Sunday, January 23, 2011

Never Going To Happen

A McClatchy analysis of WikiLeaks' State Department cables makes it clear that there was no way Congress was ever going to allow a single Gitmo detainee into a prison on US soil despite what President Obama had to say about keeping his first major promise as a new President.


In cable after cable sent to the State Department in Washington, American diplomats make it clear that the unwillingness of the United States to resettle a single detainee in this country — even from among 17 ethnic Muslim Uighurs considered enemies of China's communist government — made other countries reluctant to take in detainees.

Europe balked and said the United States should go first. Yemen at one point proposed the United States move the detainees from Cuba to America's SuperMax prison in the Colorado Rockies. Saudi Arabia's king suggested the military plant micro-chips in Guantanamo captives before setting them free.

A January 2009 cable from Paris is a case in point: France's chief diplomat on security matters insisted, the cable said, that, as a precondition of France's resettling Guantanamo captives the United States wants to let go, "the U.S. must agree to resettle some of these same LOW-RISK DETAINEES in the U.S.'' In the end, France took two.

In the end we sent a couple dozen detainees to other countries in an effort to try to clear Gitmo, but Congress eventually forced Obama's hand.

Under the Defense Department appropriations bill that Obama signed into law two weeks ago, the administration not only can't use Pentagon funds to bring detainees to the United States for trial, but must certify that countries meet a set of security conditions before the U.S. can send detainees to them.

In a signing statement, Obama objected to those restrictions, but he did not say he'd ignore them.

So the bottom line is that since Congress is petrified that trying any of the detainees left in Gitmo...even under military tribunals...may lead to one of them not being found guilty and released, they will never be tried, and kept forever there.

Gitmo will be open for at least my lifetime, and probably your children and your grandchildren too.
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