WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama said yesterday some of the terror suspects held at Guantanamo would be brought to prisons in the United States despite fierce opposition in Congress. He promised to work with lawmakers to develop a system for imprisoning detainees who can’t be tried and can’t be turned loose.
Obama conceded that some would end up in US prisons and insisted those facilities were tough enough to house even the most dangerous inmates.
“There are no neat or easy answers here,” Obama said in a speech in which he pledged anew to “clean up the mess at Guantanamo” that he said the nation had inherited from the Bush administration.
The president spoke one day after the US Senate voted resoundingly to deny him money to close the prison in Cuba, in a rare, bipartisan setback for the popular president that complicates his efforts to persuade skeptical allies to accept some of Guantanamo’s detainees.
The vote also marked a victory for Senate Republicans, who have turned their attention to Obama’s foreign and terrorism policies after failing to make headway in criticizing his economic program. They have dubbed the decision to close Guantanamo a security misstep, an argument that appears to have swayed Democrats.
But Obama said he was still determined, and he decried arguments used against his plans.
“We will be ill-served by the fear-mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue,” he declared. Speaking at the National Archives, Obama said he would not do anything to endanger the American people.
The administration has also decided to put a “high value” detainee on trial in New York City despite resistance from some in Congress. Attorney General Eric Holder announced early yesterday that Ahmed Ghailani will be sent to New York City for trial, which would make him the first Guantanamo detainee brought to the US and the first to face trial in a civilian criminal court.
Ghailani was indicted by a federal grand jury in New York for the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Africa — attacks that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. It was not immediately clear when the transfer would occur.
Obama noted that roughly 500 detainees already have been released by the Bush administration. There are 240 at Guantanamo now.
He said opening and continuing the military prison “set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world.”
“I can tell you that the wrong answer is to pretend like this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo,” Obama said. “As president, I refuse to allow this problem to fester. Our security interests won’t permit it. Our courts won’t allow it. And neither should our conscience.”
Obama said his administration was in the process of studying each of the remaining Guantanamo detainees “to determine the appropriate policies for dealing with them.” “Nobody has ever escaped from one of our ‘supermax’ prisons which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists,” Obama said.
Obama disclosed that administration lawyers had approved 50 detainees at Guantanamo for transfer to other countries. Even so, it was not clear how many countries were prepared to take them.
Obama stopped short of offering a clear answer on the key question of what to do with detainees who won’t be tried for war crimes but are likely to be held indefinitely.
He said his administration would “exhaust every avenue that we have” to prosecute detainees but there would still be some left “who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes” yet remain a threat.
Among these, he said, are prisoners who have expressed allegiance to Osama Bin Laden “or otherwise made it clear they want to kill Americans.” “So going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime” to handle such detainees “so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our constitution.”
The president again rejected the idea of an independent commission that would investigate the whole range of national security issues under the Bush administration.
