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The President deserves full credit for a succinct explanation of why the situation at Guantanamo is a humanitarian disaster and a foreign policy embarrassment. (I couldn’t find an embed containing just the President’s comments; the official White House channel includes only the full 48-minute press conference — relevant portion starts at 25:20.) If nothing else, he has brought a new level of attention to the plight of detainees.
There’s a seven-minute PBS Newshour clip at the end of this post, with Charlie Savage providing some background to Gwen Ifill. Further discussion:
Amy Davidson at the New Yorker does the math on “A Hundred Hungry Men at Guantanamo“:
… A hundred prisoners are taking part in the hunger strike at Guantánamo now—a hundred angry men, or ones who are in a state of despair. There may be more, since that is the military’s count, and the lawyers for the prisoners have been saying for some time that the number is higher. There are not, it should be said, a hundred prisoners at Guantánamo who even the United States government considers dangerous enemy combatants; that means it’s a mathematical necessity that there are hunger-strikers who shouldn’t be there, either. Eighty-six prisoners have been cleared for release, one way or the other, many of them years ago now, but have not been released. (For many, the problem is that they are from Yemen.) That leaves just eighty. They are roughly divided between those the Administration says it might bestir itself to bring a case against someday, and those it acknowledges it doesn’t have enough evidence against, but finds somehow unsettling, and so is locking up anyway. There are only six prisoners who are now facing military commissions. A month ago, there were only thirty-one hunger strikers by the military’s count, or five times as many as those being tried. Now the ratio is more than sixteen to one….
Adam Serwer at Mother Jones, “Can Obama Stop the Uprising at Gitmo?“:
… Congress has done everything it can short of making transfers illegal to prevent the administration from sending Gitmo detainees elsewhere. Current law states that the secretary of defense has to certify that, among other requirements, the detainee being transferred won’t ever pose a threat in the future, which is ultimately not something the administration can control. Although the rate of former Gitmo detainees who later join terrorist groups is relatively low—and lower than it was during the Bush administration—any failure would be politically toxic, and the certification process ensures that the Obama administration would bear full responsibility. “The restrictions have made it extraordinarily difficult, and that the process is fraught with legal hurdles,” said a defense official. “Some of the things that we are asked to do simply cannot be verified.”…
Long Reads: President Obama Still Wants to Close GuantanamoPost + Comments (60)