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Closing Guantanamo

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A White House task force on closing Guantanamo is being delayed by six months. Does that mean Barack Obama’s vow to close the detention camp by early next year is in jeopardy? The World’s Matthew Bell reports.
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LISA MULLINS: One of Barack Obama’s first acts as President was to order that the detention camp at Guantanamo be closed. But a task force that’s studying how to do that, just missed a key deadline, and it’s getting a six-month extension. As The World’s Matthew Bell reports, it’s putting Mr. Obama’s promised deadline for Guantanamo’s closing in doubt.

MATTHEW BELL: Obama administration officials say they’re still on track to close Guantanamo by next January, but that goal might be proving tougher than the White House originally planned. At the very least, the six-month delay announced last night puts the January deadline in serious jeopardy, says Ken Gude of the liberal leaning Center for American Progress in Washington.

KEN GUDE: The administration certainly isn’t giving up and neither am I giving up on the one-year timeline. They’ve got a lot of work to do in a very rapid order to meet that deadline, and it seems now likely that it could be pushed back.

MATTHEW BELL: But Gude says he’s less concerned about arbitrary deadlines, than he is with getting US policy right.

KEN GUDE: It is clear, despite what has been kind of a sluggish process so far, that the administration is firmly committed to closing Guantanamo and reforming US detention policy. That hasn’t changed regardless of what timeline they may now be working on. Guantanamo will be closed. It may not be closed as rapidly as the administration has hoped, but it will be closed.

MATTHEW BELL: President Obama’s getting heat from both the right and the left on this issue. The ACLU says this delay could be a worrisome sign that the Obama administration might keep the Bush era system of military commissions in place. Or that it will continue holding some Guantanamo detainees indefinitely without charges or trial. The ACLU says this could lead to years of legal battles instead of the swift and certain justice that Mr. Obama says he wants. On the right, the Republican Senate leader. Mitch McConnell, described the missed deadline on detention policy as a further sign that the administration had no plan in place when it said it would close down Guantanamo. Part of the problem here, according to Sarah Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is that the legal and political questions being addressed are tough ones.

SARAH MENDELSON: But I also worry that there needs to be more senior guidance, that maybe there needs to be an advisory committee that needs to be shepherding this process as opposed to as one member of the task force explained to me, you know, ‘I’m basically a bureaucrat.’

MATTHEW BELL: Mendelson says the White House should have done itself a favor by appointing a high-level commission for closing Guantanamo along the lines of the 9-11 Commission or the Iraq Study Group. But even so, she adds, that would not have done away with one of the biggest obstacles facing the Obama White House.

SARAH MENDELSON: The problem is that the way the Bush administration packaged this was very bizarre. On the one hand, they actually released over 500 people from Guantanamo, over 500. And we have no visibility or clarity into how they did that, what the decision process was. On the other hand, they made it seem as if Guantanamo had zero costs, that it was somehow risk free, when in fact, it was a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.

MATTHEW BELL: US military officials have said that Guantanamo has proved to be an effective recruiting tool in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Another problem, US allies have been reluctant to accept Guantanamo detainees, and Congress has made a political football out of the issue, says Ken Gude of the Center for American Progress.

KEN GUDE: I mean nothing could be more stupid, frankly, than that pathetic assertion of fear that many Republicans and some Democrats have used to scare into thinking that Guantanamo detainees are somehow these super villains who from 23 hour lockdown inside a super max federal penitentiary can somehow wreak havoc on the citizens of Florence, Colorado or Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas or Marion, Illinois. I mean that’s just ridiculous.

MATTHEW BELL: What’s not clear yet is how Mr. Obama will come down on the big question of indefinite detention without charge for some detainees. The president has said he’s uncomfortable with the idea, but it appears his administration is wrestling with the issue, and will continue to be for longer than anticipated. For The World, I’m Matthew Bell.

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