Why hasn't Obama closed Guantanamo?

People who have never been charged with any crime and who have no prospect of being released.

This might be stupid, but I don’t know a whole lot about Guantanamo Bay. If they haven’t been convicted of a crime, why are they there?

I wonder that too. It is another blot on the nation and a major failure on his part.

Congress, through it’s spending oversight, has prohibited funding any prosecutions and to prohibit spending on a place to hold detainees in the United States.

Many of the detainees are known dangerous terrorists, but there is no specific US law that has been broken or evidence that would stand the scrutiny of a trial. Another problem is that there is no place to repatriate them. Their home countries do not want them back.

There’s no clear, politically safe path for putting the detainees elsewhere. Here’s my understanding of the situation:

Of the 166 detainees, about 46 are generally considered badies who pose a realistic threat to the US. Of the rest, about 80 have already been vetted and cleared for release because they don’t pose a threat. The remainder we’re just not sure about.

Of those cleared for release, the majority are Yemenis. Yemen does want them back, and is actively seeking their release, but there is currently a prohibition on the books against sending any detainees to Yemen because Yemen can’t guarantee adequate control of the returnees, as our law would require.

I’ve heard commentators say that as the laws stand, the only way repatriation could happen for those cleared for release would be for the president to declare an end to hostilities with AQ. This would be a technical maneuver that would remove the legal justifications for the detentions and force the release. It would, however, hand the president’s opponents a political cudgel that they would use with glee.

As @zenvelo said, Congress has made it impossible for any of the detainees to be brought to the mainland.

A bunch of really bad options.

We do not have access to national security records that obviously caused obama to change his conviction to close it.

@thorninmud has a fairly accurate representation of the conflict. There are a few additional details that I think are significant. Most of the detainees are being treated as Prisoners of war. As such there is no trial, no sentencing, nor even charges. They are merely held until the hostilities are over. That’s how POWs are handled. These guys don’t really fit the definition of POWs so we call them ‘Enemy Combatants’.

Obama and Holder want to treat this as a police action and handle it through the criminal justice system. That becomes very difficult when the detainees were captured on the feild of battle, not a crimes scene. If we bring them to the mainland, we complicate the problem. As mentioned above, we can’t send them home in many cases for reasons of law but if they are here, they will eventually be released, either through aquittal or after serving thier sentence. At which time they will be released here. Not an attractive result. And yes if Obama was to release 100 known or likely terrorists onto the streets of New York, he would be blamed for that.

If you were a German soldier captured during WWII, you were detained until the hostilities were over. No trial, no Maranda Rights, no nothing. It is only the effort to make this a criminal justice issue that confuses their status.

Because congress won’t let him:

On January 22, 2009, President Barack Obama signed an order to suspend the proceedings of the Guantanamo military commission for 120 days and to shut down the detention facility within the year.[11][12] On January 29, 2009, a military judge at Guantanamo rejected the White House request in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, creating an unexpected challenge for the administration as it reviewed how the United States brings Guantanamo detainees to trial.[13] On May 20, 2009, the United States Senate passed an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009 (H.R. 2346) by a 90–6 vote to block funds needed for the transfer or release of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.[14] President Obama issued a Presidential memorandum dated December 15, 2009, ordering Thomson Correctional Center, Thomson, Illinois to be prepared to accept transferred Guantanamo prisoners.[15]

The Final Report of the Guantanamo Review Task Force, dated January 22, 2010, published the results for the 240 detainees subject to the Review: 36 were the subject of active cases or investigations; 30 detainees from Yemen were designated for ‘conditional detention’ due to the poor security environment in Yemen; 126 detainees were approved for transfer; 48 detainees were determined ‘too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution’.[16]

On January 7, 2011, President Obama signed the 2011 Defense Authorization Bill, which, in part, placed restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo prisoners to the mainland or to foreign countries, thus impeding the closure of the facility.[17] U.S. Secretary of Defense Gates said during testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on February 17, 2011: “The prospects for closing Guantanamo as best I can tell are very, very low given very broad opposition to doing that here in the Congress.”[18] Congress particularly opposed moving prisoners to facilities in the United States for detention or trial.[18] In April 2011, Wikileaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.[19] As of March 2013, 166 detainees remain at Guantanamo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

I mean no disrespect to anyone on this page but I think some of the phrases being used should be looked at more closely.

“Known dangerous terrorists” What does that phrase mean exactly? Known by whom and for what reason?

“Generally considered baddies”. It seems to me they are generally considered baddies because they are in Guantanamo rather than the other way round. Generally speaking we don’t know who these people are or what they are supposed to have done.

“Held until hostilities are over” What does that mean? What hostilities? Against who? When will we know they are over?

“Captured on the field of battle” Most of the inmates of Guantanamo were not captured but were handed over by Pakistanis and Afghans for bounty payments.

@Jaxk If their status is confused it is because it was deliberately created that way. Guantanamo was chosen because Bush’s legal counsel advised that it could be considered outside US legal jurisdiction. The Bush administration also asserted that detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions.

@flutherother “It seems to me they are generally considered baddies because they are in Guantanamo rather than the other way round”

That may have been the case back when Bush was telling us that the Gitmo detainees were “the worst of the worst”, but now were pretty damned cynical about the whole Gitmo enterprise. Unless you’re mentally stuck in 2003, you realize that many of those guys ended up there just because a vindictive neighbor framed them.

At the same time, I don’t hear even the most liberal advocates saying that there aren’t some characters there who would be very likely to attack the US if released.

Who are they?

Another perspective says Obama, not Bush and not Congress, is the reason Gitmo is still opened.

@thorninmud Bush filled Gitmo with people in the same way that a deep sea trawler fills its holds with fish. It was quite indiscriminate. I think you are right in saying this is now generally accepted. But on what principle are the 46 villains selected? How can you say prisoner 46 is generally accepted to be a bad guy and prisoner 47 is generally accepted to be innocent when we know nothing about them. Maybe someone has made this assessment but who? and on what basis?

@bkcunningham The perspective you mention does exist, but it is not based on the facts.

@flutherother, see my above link, “Who are they?”

Yes, @YARNLADY, it is based on facts. What in the article I linked to you think is not factual?

People pick and choose which facts they wish to include. I’ll go with wikipedia

@bkcunningham Thanks, that is a great source especially if you click on the names. A lot of the evidence against these men is testimony from their fellow inmates which was sometimes obtained under duress.

@flutherother “But on what principle are the 46 villains selected? How can you say prisoner 46 is generally accepted to be a bad guy and prisoner 47 is generally accepted to be innocent when we know nothing about them. Maybe someone has made this assessment but who? and on what basis?”

This explains how the determinations were made.