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June 22, 2007
White House Near Decision To Close Gitmo
Washington
Forbes.com
The Bush administration is nearing a decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detainee facility and move its terror suspects to military prisons elsewhere.
Senior administration officials said Thursday a consensus is building for a proposal to shut the center and transfer detainees to one or more Defense Department facilities, including the maximum-security military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where they could face trial.
President Bush's national security and legal advisers had been scheduled to discuss the move at a meeting Friday, the officials said, but after news of it broke, the White House said the meeting would not take place that day and no decision on Guantanamo Bay's status is imminent.
"It's no longer on the schedule for tomorrow," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council. "Senior officials have met on the issue in the past, and I expect they will meet on the issue in the future."
Previous plans to close Guantanamo ran into resistance from Cheney, Gonzales and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. But officials said the new suggestion is gaining momentum with at least tacit support from the State and Homeland Security departments, the Pentagon and the Intelligence directorate.
Cheney's office and the Justice Department have been against the step, arguing that moving "unlawful" enemy combatant suspects to the U.S. would give them undeserved legal rights.
In Congress, recently introduced legislation would require Guantanamo's closure. One measure would designate Fort Leavenworth, located about 30 miles northwest of Kansas City in northeast Kansas, as the new detention facility.
Another bill would grant new rights to those held at Guantanamo Bay, including access to lawyers regardless of whether the prisoners are put on trial. Still another would allow detainees to protest their detentions in federal court, something they are now denied.
Gates, who took over the Pentagon after Rumsfeld was forced out last year, has said Congress and the administration should work together to allow the U.S. to imprison permanently some of the more dangerous Guantanamo Bay detainees elsewhere so the facility can be closed.
Military officials told Congress this month that the prison at Fort Leavenworth has 70 open beds and that the brig at a naval base in Charleston, S.C., has space for an additional 100 prisoners.
Rice has said she would like to see Guantanamo closed if a safe alternative could be found. She said during a trip to Spain this month that the United States "doesn't have any desire to be the world's jailer."
"I don't think anyone wants to see Guantanamo open one day longer than it is needed. But I also suspect nobody wants to see a number of dangerous people simply released out onto the streets," she said.
On Thursday, two Democratic lawmakers, Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida and Sen. Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, told a human rights commission that Guantanamo must be closed if the United States is to regain credibility and authority on human rights.
"The damage done to the United States goes beyond undermining our status as a global leader on human rights," Cardin said. "Our policies and practices regarding Guantanamo and other aspects of our detainee policies have undermined our authority to engage in the effective counterterrorism measures that are necessary for the very security of this country."
Officials say that Bush, who also has said he wants to close the facility as soon as possible, is keenly aware of its shortcomings.
His wife, Laura, and mother, Barbara, along with Rice and longtime adviser Karen Hughes, head of the public diplomacy office at the State Department, have told him that Guantanamo is a blot on the U.S. record abroad, particularly in the Muslim world and among European allies.
Earlier this month, former Secretary of State Colin Powell called for the immediate closure of the prison, saying it posed an untenable foreign policy risk and was irreparably harming the U.S. image abroad.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said in statement that "removing the stain Guantanamo has left on our foreign policy" is long overdue.
"It also goes a long way toward returning America's moral authority in the world and addressing the mistakes which have set us back in the fight against terrorism," said Kerry.
Update:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A White House meeting planned for Friday about the future of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility has been canceled after The Associated Press reported the Bush administration was "nearing a decision" to close the center.
National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said there would be no meeting Friday, but he would not comment on the reasons for the cancellation.
Officials from the White House, the Pentagon and the Justice and State departments denied the AP report.
"The administration is not 'nearing a decision' on changing our long-held policy to shut down Gitmo in a responsible way," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. "There is no meeting tomorrow."These and other steps have not been completed. No decisions on the future of Guantanamo Bay are imminent, and there will not be a White House meeting tomorrow," he said.
Johndroe later told CNN that a meeting had been set but was canceled.
Wild Thing's comment..............
Alcee Hastings!! The guy that was impeached and thrown out as a federal judge for corruption?! Hahahahaha! You can’t make this sh*t up!! Is anyone actually running this government, or is it like a derelict ship with no helmsman?
And what the heck is that about with Laura and Bush's mom and their input about this. Sorry but I have nothing against Laura at all, but she is not the person I voted for to be President. Since that part of the first article is from the AP it may or may not be true about Laura and Barbara's input.
But one thing for sure with the UPDATE article, the White House obviously has lied. Can't these people learn how to lie better especially when it is in the press. Or did they change their minds because it was leaked to the press, who knows.
Between these two articles it reads like a Kerry flip flop. They had a meeting planned, no there was no meeting planned.....well there was a meeting planned but we cancelled it. HUH????
I hope Bush listens to Cheney and says NO to closing Gitmo. But if he doesn't then Bush is letting the likes of Kennedy, Reid, Powell and others run our White House. I didn't like reading that Bush wants to close it, that concerns me a lot.
Posted by Wild Thing at June 22, 2007 12:55 AM
Comments
.... and the "Death to America" Islamomaniacs can seek employment at the U.S. Capitol as pages and interns, eh? Or as guest speakers in the blue state colleges and universities? Or as Ft. Dix pizza delivery men? Or employment as toll booth collectors in our major tunnels and bridges too? WOW... ONE NATION UNDER ALLAH, DIVIDED... WITHOUT LIBERTY AND NO JUSTICE FOR OUR ENEMIES THAT HAVE SWORN TO SLAUGHTER US?
"We'll bring them to justice..." - President George W. Bush, 9-11-01 ?
Posted by: darthcrUSAderworldtour07 at June 22, 2007 06:31 AM
I hope Bush will not close GITMO , what America can do with terrorists on his sole . GITMO is perfect , its secret , and away from America . I remeber this article write by Yves Roucaute , very intersting
BlackRain06-13-2006, 06:11 PM
An interesting translated article published in Le Figaro by Yves Roucaute
Guantanamo: Enough with the Anti-American Propaganda.
7 June 2006
Le Fagaro
In a full out world war against terrorism, “the Guantanamo affair” is serious. Instead of supporting those who are on the front line in this new type of war with the cruel forces out against civilization, the poison of anti-Americanism is breaking the morale of our nations.
Anti-American propaganda instructs us to turn our gaze toward Cuba. Not the Cuban reality of Castro who, after having killed more than 100,000 Cubans in his half-century rule, has dominated by terror. Not the Castroists repugnant prisons where several thousands of political prisoners stagnate (336 officially). But in the tourist program of the politically correct, “The Gulag of our time” is American.
Guantanamo, Guantanamo. Propaganda denounces isolated prisoners there and the secrecy. There were those who made claims against it in the American courts, invented prisoners held without cause, imagines tortures, and the rape of individuals’ rights.
Insulation and distance? You don’t have to look hard for precedents which were never disputed. When on June 22, 1940, Hitler launched an unprovoked air against England, Winston Churchill got the Canadian government to detain 3,000 German soldiers captured by the British army, and kept them in complete secrecy in isolated camps in northern Ontario and at Kananaskis in the Rockies.
There were three reasons for this: so the prisoners could not return to combat in the event of escape, and prohibited the passing of information within the camps, and prohibited the Nazi prisoners from forming networks. When one sees the way in which the Islamist networks are organized today in French and British prisons, isn’t isolation a mild response to the asymmetrical warfare carried out by the terrorist networks with have propagated worldwide?
The secret? It makes it possible to obtain information without the enemy not suspecting it, not knowing which is taken, nor when. It allows infiltrations, substitutions of people, revealings of complicities, plays of misinformation. Provisional, this type of imprisonment does not remain strategic about it. And it saves thousands of lives.
Court intervention? By what strange, tortuous view would this be necessarily?
As in any war, internment of captured enemy does not enter the courts, and is done to prevent them from fighting and to keep them for information. Admittedly, after a while the secrecy of the capture is out. When the information is no longer valuable they can still take up arms. This is why the Americans released prisoners little by little.
With regard to the current disputes, after the decision of the Supreme Court (June 2004, Rasul v. Bush) and the Detainee Treatment Act of December 2005, the legal debate continues, but no judicious person wants to see the dangerous prisoners of Guantanamo free or to assemble networks in ordinary prisons.
Conditions of detention? Democracies are not without their obligations. As Kant showed, they are entirely different from tyrannies in what violations of human dignity the punished may endure. By forgetting that, a soldier commits a double felony: he violates a natural law and sabotages the moral underpinnings of his country. This always seems to be left out of the propaganda that these sanctimonious hypocrites put out to confuse and control others. The American courts answer this moral concern: they imposed punishment following the revelation of Abu Ghreïb and nowhere did anyone thank Allah for that.
But where is the evidence of torture at Guantanamo?
The famous UN Commission on Human Rights Report (of February 2005) on which these anti-Americans lean proves nothing.
This commission, which counts among it’s members communist China, Castro’s Cuba and, Saudi Arabia… had found the military authorities that didn’t trust in them improper by accepting their arrival but not letting them question the prisoners.
Consequently, they refused to put a foot in the camp and drew up his report thanks in particular to testimony of captive Islamists who were released.
What’s the latest form of propaganda?
Poor “a documentary-fiction”, The Road to Guantanamo, with won the golden bear at the Festival of Berlin, with lines so large which they make put Sergeï Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl to shame.
Was there really no reason to suspect why the three heroes of film were prisoners at Guantanamo?
Can you really take them at their world when they say they underwent torture which leaves no marks? Victims of bad luck, they left for Pakistan to attend a wedding in Karachi, the disembarking point for the world’s Islamists on their way to Afghanistan.
Then, they go another 1.200 kilometers to Kandahar, the center of Al-Qaida command. They continued to Kabul where many Taliban reinforcements arrived at the same time. During the Allied intervention our heroes are found at the Pakistani border with the Islamists. Fleeing, their bad luck continued when they are stopped by the Northern Alliance with armed members of the Taliban, who hand them over to the American authorities.
Each day anti-Americanism appears more and more like the new opiate of the masses. It is the heart of a world without a heart, where morality is excluded, the strange reference point for the consciences lost by the fall of the Berlin Wall. If the true force of a republic lies in virtue, as Montesquieu said, then virtue is measured by courage one has to fight for it. Guantanamo, it is this courage.
Posted by: RWC at June 22, 2007 06:58 AM
Where is a tidal wave when you need one?
- Gasman
Posted by: Steve Gaston at June 22, 2007 07:09 AM
Ok when they close 'Gitmo', where are they going to relocate the prisoners er ... Victims , in Washington DC. Then they can go to see Michael Chertoff(Jerk) to receive their Z-visas and green cards. This would certainly make sense and Ted Kennedy and Dick Durbin will hire them as caretakers of all their homes.
Posted by: Mark at June 22, 2007 08:37 AM
Sure, let's put 'em in Leavenworth, and see how long before the moonbats start a Sheehan-esq circus outside the gates to "free their opressed muslim brothers". Not that the press would cover it or an;ything.
Those people are in Gitmo for a reason. Gitmo is one of the few places where it is more dangerous for the prisoners outside the wire than inside.
"Escape? Go ahead. See how long Fidel lets you live."
Just why is this "Close Gitmo" crap bubbling to the surface now?
Posted by: Rick at June 22, 2007 09:19 AM
This is just one more reason to keep lawyers out of the political arena. This country has forfeited it's sovreign rights to self govern to the whims of the United Nations Communists and the world court at The Hague, Netherlands. Close Gitmo and move them all to Hyannis Port and Chappaquidick where terrorists are loved and revered.
Posted by: Jack at June 22, 2007 01:16 PM
Darth, omg ....pages and interns....the thing is with all that has been happening it would be par for the course wouldn't it.
Posted by: Wild Thing at June 22, 2007 02:09 PM
RWC thank you and yes we absolutely have to fight for that courage.
America has been a bright start to so many countries, the hope of help and fought for freedom. We cannot get rid of that, we cannot let those that want to weaken us and put us in more danger have their way.
Posted by: Wild Thing at June 22, 2007 02:13 PM
Steve amazing isn't it!! God help us all.
Posted by: Wild Thing at June 22, 2007 02:14 PM
Mark, LMAO ..."caretakers of all their homes.".....oh gbosh now I could almost go for that. Have the prisoners even live in guest houses on the propety of Pelosi, Kennedy, Reid etc. all of them and see how safe they feel. heh heh.
Posted by: Wild Thing at June 22, 2007 02:16 PM
Rick, I wonder too. It is like everything that has been laying low from suggestions is now being brought up to do it. Like well if we are going to kill off this country let's do it the full blown way. That's what it feels like to me, they want to kill off completely what America has stood for, how we have done things, our laws, our security, our Constitution the whole shabang.
Posted by: Wild Thing at June 22, 2007 02:20 PM
Jack, hahahhaah love that idea...."Close Gitmo and move them all to Hyannis Port and Chappaquidick where terrorists are loved and revered."..... Gosh I would love to have every one of them at Kennedy's door.
Posted by: Wild Thing at June 22, 2007 02:22 PM
RWC, that is a heck of an article, unusual for the MSM.
I suppose we could turn the detainees loose in the UN building and make sure they stay there.
Posted by: TomR at June 22, 2007 03:36 PM
I just caught something said by White House spokes(man)that they are, "Going to shut it down in a responsible way", does that imply that they will all get Green cards ?
And would a Irresponsible way mean they were all shot trying to escape, ala the 'Great Escape'
'How many wounded ...?'
'None '
I am inclined to go with the irresponsible method, but afterall these guys are the pillars of Islamic society.
Posted by: Mark at June 22, 2007 05:30 PM
Mark oh wow, they will do it then. I pray so much they don't bring them to our country, our lawyers will jump on it, money to be paid to the lawyers probably by our tax dollars I would think. OH man just typing this makes my blood boil and also a fear too of these terrorists out on our streets.
Posted by: Wild Thing at June 23, 2007 01:16 AM
