspects at a U.S. naval base in Cuba.
Human rights groups and many governments, including allies of the United States, have called on the Bush administration to close the prison, saying it violates international legal standards and harms America’s standing in the world.
Gates has said he wants to close the site, where inmates have been held for years without trial, after he took over from Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in late 2006 and assigned officials to look into the issue.
But the former CIA chief said the effort had run up against several major problems. The first was that the United States had identified about 70 prisoners who could be returned home in theory but not in practice.
“The problem is that either their home government won’t accept them or we’re concerned that the home government will let them loose once we return them home,” he said. [Washington Post]
Gitmo is still holding 270 prisoners that are either awaiting military court martials or are in legal limbo for the reasons Secretary Gates spoke of. Over the years 500 prisoners have been released from the prison back to their home countries with 36 of them confirmed to have returned to terrorism to include one suicide bomber last month in Mosul that took part in attacks that killed seven civilians there. Plus Secretary Gates confirmed that not one US state has volunteered to house the prisoners back in America which has caused the current gridlock.
Since this issue will probably come up during the election I think it will be interesting to see how each candidate will approach this issue because closing Gitmo is not as easy as critics make it out to be.
Complete article is below the fold:
Washingtonpost.com
May 20, 2008
Efforts To Close Guantanamo At Standstill: Gates
By Andrew Gray, Reuters
WASHINGTON - Efforts to explore ways of closing the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay have reached a standstill due to legal and practical problems, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday.
“The brutally frank answer is that we’re stuck and we’re stuck in several ways,” Gates told a U.S. Senate hearing when asked about his desire to shut down the detention site for terrorism suspects at a U.S. naval base in Cuba.
Human rights groups and many governments, including allies of the United States, have called on the Bush administration to close the prison, saying it violates international legal standards and harms America’s standing in the world.
Gates has said he wants to close the site, where inmates have been held for years without trial, after he took over from Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in late 2006 and assigned officials to look into the issue.
But the former CIA chief said the effort had run up against several major problems. The first was that the United States had identified about 70 prisoners who could be returned home in theory but not in practice.
“The problem is that either their home government won’t accept them or we’re concerned that the home government will let them loose once we return them home,” he said.
Some 270 detainees remain in Guantanamo Bay and more than 500 have left since the site opened in January 2002, according to the U.S. military.
The Pentagon says some 36 former Guantanamo inmates are “confirmed or suspected of having returned to terrorism.”
Gates cited a Kuwaiti former inmate who carried out a suicide bombing in Mosul in northern Iraq last month. Both the bomber’s family and the U.S. military have said he carried out the attack.
The United States has also failed to come up with a solution for inmates who cannot be freed for security reasons but will not be charged under the military commissions system for trying war crimes suspects, Gates said.
“We just have a hard time figuring out … what do you do with that irreducible 70 or 80 or whatever the number is,” he told the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
There was also a widely held reluctance to house any of the prisoners in the United States, Gates said.
“We have a serious ‘not in my backyard’ problem. I haven’t found anybody who wants these terrorists to be placed in a prison in their home state,” Gates said.
“Those three problems really have brought us to a standstill,” he added.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California who questioned Gates at the hearing, said the prison was responsible for an “enormous loss of (U.S.) credibility … in the eyes of the world.”
When Feinstein said she knew Gates felt the same way as she did about Guantanamo, the defense secretary interjected “I still do,” but he offered no further comments on the issue.
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3:39 pm on May 24th, 2008 1
This is why I was against Gitmo as they set it up. I couldn’t see an end result once you set it up. In a US mainland prison, maybe they could have held them there forever or in a prison in Iraq or Afghanistan or the likes, but not in US-held territory in Cuba.
I also felt from the start that the US and world community would fail to move forward as a result of 9/11 and the Afghan War. We had a chance to move forward on international law related to terrorism and 21st century warfare. The Geneva Conventions, as the Gitmo Situation has proven, were written for a different era.
They were not designed to deal with contemporary transnational terrorism — well — I think you could argue they were - but the world-leading nations have shown they are unwilling to apply them to today’s reality.
That is what has bothered me more about the Gitmo case.
The critics have kept bringing up the Geneva Conventions, but from my limited reading of them, it seems they are actually arguing that the Conventions should NOT be applied — that they should be twisted to be applied as how they want to interpret them - with their interpretation being against the very letter of the Conventions.
From what little I’ve read, the type of fighters taken to Gitmo were specifically defined as not being covered by the GC which spell out how official POWs are handled.
It seemed to me the critics wanted to actually counter provisions of the Conventions by redefining what a lawful combatant is.
If the nations wanted to move the Conventions forward by rewriting the rules to include irregular fighters to be covered by the same rules as real soldiers (per GC definitions), then they could have proposed to do that.
Instead, they have relied on a public relations campaign that mangled the GC as written.
They could have also changed the Conventions by putting in clauses that say that irregular fighters will not be given POW status but must be treated as domestic criminals of the capturing state - in this case to be tried in American criminal courts - or - they could have said they must be considered “war criminals” and tried by the International Criminal Court - or some such other rules. —– instead of - again - refusing to do the tough job of revising the GC in favor of public relations campaigns.
6:27 am on May 25th, 2008 2
In hindsight I think as well they should have just kept these people in Afghanistan to avoid the legal trouble bringing them to Gitmo brought.
Another big problem with Gitmo is that people want to give these guys civilian trials when in many cases when they were picked up it wasn’t like a CSI crime scene was established to gather evidence because many were picked up in the midst of combat operations. Not to mention what a propaganda coup it would be for these people like we saw with the Moussaoui trial.
However it Gitmo ends it will be ugly with probably more of these thugs being let go to go kill more people like in Mosul last month.
2:54 pm on May 26th, 2008 3
Who needs Gitmo?
We can just start indefinitely confining people on American soil.
wiredispatch.com/news/?id=183191
That’ll teach those pesky thought criminals!
4:30 am on May 28th, 2008 4