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  1. #1
    Senior Member European Knight's Avatar
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    Post Obama administration scrambling to release as many as possible from Guantanamo Bay

    Obama administration scrambling to release as many as possible from Guantanamo Bay

    Published on Sunday, 5 June 2016 08:40 - Written by KATHLEEN HENNESSEY and BEN FOX, Associated Press


    WASHINGTON (AP) - The Obama administration is running out of time and options to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, so officials are scrambling to release as many prisoners as possible and considering novel legal strategies that include allowing some men to strike plea deals by video-teleconference and sending others to foreign countries to be prosecuted.

    But it looks to be little, too late to close the prison before President Barack Obama leaves office in January, denying him the chance to fulfill a campaign pledge.


    There's the difficulty in transferring prisoners from the U.S. base in Cuba, questions about the legality of plea deals and solid opposition in Congress to anything that might help Obama achieve that promise.

    "The clock has struck midnight and the American people have won," said Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., who has said he would oppose any effort to move detainees to prison facilities in his state. "The president needs to admit that."

    Later this month, lawmakers are on track to extend a ban on moving detainees to U.S. soil. That would leave the president with no way to make the January 2017 deadline, barring an unexpected reversal in Congress or a politically explosive executive order.

    The White House increasingly is pointed to a parallel strategy: trying to shrink the number of detainees in hopes of persuading lawmakers that Guantanamo is too expensive to sustain as a prison.

    Of the 80 remaining detainees, 30 have been cleared for an overseas transfer. Most will leave starting in late June and continuing into July, according to a U.S. official. Those prisoners will go to a number of countries, including at least one in

    Europe, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the administration had not authorized public release of the information.

    Seven additional detainees are facing trial by military commission, including five charged with planning and supporting the Sept. 11 attacks. Three others have been convicted. But commission proceedings have gone on at a glacial pace. In

    April, the Pentagon put forward fresh proposals for Guantanamo, but none has been incorporated into defense legislation moving through Congress.

    The remaining 40 were either at one time considered for prosecution or held as indefinite "law of war detainees" until the end of hostilities in the fight against terrorism that began after the 2001 attacks. The United States started using

    Guantanamo for suspects in January 2002; at its peak, the facility held about 680 prisoners.

    U.S. officials have chipped away at those numbers through the Periodic Review Board, a multiagency task force that conducts parole-style hearings for men once deemed too dangerous to release.

    The board did not hold a hearing until November 2013, but recently it has picked up its pace, holding more than 20 so far this year. Outcomes are leaning heavily in prisoners' favor. If the government keeps up its current pace of about two per week, it wouldn't complete hearings, much less arrange for transfers, until December.

    The U.S. also is working with other governments to prosecute some detainees overseas, the official said. These could be prisoners accused of conduct outside the U.S. involving offenses against citizens of other countries. It would otherwise be difficult or impossible to prosecute these men in an American court.

    One possible example would be Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, a 42-year-old Kenyan accused of involvement in plots in Mombasa in November 2002: an attack on an Israeli-owned hotel, in which 13 people died, and an unsuccessful attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner.

    The official declined to identify any specific cases but said there could be five to 10 in all.

    The defense bill up for debate in the Senate soon includes a provision that would allow detainees to enter guilty pleas - via video teleconference - in federal civilian courts. If a judge accepts the plea, the detainee would be sentenced and transferred to serve that sentence in a foreign prison.

    In conversations with advocates, White House officials have said the Justice Department has reservations about such guilty plea proposals. Chief among the concerns is whether the judge could accept the guilty pleas as entered by the defendant knowingly and voluntarily - a bedrock principle of the American criminal justice system - while there is no mechanism in place to stand trial. The prisoner's only other choice is continued, indefinite detention.

    The White House has not taken a position, but suggested it is receptive to the idea. The president believes it is "important that we have available to us a variety of tools at our disposal," National Security Council spokesman Myles Caggins said in a statement, which also noted that federal courts have "outstanding record" of handling terrorism cases.

    Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer who has represented many Guantanamo prisoners over the years, including three still held, said the ability to strike a plea deal in federal court would benefit relatively few detainees. He said the renewed administration interest in closing the prison is hard to take seriously now.

    "Those efforts and that kind of resolve should have been shown over the course of the eight years of the Obama administration and not in its final moments," said Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York.

    Obama administration scrambling to release as many as possible from Guantanamo Bay

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    Senior Member European Knight's Avatar
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    Cotton: Terrorists Remaining at Gitmo Are ‘Hardest of the Hardcore’

    Americans would be ‘hesitant’ to see prisoners released if they knew reasons for detention



    Tom Cotton / A

    BY: Morgan Chalfont June 9, 2016 4:59 am

    Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) said Wednesday that the American people and U.S. allies would be “hesitant” to see prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay if they knew all the facts regarding their detention.

    Cotton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters that the Obama administration is preparing to release the “most dangerous” prisoners from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, despite intelligence showing that a large number of ex-detainees have either returned to terrorist activities or are suspected of doing so.


    “They’re releasing some pretty bad guys, and I suspect … the American people and frankly a lot of our allies would be a little bit hesitant to see them released and see them walking into their country if they knew all the facts supporting the detention of the people at Guantanamo right now,” Cotton told journalists Wednesday morning during an event at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.


    President Obama has accelerated efforts to close the detention facility before the end of his administration, whittling the prison population down to 80 after transferring a slew of detainees to foreign countries. Cotton described the remaining prisoners as the “most dangers ones.” Some have been cleared for release and Obama has proposed moving others to stateside prisons.


    “The people left at Guantanamo are the hardest of the hardcore, and they’re getting down to five or six dozen who I don’t think even the administration would ever see released to any country,” Cotton said.


    Republicans have taken steps to thwart Obama’s rush to close Guantanamo using annual defense legislation. Cotton along with Sen. David Perdue (R., Ga.) introduced an amendment to the fiscal year 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) last week that would require the Director of National Intelligence to complete a declassification review of intelligence reports related to past terrorist activities of former Guantanamo detainees and publicly release any information on behavior of ex-detainees related to terrorism.

    “I think it’s important that the American people and our allies recognize the histories of some of these detainees, not just the ones we have now but the ones we’ve released in the past,” Cotton said.

    The amendment is one of several Guantanamo-related provisions offered to the NDAA, which is on the Senate floor for debate this week. Cotton said he hopes to have a vote on the amendment or include it in the legislation as part of a package.

    Others have likewise sought to boost transparency of Guantanamo prisoner transfers. On Tuesday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) introduced an amendment to the NDAA that would mandate that the defense secretary give Congress unclassified notice of plans to transfer detainees 30 days before the transfers occur. The notice would make public specific information about detainees designated for transfer, including their countries of origin and destination.

    The administration currently must inform Congress of imminent transfers, but the notices are classified.


    Republicans critical of Obama’s efforts to close Guantanamo have pointed to a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence indicating that about 18 percent of former detainees are confirmed to have resumed terrorist activities and 13 percent are suspected of returning to terrorism. Many have warned of the national security implications of releasing prisoners to foreign countries that may not be able to control them.


    “Releasing these terrorists overseas poses a real risk,” Cotton said Wednesday. He also emphasized the danger of bringing prisoners not cleared for release to stateside prisons.


    “The people we are releasing now are the most dangerous ones, the most immediate threat,” Cotton expanded. “Bringing any number of them to the United States, I think, would pose serious problems, not just the immediate threats they pose to the facilities and the areas around the facilities but also the long-term ability to detain them, given what I suspect some judges will do in applying the full scope of constitutional rights to people who don’t have those rights.”


    Current law bars the military from using federal funds to move Guantanamo prisoners to the United States, a ban that would be extended by the fiscal year NDAA currently under consideration by the Senate. The White House threatened to veto the legislation in its current form on Tuesday, specifically criticizing the provisions related to Guantanamo.


    “The bill continues unwarranted restrictions regarding detainees at Guantanamo Bay and adds new provisions, attempting to dictate how the Executive Branch conducts foreign policy and requiring the disclosure of sensitive national security information,” the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.


    Cotton said on Wednesday that none of the prisoners remaining at Guantanamo should be released.

    “They are prisoners of war in an ongoing war and it is in our national security interests to keep them right where they are at Guantanamo Bay. It’s a modern, humane, and effective facility,” Cotton said.

    Cotton: Terrorists Remaining at Gitmo Are ‘Hardest of the Hardcore’

  3. #3
    Senior Member European Knight's Avatar
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    June 13, 2016
    Reuters: Obama gives up on using executive power to close Gitmo
    By Rick Moran
    Reuters is reporting that the Obama administration is reluctantly giving up the idea that they can close the prison at Guantanamo by issuing an executive order under his authority as commander in chief.

    The White House has said repeatedly that Obama has not ruled out any options on the Guantanamo center, which has been used to house terrorism suspects since it was set up in 2001 following the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

    Obama is eager to fulfill his 2008 campaign pledge to close the prison and could still choose to use his commander-in-chief powers, but the option is not being actively pursued, the sources said.

    Without executive action, the chances of closing the prison would hinge on convincing a resistant Congress to overturn a long-standing ban on bringing possibly dozens of remaining prisoners to maximum-security prisons in the United States.

    White House lawyers and other officials studied the option of overriding the ban but did not develop a strong legal position or an effective political sales pitch in an election year, a source familiar with the discussions said.

    "It was just deemed too difficult to get through all of the hurdles that they would need to get through, and the level of support they were likely to receive on it was thought to be too low to generate such controversy, particularly at a sensitive (time) in an election cycle," the source said.

    Republicans in Congress are opposed to bringing Guantanamo detainees to U.S. prisons and have expressed opposition to transfers to other countries over concern that released prisoners will return to militant activities. They have vowed to challenge any potential Obama executive action in court.

    At its peak, the prison at the U.S. naval base in Cuba housed nearly 800 prisoners, becoming a symbol of the excesses of the "war on terror” and synonymous with criticism of detention without trial and accusations of torture. Obama has called it a recruitment tool for terrorists.

    The King is in check.

    The president knows the bi-partisan firestorm that will erupt if he brings any of those terrorists housed at Gitmo to American soil. Even many Democrats aren't that stupid. It's not that supermax prisons couldn't handle the terrorists, but giving them the opportunity to radicalize others, as well as adding a dangerous, unstable element to prisons where the worst of the worst are kept just doesn't make any sense.

    We are likely to, at some point, send thousands of more troops to Iraq to battle Islamic State. That means more terrorist prisoners. What do we do with these high value fighters who may have advance knowledge of attacks on the west? I don't think we can trust the Iraqis to keep them prisoner. And the chances of the Iraqi government allowing us to open our own prison on Iraqi soil are slim.

    Guantanamo may yet prove useful in the near future.

    Reuters: Obama gives up on using executive power to close Gitmo

  4. #4
    Moderator Beezer's Avatar
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    Obama needs to just "give up" on everything and walk himself out of our White House. Hop on a plane and go back to Kenya where YOU belong.

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