Gitmo closing in its 'final stages'

[HamdenRice]

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/70427-gates-gitmo-closing-in-its-final-stages-


Gates: Gitmo closing in its 'final stages'
By J. Taylor Rushing - 12/03/09 11:24 AM ET

Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Thursday told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Obama administration is in the "final stages" of closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In a hearing to asses the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, Gates said President Barack Obama remains "very much committed" to closing the prison by January and transferring its prisoners.

Gates said of the 215 detainees at the prison, 116 will likely be transferred to other countries. He also endorsed criticism that the prison has a negative image that has benefited al-Qaeda.

"It has a legacy. It bears a taint," Gates said. "It is a training tool for al-Queda."

<end quote>

The Brookings Institution says that one of the oddities of the Gitmo controversy is that there has never been a public authoritative tally of the number of prisoners there, but estimates that the total number was around 558.

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2008/1216_detainees_wittes/1216_detainees_wittes_exec_sum.pdf


http://law.shu.edu/publications/guantanamoReports/guantanamo_report_final_2_08_06.pdf

[Peacetrain]

1. It is a stain we will take for generations to try and overcome.. glad it is almost done

[Mithreal]

39. US unveils extended Bagram prison, 'Guantanamo's evil twin'

Al Jazeera's correspondent James Bays, who was among those who inspected the facilities on Sunday, said Bagram, unlike its Guantanamo counterpart, was clearly not going to be shut down soon.

"The new prison wing cost some $60 million to build ... and is meant to be part of a new era of openness and transparency," Bays said.

"But we were not shown the detainees. Human-rights lawyers say that, while the environment for the prisoners may be changing, their legal situation is not ... not having been charged. Nor has any civilian lawyer ever been allowed inside."

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/11/20091115114337109563.html

Flame away, facts are to be ignored as another posts below.

[vaberella]

2. Thanks for the news but you know that DU doesn't care about that, right?!

Thanks for posting HamdenRice!

[HamdenRice]

3. As Ronald Reagan said, "Facts are stupid things ..."

[tridim]

7. Good news just doesn't fly on DU any more.

It is immediately unrec'ed and spun into a negative.

[moodforaday]

34. "116 will likely be transferred to other countries"

If these other countries include Syria or Egypt, then maybe Gitmo should stay open. At least the prisoners there are kept alive, mostly, and some of them can even be visited by the Red Cross. There are worse places than that.

The point isn't simply to close down Gitmo, is it? The point is to stop torturing people, stop extrajudicial imprisonment, stop people from being grabbed from the street and brought to a gulag in a far-away country with little hope of ever seeing home again, stop the open-ended incarceration of people who have never been put before a judge or seen evidence against them or told what they are being accused of. Stop putting people away without a fair trial. This is what closing Gitmo is supposed to mean.

If Gitmo is closed but other prisons continue to operate outside of the law, and if many Gitmo inmates find themselves flown to other coutries for more imprisonment and more torture, then what exactly will have been achieved? Will you be cheering as the last plane takes off from Guantanamo and sets course for Bagram?

[Hell Hath No Fury]

36. Glad that someoen else spotted that.

I fear that those who they are unable to bring to trial here due to a lack of evidence but still want to hold indefinitely are in those 116. :(

[HamdenRice]

48. So basically you want to put the administration in a bind in which they can't possibly satisfy you?

But at any rate, your concern is not a problem. You may recall the case of the Chinese Uighurs, Chinese Muslims who were imprisoned in Guantanamo. The government decided that they were innocent and should be freed.

The Obama administration is applying the International Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to the release of Guantanamo prisoners. Despite it's name, the Convention applies to more than just the typical refugee population; it also applies to various immigration matters.

The central provision of the Convention is that a member state (the US is one), cannot deport, send or return ("refouler") any person to any country where that person would have a well founded fear of persecution. The flip side of the prohibition on refouler is that state parties are required to offer asylum to any person who has a well founded fear of persecution on being returned to his home country, but unfortunately, since the 1980s almost every country interprets this as discretionary, creating a split between the prohibition on refouler and the obligation to offer asylum.

The Bush administration either arbitrarily dumped the Uighurs in countries which were unsuited to them or scuttled negotiations with countries willing to accept them by demanding indefinite incarceration.

The Obama administration, however, applying the Refugee Convention standard, has agreed that the Uighurs had a well founded fear of persecution if returned to China, and has been slowly, laboriously negotiating asylum for them. They then set out to find some country that would take them. That is the sort of thing that seriously slows down the process of releasing the prisoners. As I mentioned earlier, almost every innocent prisoner at Guantanamo is now under a cloud of suspicion of terrorism in his home country and cannot be sent there, and very few third countries want to accept suspected terrorists either.

The Obama administration has found asylum for some of the Uighurs in Palau and Bermuda.

So, while your concern that the Guantanamo prisoners will be incarcerated or tortured was valid under the Bush administration, the Obama administration appears to be applying Refugee Convention standards, which is why it is taking so long to close the facility.

[grantcart]

56. transfers to Saudia Arabia on the other hand have found GITMO releases embraced.

http://www.saudi-us-relations.org/articles/2009/ioi/090522-lacey-rehab.html

[Cha]

31. Weren't the rw haters hoping to keep gitmo open?

[Parker CA]

4. Great news!! Looks like he'll be very close to his announced closure date. Let's go!!

[tekisui]

5. knr. There are some interesting charts in the last link.

A vast majority were at most 'associated with' al-qaeda or the Taliban.

[HamdenRice]

9. It was indeed a travesty. Most it seems were innocent.

A big problem though, is that even the innocent now face persecution because of the taint of having been suspected of being terrorists, and they cannot, consistent with international treaties on refugee status, be sent to their home countries where they would face a "well founded fear of persecution."

[cry baby]

6. rec and bookmarked! thank you! nt

[mikelgb]

8. Gates- "It bears a taint".. beyond obvious lol, hey gates: So do you.

[orwell]

10. Thank you for posting...

...some positive news...

Looks like another promise will be fulfilled.

[Kdillard]

11. Excellent news.

[Dr Robert]

12. in a year, those who called Obama a 'do-nothing' will look like complete jackasses

[HopeOverFear]

18. They look like that now.

:)

[ClarkUSA]

13. Where are the idiots who think Obama = Bush when we want them?

:eyes:

[HamdenRice]

14. They are furiously unrec'ing because facts have a pro-Obama bias, to paraphrase Colbert

The see-sawing in the rec numbers is pretty interesting.

[impik]

16. Bunch of losres

[ClarkUSA]

21. Literally.

Most of the most caustic members in the 24/7 Obama Outrage Club were on the losing side in last year's contests.

[impik]

24. Oh, i know. And now

they don't care if they'll bring the Republicans back to power, as long as they can rip this courageous president apart.

[ClarkUSA]

28. Exactly. Their bitterness has led them down the path to teabagger idiocy.

Must suck to be them: there are many more of us than there are of them in the real world and the facts are on our side,
making it easy to refute their lies and even easier to support our President through all of their nonsense.

Let's keep kicking all the factual OPs re: Pres. Obama until the lies stop.

:fistbump:

[Ikonoklast]

50. They're too busy rounding up enough wood to build a bigger soapbox

for St. Dennis to stand on, as President Obama's accomplishments are starting to make him look quite little, in more ways than one.

Maybe he can find some like-minded Republicans to commiserate with.

[ClarkUSA]

20. lol! They're quick to unrec FACTS but cry victim when their lying liar's lies get unrec'ed.

What a bunch of cowardly assholes. But we knew that already.

Anyway, nice OP. Bookmarked to remind the Failers what they refuse to ackowledge. :fistbump:

[HamdenRice]

23. I just got tired of certain impregnable urban myths: Gitmo isn't closing, warrantless wiretapping,

torture, extraordinary renditions -- all things that have ended (except Gitmo) or are close to being ended.

It's almost mind blowing that almost every single day someone posts that nothing on these issues has changed.

I blame Amy Goodman of Democracy Now because on both warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition, she did very misleading stories saying they were continuing despite reporting underlying facts she was reporting at the same time that they had been discontinued.

[ClarkUSA]

25. I hear you. Obama supporters need to kick this & other factual OPs every day until the lies stop.

As far as Amy Goodman is concerned, she has as much intellectual integrity as Dennis Kucinich.

[Peacetrain]

26. I have to admit I am a little disappointed that we are not getting more input on this op

of how we are succeeding. This is what WE all wanted.

[Hansel]

44. I blame the immaturity of some of the posters.

I'm sorry, but some of them are really child like in their behavior and thinking.

[moodforaday]

35. I did not unrec

but didn't rec either. Because of this line in the article:

116 will likely be transferred to other countries

Closing down Gitmo may be good news to the people incarcerated there without a trial, or it may only be a PR stunt, while the inmates will continue to suffer even worse than they have so far. As always, "the devil is in the details", isn't it?

[treestar]

22. Apparently it is taking quite a while to figure out a way to spin this

negatively!

[ClarkUSA]

29. LOL! I think you've nailed it. They're probably waiting to see what Counterpunch says first.

Either that, or SocialistWorker.org, or Mother Jones, HuffPo or bitter liberal blogger who is still nursing resentment over last year.
Hell, they'll even take Rush Limbaugh and the RNC if they get desperate.

In the meantime, let's keep kicking all the factual OPs about Obama until the lies stop.

:fistbump:

[HamdenRice]

33. You left out WorldSocialistWebSite, the Weekly World News of politics nt

[NatBurner]

15. heh

way to sit on your ass and do nothing, barack!

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

17. Sorry, that doesn't count.

It didn't happen on January 23rd, so it doesn't matter. :sarcasm:

[Arkana]

19. Huh. And here was me thinking we weren't going to do it.

[phleshdef]

27. LOL, gonna be hard for the people who spread the lie that he broke this campaign promise to spin...

...this one. Cmon people, aren't you even gonna try?

[ieoeja]

30. Kick

[WeDidIt]

32. I predict this post will be ignored as much by the radical progressives on DU

as teh thread announcing the last of the Afghanistan troops coming home will in 2012.

[Odin2005]

37. Where are the Obama-haters now?

[moodforaday]

40. I'd like to see what you think

about my post above, #34. Maybe you'll find your Obama hater there.

[slipslidingaway]

42. Thanks for posting that section, also we still have Bagram. n/t

[me b zola]

38. K&R

:kick:

[CTLawGuy]

41. uh sorry

he didn't close Gitmo on his first day, so therefore he OPENED Gitmo in the first place and put in every single prisoner who is there now.

OBAMA = BUSH !1!!

:sarcasm:

[Hansel]

43. Cue the poutrage about how he didn't do it on Jan 22nd. nt

[Hekate]

55. Oh it's already here and tuning up...

:nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity:
:nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity: :nopity:

[AngryAmish]

45. It closed in less than 45 days...we were promised.

[bertman]

46. A welcome change, for sure. Thanks for posting this, HR.

[SpartanDem]

47. K&R

[BeyondGeography]

49. Keep it kicked, fellow pom pom squad sellouts

:patriot:

[ensho]

51. thanks for the report - its good to know the closing is proceeding

nt

[Kitsune]

52. Yeah, we've moved most of 'em to Bagram.

Same shit, different asshole.

[beyond cynical]

53. I would be willing to bet that the 116 who are going to be "transferred"

will not fair so well.

For the others, it will be like winning the lottery.

[grantcart]

57. I would take that bet

low level returnees to Saudia Arabia have been treated like long lost sons and rehabilitated with housing, education and jobs.


http://www.saudi-us-relations.org/articles/2009/ioi/090522-lacey-rehab.html

[Hekate]

54. That's a relief. Our POTUS has a NOW-DONE list several pages long at this point. Right?!

Right. :fistbump:

Hekate