President Barack Obama made big promises during the 2008 presidential elections to close Guantanamo Bay. Now, eight years later, he’s running out of time and options to shutter the detention center in Cuba.
With little left on the clock, Obama has become so desperate to get the prison closed he’s releasing suspected terrorists to countries unknown — and may be helping others enter plea deals illegally.
Recent reports say that Obama administration officials are scrambling to release as many prisoners as possible from GITMO, and are considering possibly illegal strategies to do so.
One includes allowing some men to strike plea deals by video-teleconference. Another option the Obama administration is considering would be to release others to foreign countries to be prosecuted.
Despite all of this, it still looks to be too late to close the prison before Obama leaves office in January, denying him the chance to fulfill his 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.
According to a report by The Associated Press, the White House increasingly is pointing 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 an “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.
I think he should release them to him and when he leaves the White House they can move in with he and his family – they can share prayer rugs and break bread together all without a secret service detail – let him see the real world as he has created it, first hand.
Great idea. I’m with you. He’s such a jackass. It makes me sick he was ever elected POTUS.
Guantanamo must be left open for Killary and Bo Homo Soetoro!
Don’t you mean…blasphemy rugs?
Spoken like a True Soldier of ChrISIS,Denise A!!
Beautifully stated!
And they should all get a goat of their own,Except obummer he will get two because he is two faced and a traitor to America and the American people
I agree 100%. He better go down in history as the worst President we have ever had. In 7 years he has done so much damage it will take 30 years or more to overcome. I won’t be around to see it. What an Unamerican idiot he is. He should have been impeached after the 2nd year. I don’t think the world can take much more. The sad thing is he is so delusional he thinks he did a great job. If destroying Amerca was the plan, then he did a good job.
BULLSHIT!!!!!
President obama is a Marxist Muslim who has been beheading America on the world stage for almost eight years.
He is going too far. Enough is enough. He needs to get out of the Presidency which he will be ordered to do before long. Then he needs to face the things that he has done to this country in court and pay the price.
SERIOUSLY Doubt the President will be”ordered” to leave,popopatti,as his term is over in less than a year!
AMEN Pogopatti
T hey may chose to come to the US – they can then become “undocumented workers”, get covered by obamacare, get their welfare,food stamps, free housing, free phones and a debit card to cover all of those pesky expenses like buying guns and bomb materials.
YOU,Southern By Choice,live in a very Strange,NONEXISTENT Dystopian world(and,No,I DON’T Mean the South!)
“Strange and non-existent” (no need for caps). Just what part of what I said do you disagree with. Oh – you can’t because it is all true!
MUST DENY ALMOST ALL of it,Southern,By Choice,because with the exception of severely-Restricted Food Stamps program,NONE of t is TRUE(EXCEPT: In YOUR Strange,Paranoid Fantasy World,of course!)
Ridiculous claim Mr William, All these “undocumented workers” need to do is bear a child within their immediate family, (the actual childbirth taking place from an “emergency” therefore making the mother eligible for free “emergency treatment”), The Child is born an American citizen, that makes the parents and any other children automatically eligible for welfare, food stamps and medical insurance….at the expense of the American taxpayer. Please think things through before you speak of something that you know nothing about.
mr(???) william… ha!! thats a good one freedom is a great american priviledge. even to idiots like william.
read some of the email responses and i think you will get a true picture of what is goping on
do you like male or female goats with your prayer rug.
and feel free to take several gitmo detainees for your own personal use.
have a happy, free, and wonderful day
I am assuming you are being sarcastic. If you are then I agree. But only if you are being sarcastic.
I didn’t mean she was sarcastic. What she said could all be true with Southern saying it with sarcasm. I use sarcasm all the time but am not sarcastic. It is just a different way of speaking.
WE NEED YOUR FUTURE ADDRESS obama SO WE CAN SEND ALL THE TERRORIST TO YOUR HOUSE TO LIVE. WE DON’T HAVE SECRET SERVICE TO GUARD US, YOU DO, AND THAT’S THE ONLY REASON YOU CAN DO WHAT YOU’RE DOING TO THE AMERICANS THAT HAVE WORKED SO HARD FOR OUR COUNTRY!!!!!!!!! TRUMP, HELP US PLEASE!!! GOD HAVE MERCY ON OUR ONCE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY….AMEN
Amen!!!
Try Extra,EXTRA Strenghth Thorazine,Many Injections of it,PamEla_It MAY Control your Paranoid Schizophrenic Episodes.
Try Extra,EXTRA Strength Thorazine,Many Injections of it,”me says”:It MAY Control your Paranoid Schizophrenic Episodes.
It will be worse if Hillary gets elected. May God have mercy on our souls if that happens.
I agree. I shudder at the thought of her being in the WH. Our country needs lots of prayers.
Now,again, where’s our do nothing Republican {?} congress???
I have no doubt O will just send the remaining terrorists to other countries without approval from Congress or anyone else and then give Gitmo back to Cuba. I think that was the plan all along. By the time anyone finds out about the action, it will be too late to take steps to stop or correct. I doubt that even Donald would go to other terrorist countries to retrieve Gitmo terrorists.
Oh,if he thought the Gitmo terrorists could be potential supporters,I’m Sure Fuehrer Trump would retrieve them!
Youre just a typical liberal pos. Stop trolling and do something usefull. Youre not going to change anyo es mind so just give it a rest.
I’m in favor of letting Israel try as many of these prisoners as they want. Those who are being held for crimes committed against other countries, not the U.S., should be transferred to those countries for prosecution.
Prisoner of war camps are common. Once the hostilities end in Iraq and Afghanistan, those detainees can be released to their respective governments.
Great idea, John. It’ll never happen in this life, but perhaps in the life to come.
He is attempting to do as much damage as he possibly can before being forced out of the Whitehouse.
“forced out of the Whitehouse”???!?:Very Funny,El Tejas!
Better Still: Keep Guantanamo Open and send Trump,his deluded supporters,and the people responsible for the Horn News,Matt Barber,Breitbart,C.N.S,Peter LaBarbera, Joseph Farah,and the Many Other Purveyors of Hatred,Lies,American Fascism FALSELY-CALLED “Patriotism”,and Paranoid Propaganda there for Incessant Water-Boarding.
“An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
— Thomas Paine, Dissertations on First Principles of Government (July 7, 1795)
You sound like a sadist, Billy-boy.
How Obama managed to survive 8 years of presidency is beyond my comprehension. He is the worst joke ever to have that position. Beside making America weaker, he has managed to humiliate us, tried to take some of our rights away, and make decisions on his own terms. Good riddance to a poor example of commander in chief.
G. W. Bush got us all into this mess in the first place. Almost every one of the 911 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia. So what does Budh do? He attacks Iraq because his daddy told him too. Hence, ISIS is born.
He hasn’t only been releasing terrorist, but has also been paying for the damage and destruction they are about to cause….pretty obvious if you ask me…..and pretty pathetic!
He hasn’t only been releasing terrorist, he has been equipping, funding and preparing them….pathetic!
Mr. Noboma and his family along with the Clinton crime family, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and his present key administrators should all reserve their rooms at Gitmo. its where they belong.
The only place those damned animal prisoners belong is right there in hell, and they should all be put to death, and should have in the very
first place to begin with, not be kept at GITMO. If Israel had captured them, they would be immediately executed for their crimes, China would
do the same, not coddle them. Those animals committed cold blooded murder AGAINIST the free world, they deserve the death penalty and
eternity in HELL.
To William: I believe I would suggest you follow what Mr. Lincoln said:; BECAUSE PEOPLE THINK YOUR STUPID, DON’T OPEN YOUR MOUTH AND REMOVE ALL DOUBT, and yes William you’re either stupid or you’ve drank the muslem cool-aid in any case leave the country you don’t belong here!!!!!!!!
Oh I was sitting here trying to find the words to reply to William. Thanks Le Snyder!
Le Snyder-
i could be mistaken, but i believe the original quote you mention can be attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who but re-stated a Proverb which says something akin to “Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise.”
If you want an eye-opener, you should read “The Real Lincoln,” by DiLorenzo, iirc. He was the one who started the Unconstitutional “Executive Order” nonsense every subsequent president has also Unconstitutionally exercised, based on the “War Powers” act he got through a Quisling Congress. Why, during the War for State’s Rights, Lincoln imprisoned THOUSANDS of innocents, some for the “crime” of “disagreeing with the president,” and for the duration of the war! Many journalists met the same fate. Lincoln is not the hero history has painted him to be.
Whats new . When we impeach him we we need to send him to getmo to learn first hand what these fine group of men think.
Congress if you don’t do something and get off your dead rear and stop him . Dont count on being around much longer. BEcause the people will come after you and vote you out. or something else will be done
With all the laws n BS OBAMA has done and trying to do against American’s and our country don’t understand why he hasn’t been IMPEACHED YET wake up America B4 it’s to late
He is Un American, He is a Liar, and he is a piece of feces
TRUMP will be the next CIC in 2016…… The only man worthy of the position, Trump is NOT a paid puppet for the super rich to run the country as they see fit….. Trump the only man for all legal american citizens…
NO MORE CLINTONS, NO MORE LIES, NO MORE