President Barack Obama says it's time to rethink the prison camp at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba, because its operation is a stain on the national psyche and
diminishes that for which the United States stands.
Since it opened in 2002, the prison camp has handled 779 prisoners, most of whom
were captured in fighting in Afghanistan -- not by U.S. troops but by Pakistani
and Afghan troops, often in exchange for bounties of $5,000.
Eleven years later, 166 prisoners remain. A federal task force determined 46 of
them needed to be held indefinitely but the rest could be released -- or
released with conditions.
"When I was campaigning in 2007 and 2008, and when I was elected in 2008, I said
we need to close Guantanamo. I continue to believe that we've got to close
Guantanamo," Obama told a news conference last week to mark the first 100 days
of his second term.
"I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to
keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of
our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on
counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to
be closed."
Many members of Congress are opposed to closing Guantanamo and nixed a plan for
the federal government to buy an unused Illinois prison to house the detainees
-- this despite the continuing federal prison incarceration of a number of
terrorism figures, including Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the blind sheik,
who is a serving life term at the Butner (N.C.) Federal Correctional Institution
for plotting the deadly 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and shoe bomber Richard
Colvin Reid, who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight and is being held
at the supermax prison in Florence, Colo.
"The notion that we're going to continue to keep over 100 individuals in a
no-man's land in perpetuity, even at a time when we've wound down the war in
Iraq, we're winding down the war in Afghanistan, we're having success defeating
al-Qaida['s] core, we've kept the pressure up on all these transnational
terrorist networks, when we've transferred detention authority in Afghanistan --
the idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have
not been tried, that is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests,
and it needs to stop," Obama argued.
Maybe, Obama allowed, creating Guantanamo was the right thing to do in the
immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and
Washington, but more than a decade later, the issue needs to be revisited and
the problems at the prison are only going to "fester" and "get worse" if the
status quo remains.
At a subsequent news briefing, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters
Obama can take a number of administrative actions to deal with the situation,
among them appointing someone at the State Department to work on repatriating
detainees to their home countries or sending them to third countries -- a
position that has been open for several years.
"We have obstacles that were thrown up by Congress that prevent us from -- well,
they refuse to provide the funding that would allow us to transfer detainees to
incarceration facilities here in the United States," Carney said. "And they have
circumscribed our ability to take action on this front in other ways. So we have
to work with Congress and try to convince members of Congress that the
overriding interest here in terms of our national security as well as our budget
is to close Guantanamo Bay."
Carlos Warner, who represents 11 of the prisoners at Guantanamo, praised Obama's
position and said the president doesn't need congressional approval to transfer
prisoners if it's a national security issue.
"The president's statement made clear that Guantanamo negatively impacts our
national security. The question is not whether the administration has the
authority to transfer innocent men, but whether it has the political courage to
do so," Warner said in a statement.
One-hundred of the Guantanamo prisoners are conducting a hunger strike, with 23
of them being force-fed. The Miami Herald reported four of those being force-fed
had been cleared for release years ago.
Last week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a U.N. agency,
condemned the forced feedings as inhumane. The American Medical Association also
issued a statement condemning the practice.
Jeremy Varon of Witness Against Torture said keeping Guantanamo open is "morally
unacceptable and politically unsustainable."
"We first heard of the hunger strike about six weeks ago when the U.S. military
was denying it was even taking place. ... The Guantanamo nightmare must end
now," he said.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., has been among the most vocal in Congress arguing
against closure.
"The prisoners are being treated better than American citizens in any prison
I've been to in the United States," said King, the ranking Republican on the
Homeland Security Committee. "They're allowed out of their cells for hours at a
time -- even the worst of the worst."
He likened the prison to a Club Med for terrorists and. following a 2009 visit,
called efforts to close it "misguided."
