Obama defends emptying Guantanamo

From TheMatadorOnline.com newsroom:

By Carol Rosenberg

McClatchy Newspapers

(MCT)

MIAMI _ President Barack Obama said in an interview broadcast Sunday the Bush administration did not properly vet Guantanamo detainees before freeing them. Still, he defended his plan to empty the prison camps to mend global relations.

Obama made the remarks in excerpts released by CBS "60 Minutes" a week after former Vice President Dick Cheney said the president's plans to dismantle GOP-led detainee policy were risky.

"How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney?" Obama retorted. "It hasn't made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment."

The Bush administration sent to other countries some 500 detainees in its periodic rounds of releases since opening the controversial prison camps in January 2002. The Obama White House has approved release of only one so far from Guantanamo _ a former British resident who was sent to London.

Justice Department officials are now sifting the files of the 220 war on terror captives at Guantanamo to decide who can be sent home, who can be resettled in third countries and who should face trials.

Spokesmen for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have claimed a sizable recidivist rate of former detainees who have rejoined the Taliban or attacked U.S. forces or allies. In a few instances, Pentagon spokesmen have cited specific cases, but mostly pointed to secret intelligence reports and scarce public proof.

"There is no doubt that we have not done a particularly effective job in sorting through who are truly dangerous individuals...to make sure they are not a threat to us," said Obama.

But he said his predecessor's policy of indefinite detention at Guantanamo without trial was "unsustainable."

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Only a few dozen have been charged in the now frozen war court the Bush administration championed. Of the three who were convicted _ Osama bin Laden's driver and media secretary and an Australian foot soldier _ two have been set free in Australia and Yemen.

Obama has said he prefers traditional prosecutions for which cases can be built in U.S. courts _ an approach that Cheney cast as an effort to transform war policies into law enforcement practices.

Cheney's remarks on last Sunday's CNN broadcast sparked a new round of national debate on the future of the prison camps.

A former Bush appointee, retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, reignited a feud with the former vice president by reminding on a Web site that Bush-era intelligence suggested some at Guantanamo are innocent.

The Obama administration has been steadily breaking with Bush detainee policy since the president signed an Executive Order instructing his government to empty the prison camps within his first year in office.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who is leading the Cabinet level review of what to do with the detainees, toppled one taboo last week:

He told reporters he could imagine the U.S. resettling on American soil some Muslims from China who had been cleared of being "enemy combatants," but cannot go home from Guantanamo for fear of religious persecution in their communist homeland.

Gates, a holdover from the Bush years, had urged legislation that banned ex-Guantanamo captives from being settled in the United States.

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© 2009, The Miami Herald.

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