Charlie Savage, in the NYTimes:
In what the Pentagon called a “significant milestone” in the effort to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military announced Tuesday that the United States had transferred three Chinese detainees to Slovakia.
The three were the last of 22 ethnic Uighurs from China who were captured after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and taken to Guantánamo…
Their transfers to Slovakia, which the military said were voluntary, came days after Mr. Obama signed into law a new version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act. In that law, Congress extended restrictions on transferring Guantánamo detainees into the United States, but relaxed some restrictions on transferring them to other countries.
In a statement he issued when he signed the bill on Thursday, Mr. Obama reiterated his belief that closing the Guantánamo prison was a good policy and suggested vaguely that some of the transfer restrictions might be unconstitutional constraints on his powers, echoing assertions he has made when signing previous versions of the law.
“The detention facility at Guantánamo continues to impose significant costs on the American people,” Mr. Obama said. “I am encouraged that this act provides the executive greater flexibility to transfer Guantánamo detainees abroad, and look forward to working with the Congress to take the additional steps needed to close the facility.”
Limited as this is, it’s progress. For context, couple weeks ago, the Miami Herald‘s Carol Rosenberg, who’s probably done more reporting on the ground at Guantanamo than anyone, talked with Rachel Martin on NPR:
…MARTIN: As I understand it, there is a third group of people, those who have not been cleared for release but there’s not enough evidence to try them. How many are in that situation and what happens to them?
ROSENBERG: There’s 46 of them. They’re called the indefinite detainees, or, as we call them, the forever prisoners. People who the panels and the taskforce of the Obama administration concluded are the enemy, are dangerous but not necessarily guilty of a crime. And we’re holding them kind of as war prisoners. And what happens to them is case by case they’ll get review, and that they will have the opportunity to argue that they’re not the enemy. And there’s these parole panels just getting started in which the forever prisoner and his lawyer, if he has one, can go before a representative of the Pentagon, the Justice Department, Homeland Security, the State Department and make an argument. And they can conceivably get off that forever prisoner list but it’s a long, slow process. And those are the people who they would most like to move to the United States because those are the people who will be the hardest to get out of Guantanamo any other way.
MARTIN: Do you get a sense from those who work there and work on detainee issues that this is a prison that’s on its way to closing down? Is that the expectation?
ROSENBERG: No. When you go to Guantanamo – and I go about once a month – there’s really no sign that this is going out of business any time soon. It’s an unpopular mission. The soldiers have rotations lined up through, I don’t know how many years out, and they have built a sprawling infrastructure of prison camps and dining facilities and headquarters. And you come and go and there really is no sign that anyone there thinks that this is the last month or the last year of the detention center complex.
Keith G
Slow but very welcome progress.
gene108
Congressional opposition to closing GITMO is – I guess – the best unified bipartisan stand Congress can take in this day and age.
Corner Stone
The legacy of fear, and the cynical amping up of that fear for political gains, may be the longest lasting legacy of the GWB admin. Certainly for domestic political considerations.
max
Limited as this is, it’s progress.
Well, of a sort. It only took seven years to get all 22 Uighurs out. (And they were obviously not guilty of anything before we went into Iraq.)
max
[‘I’d say molasses slow but molasses is faster than that.’]
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Yanno, if there are people in Gitmo who we consider to be very dangerous but haven’t actually done anything, wouldn’t the best bet be to release them on parole in the US and keep a close eye on them with parole officers etc.? It would sure as hell be cheaper than keeping them at Gitmo.
Corner Stone
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
God in heaven.
? Martin
Am continuing my tradition of watching the Rose Bowl every 100 years.
Baud
billgerat
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Republican bedwetting has already prevented this.
MikeJ
@? Martin: I think Junior University is going to run away with it.
BillinGlendaleCA
@? Martin: It’s the law here in CA.
ETA: Being and alum of UCLA and UW, I have to support the PAC-
81012 team.Villago Delenda Est
Ah, Cardassian justice for all!
BillinGlendaleCA
@MikeJ: Someday if they’re really good they can become a real university as opposed to a Junior University.
Patrick
@billgerat:
Not just Republican bedwetting. Democratic senators like Bernie Sanders also voted against allowing prisoners to come to the US.
Keith G
Too bad we just can’t take the Uyghurs to the Kazakhstan/China border and wish them Allah’s protection as we send them on an eastward journey home.
The Uyghurs are China’s problem, a problem they have richly earned after a century of the most severe mistreatment.
watergirl
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I thought you were responding to commenter “Yanno”, and I couldn’t remember what comment Yanno had made, so I looked upthread for his/her comment. Hmm, comments 1-4 were not made by Yanno, so I was momentarily perplexed.
:: laughing at myself ::
watergirl
@BillinGlendaleCA: So why is the Big 10 still the big 10?
Villago Delenda Est
@watergirl:
“Yanno” = “Ya Know”, methinks.
ruemara
Good news indeed. I raise this glass o’cheap chard to the unintentional good being done by our feckless Congress.
eric
@Patrick: But he only did so because Sanders “gives beautiful speeches, but he is milquetoast oftentimes when it comes to execution.”
watergirl
I have been wondering for some time why President Obama can’t simply tear down the structures at Gitmo and let church or social justice groups build a lovely club med (or something) for the prisoners. Perhaps even the new pope could provide some funds.
The republicans could never stand for the prisoners being so well treated, so they would have to allow another course of action.
watergirl
@Villago Delenda Est: Yes, that’s where the laughing at myself part came in. I just thought I’d share my momentary lapse as a bit of humor.
Edit: Of course, I’m still laughing at this from yesterday, so perhaps I am just easily amused.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf3BNRF9ICc
Villago Delenda Est
@watergirl:
Well, the prisoners dine on lemon chicken all the time, so they can’t be experiencing any hardship, you know.
Professor
The USA, a supposed civilized country, could go to another sovereign country, abduct innocent people, tortured them and imprison them without any cause, and we shout out as GOOD NEWS from Guantanamo when some are released. I call that Shameful and barbaric. The world has lost all respect for the USA.
watergirl
@Villago Delenda Est: Maybe they could start releasing all the menus, showing prisoners dining on fine food in lovely restaurants. Seriously, there has to be a way to shame the cowardly senate into doing the right thing.
MikeJ
@Professor: So you’d be happier if they weren’t repatriated?
Patrick
@watergirl:
Until average people in this country lose their irrational fear for these prisoners, Congress will not do anything. I have seen people interviewed on TV about having them transferred to supermax prisons here in the US. No dice. People think they can somehow escape, eventhough it is extremely rare. Until people realize that they are not supermen who can somehow escape any type of prison wall, nothing will ever change for these people.
ruemara
@MikeJ: No, no. let’s go back in time and prevent them from being captured. And then, give them some barley juice and pomegranate smoothies with gluten free, dairy free nachos. Friends for life.
watergirl
@Patrick: Maybe I am not recalling this correctly, but I live in IL and I thought Durbin had it all lined up for one of our superman prisons to take them, and still the cowardly bastards in the senate couldn’t handle it.
Please break it to me gently if I have imagined the whole Durbin, IL superman prison thing.
Patrick
@watergirl:
I can’t speak to the Illinois thing. But there was also a supermax prison in Montana that was debated. And CBS or ABC were interviewing people in this small MT city as to what they thought about it. One woman that was interviewed who I will never forget, said she would be just terrified if they allowed the Gitmo prisoners to come to their prison. She had 2 children and would be just scared to death every night. That’s the irrational fear I am thinking of. As long as that exists, I don’t see Congress do anything courageously.
Davis X. Machina
@watergirl: Nope. The prison is in Thompson, Illinois.
normal liberal
@watergirl:
You aren’t imagining things – that was proposed, using a brand new facility that the state had decided not to open. (In the northwest part of the state, if memory serves. I want to say Freeport, but I may be thinking of some other attempt to rescue a small-town economy. Nope, just looked it up; the prison is in Carroll County.
As noted above, Congressional bed-wetting killed the idea by forbidding transfer of Gitmo detainees into the USA.
ETA several posts above beat me to it. There wasn’t much local opposition, because the local communities wanted the jobs the prison would create. The flip side of that is the local efforts in Livingston County to save the Pontiac prison, a primary employer.
watergirl
yay for my not being crazy! boo for living in a crazy upside-down world where the united states of america locks people up forever without a trial.
Omnes Omnibus
@watergirl: Just because you remembered this correctly doesn’t mean you aren’t crazy. Just sayin’.
Patrick
@normal liberal:
Locally (it is Rasmussen so take it for what its worth):
Fifty-one percent (51%) of Illinois voters oppose relocating some suspected terrorists from the Guantanamo prison camp in Cuba to a prison in their state.
Nationally:
A new poll released by Gallup shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea of closing the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba and moving terrorist suspects held there to prisons in the U.S.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-americans-overwhelmingly-oppose-gitmo-transfer/
burnspbesq
@Patrick:
From the time it opened until it was downgraded in 2006, the federal pen in Marion housed guys who are every bit as dangerous as any Gitmo detainee, and the good citizens of Illinois didn’t wet their pants about that. Curious, innit?
Patrick
@burnspbesq:
Indeed. I never understood the panic about the Gitmo detainees, but no concern whatsoever for equally bad guys here in the US.
Culture of Truth
This just goes to show that once you create a policy / situation to allegedly deal with “terrorism” it’s almost imposssible to back off of it, no matter how nonsensical it becomes, to the point of aruging our supermax prisons of incapable of handling the superpowers of some kid picked up in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@burnspbesq: @Patrick: Easy. Our cowardly Congress conned Joe Public into believing these guys were a mashup of the Legion of Doom, Dr. Doom, the mirror universe version of the Doom Patrol, and Darth Vader on cracked.
Amended to add:is it really conning when the mark is so eager to believe the lie from the start?
billB
Jeebus H. Kheeerist, Barry, do you not see this as the shtstain on your presidency. In a decade they will laugh at you as the biggest loser of all time. You, Barry, are the bloody executive! Close it today, Jan one 2014.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@billB:
And send them where?
Omnes Omnibus
@billB: Obama tried. Congress fucked him. Deal with facts.
gratuitous
@Professor: Yeah, I’m so old I remember when the United States used to condemn other countries for this behavior, stockpile nukes on the off chance we might get to use them against those godless commies, and talked about our country’s respect for the rule of law even if we didn’t always practice it. At least we tried to present ourselves as a beacon of justice, and did what we could to follow that ideal.
Nowadays? Aw, fuck it. Maybe the Stasi and the gulags weren’t such bad ideas after all . . .
bs
Well, we have our own gulag, and our own stasi now. Turns out the Soviets were never the enemy, they were the competition.
bs
wo bushi weiwuer
@Keith G: Is this post satire? Sarcasm? How on earth can you say these dudes who were fleeing ethnic/religious persecution deserve to be forced back into the PRC?