Closing down Guantanamo Bay

TRIPOLI (AFP) — Libya said Thursday it has asked the United States to repatriate nine Libyans held since 2002 in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

The request came as new US President Barack Obama ordered the closure of the Guantanamo prison within a year, in a dramatic repudiation of his predecessor George W. Bush.

"We are very concerned by the lack of information on the nine Libyans held in Guantanamo and we have asked for their repatriation many times," said Salah Abdessalem, head of a human rights association affiliated with the Kadhafi Foundation, a charity led by Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi's son. . .

Despite his order to close Guantanamo, Obama has not resolved the question of what to do with terror suspects who have been there for years, some without being charged

The chief judge for US military commissions at the Guantanamo Bay detention center rejected Thursday the request of government prosecutors to delay the proceedings against alleged USS Cole plotter Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Prosecutors had sought the delay in response to an executive order issued last week by President Barack Obama ordering the closure of the Guantanamo Bay military prison within one year, and instructing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates immediately to halt the military commission proceedings pending a comprehensive review of all Guantanamo detentions under the supervision of the Attorney General.

In his order, US Army Colonel James Pohl wrote:

Quote:

On its face, the request to delay the arraignment is not reasonable. The public interest in a speedy trial will be harmed by the delay in the arraignment. Granting the continuance do [sic] not serve the interests of justice. The government request for a continuance in the arraignment until after 22 May 2009 is DENIED.

Pentagon officials were stunned by Pohl's ruling and indicated that they were reviewing the ruling.

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

In an email exchange afterward, Hersh said that his statements were “an honest response to a question” from the event’s moderator, U of M Political Scientist Larry Jacobs and “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.”

Hersh didn’t take back the statements, which he said arise from reporting he is doing for a book, but that it might be a year or two before he has what he needs on the topic to be “effective...that is, empirical, for even the most skeptical.”

The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government official who had experience with many of the crises. . .

At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?” . . .

Pornography, feminisation of the enemy? Confused over what Obama's view on Guantanamo and the backlog of torture images from Abu Ghraib? Join the club.

The centrepiece of United States President Barack Obama's PR campaign to show the world the US is the nice cop was to end the military tribunals, which he called "an enormous failure" during last year's presidential campaign, and close the infamous Guantanamo prison. This was Obama's first major "achievement" upon assuming office.

Rumblings about the impossibility of closing Guantanamo were being heard even as Obama took office. It appears there's no place to send the prisoners, most of whom are innocent of anything other than fighting invaders, if that. Congress does not want to allow them to come to stay in equally notorious US jails, where overcrowding, violence, drugs and AIDS are endemic. Nor is Congress willing to fork over any money to close Guantanamo. Of course this is nonsense. Venezuela's president offered to take them all, but Obama dare not accept any favours from someone so principled, lest his house of cards come tumbling down...

Obama said today he still plans to go ahead and close it:

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090521/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama

He insisted the transfer would not endanger Americans and promised to work with lawmakers to develop a system for holding detainees who can't be tried and can't be turned loose from the Navy-run prison in Cuba.

"There are no neat or easy answers here," Obama said

"It's disappointing that Obama is seeking to revive rather than end this failed experiment," said Jonathan Hafetz, a national security attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.

 

"There is no detainee at Guantanamo who cannot be tried and shouldn't be tried in the regular federal courts system. This is perpetuating the Bush administration's misguided detention policy." Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch, said: "By resurrecting this failed Bush administration idea, President Obama is backtracking dangerously on his reform agenda."

It shows nothing of the sort. Obomba is the most powerful man in the world.

It's all a matter of how he chooses to exercise that power.

In four years of researching and writing about Guantánamo, I have become used to uncovering shocking information, but for sheer cynicism, I am struggling to think of anything that compares to the revelations contained in the unclassified ruling in the habeas corpus petition of Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti prisoner whose release was ordered last week by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (PDF). In the ruling, to put it bluntly, it was revealed that the U.S. government tortured an innocent man to extract false confessions and then threatened him until he obligingly repeated those lies as though they were the truth.

With less than three months left to make good on his promise to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay within one year and virtually no effort made so far to do so, President Barack Obama has signed the military funding bill which will effectively restart military tribunals at the facility.

Today's move finalizes a plan concocted by the president in May, which would make a handful of cosmetic changes to the tribunal system, giving detainees a little control over their legal counsel and barring certain types of hearsay evidence.

Though some have praised the moves, many insist they don't go nearly far enough, and that the tribunals continue to have features, including the possibility of trying children, which violate international law.

Despite the move, President Obama insists that he is "serious" about eventually closing the Guantanamo facility, though he no longer appears to be touting his January 22, 2010 deadline and this is widely expected to have fallen by the wayside.

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/10/28/obamas-defense-bill-restarts-gitmo-tr...