WASHINGTON, 29 May 2008 — Here’s a good example of a “sticky wicket.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a Senate committee the search for a way to close the Guantanamo detainee prison has stalled because other nations are refusing to accept their detainees.
The former CIA chief said the effort had run up against several major problems.
The US is prepared to send “about 70” detainees to their home countries but the governments involved “either won’t accept them or we are concerned that the home government will let them loose once we return them.”
Some 270 detainees remain in Guantanamo Bay and more than 500 have left since the site opened in January 2002, according to the US military.
Gates said in 2007 he would look for ways to close the prison, but he told the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee last week his inter-agency search has been frustrated by what he called a “not-in-my-back-yard problem.”
The defense secretary told senators he has discussed the issue with members of Congress and Bush Administration officials, including Attorney General Michael Mukasey, but he hasn’t “found anybody who wants these terrorists to be placed in a prison in their home state.”
As a consequence, “The brutally frank answer is that we are stuck, and we’re stuck in several ways” with the Guantanamo facility,” Gates told the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Gates referred to former Guantanamo detainee Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi, who killed himself in a suicide attack last month in Mosul, Iraq, after being released from Guantanamo in 2005.
Ajmi was not the first former detainee reported to have returned to the battlefield after leaving Guantanamo. Pentagon officials say that more than 10 people have been killed or captured in fighting after being released from the detention facility.
The US has also failed to come up with a solution for inmates who cannot be freed for security reasons but will not be charged under the military commissions system for trying war crimes suspects, Gates said.
Human rights groups and many governments, including allies of the US, have called on the Bush Administration to close the prison, alleging that detainees endure numerous human rights violations amounting to torture. Other charge that it violates international legal standards and harms America’s standing in the world.
After he took over from Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in late 2006 and assigned officials to look into the issue, Gates has said he wanted to close the site, where inmates have been held for years without trial.
Gates also discussed the fiscal 2009 Defense Department budget in his appearance before the subcommittee.
He called the rising cost of health care “one area that not only concerns us but where we believe have to get under control.”
He said there is a $1 billion shortage in the Pentagon’s proposed fiscal 2009 health-care budget, which, he said, it hopes to fill with a small increase in premiums for younger veteran retirees.
Veterans groups and others so far have succeeded in persuading Congress not to accept the price hike.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-S.D., asked Gates why the US will still be paying $2.5 billion to train and equip Iraqi security forces next year, when the Baghdad government will earn $70 billion from oil exports this year.
