Archives for 2014

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.

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