detainees

Barack Obama, detainees, Gitmo, Guantanamo, terror, Yemen

Obama shopping only 27 of 244 Gitmo detainees for release

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According to Hungary’s Budapest Times today, President Barack Obama is only seeking nations to accept 27 of the remaining 244 detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay:

Another meeting was held between deputy Foreign Minister Marta Fekszi Horvath and US Ambassador to Hungary April H. Foley on Hungary’s possible reception of former Guantanamo prisoners, Jan Krc, press attache of the US Embassy in Budapest, told MTI on Tuesday. Marta Fekszi Horvath told MTI earlier in the day that currently 27 inmates were waiting for reception [emphasis added mine] in Guantanamo, and the maximum Hungary would receive is one or two. Hungary wants to wait and see the results of the negotiations of the European Union’s justice and refugee commissioners and the Czech foreign minister in Washington on March 16, on the reception of Guantanamo prisoners, Horvath said. There is no uniform standpoint within the EU on the issue, Horvath said, adding that the former Guantanamo inmates will likely not be granted refugee status in Hungary. Instead, they would receive a special status, which would not allow them to get travel documents, and the authorities would regularly inspect them, she said.

If Mr. Hovath is correct, President Obama is considering what to do with 217 detainees, how many to prosecute, indefinitely detain, or clear for release. From that number, it is not yet clear what the adminstration plans to do with the 97 Yemenis held at Gitmo, including 2 high-value detainees. On January 26, 2009, the Long War Journal reported:

President Saleh announced that the US will repatriate 94 Yemeni detainees within three months. Yemen is building a rehabilitation center with US assistance, and the FBI this week delivered a half million dollars worth of biometric collection equipment including mobile fingerprint sets. President Saleh said Saturday that Yemen had rejected a US plan to release the 94 to Saudi Arabia for rehabilitation. In a Jan. 23 interview, US Ambassador to Yemen, Steven Seche noted, “The Yemeni government legitimately can cite capacity issues that hinder its effectiveness against terrorists.”

If both reports are accurate, that leaves the dispositions of an addtional 123 terrorists to be determined.

Afghanistan, al Qaeda, Debra Burlingame, detainees, European appeasers, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Pakistan

French Justice: Train with al-Qaeda, Get Out of Jail Free

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Please see this important piece by John Rosenthal, revealing the outrageous consequences of repatriating detainees to European appeasers:

Last Tuesday, a Parisian appeals court overturned the convictions of five former Guantanamo inmates who had been found guilty on terrorist conspiracy charges in 2007. The development should give pause to wonder not only about the wisdom of plans to transfer Guantanamo inmates to European countries (see my earlier New Majority piece here), but more fundamentally about the very idea of treating the “disposition” of Guantanamo inmates as an issue for civilian courts, whether in the US or abroad. The five French Gitmo detainees were repatriated to France in 2004 and 2005. They were tried and convicted on charges of belonging to a “criminal association formed for the purpose of undertaking a terrorist act.” The definition of this crime in French law is exceptionally broad. Not only does it permit what are, in effect, preventive detentions, but a suspect may be convicted by virtue of merely having had “regular contact” [relations habituelles] with one or more other persons who form part of such a terrorist enterprise.

The five former Gitmo detainees, however, did not merely have casual contact with members of a terror group. All five have admitted to receiving military training in Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. They were taken prisoner in the Afghan-Pakistani border region in late 2001, while fleeing the Battle of Tora-Bora. The five men — Brahim Yadel, Mourad Benchellali, Nizar Sassi, Redouane Khalid, and Khaled ben Mustafa — have provided various far-fetched alibis that are supposed to explain how they could have found themselves training in Qaeda camps, but still somehow not be implicated in Qaeda’s wars. Undoubtedly, the most amusingly incongruous of these alibis comes to us by way of none other than the New York Times, which in June 2006 published an “op-ed” signed by Mourad Benchellali. In the article, Benchellali claims that he left France for Afghanistan in early summer 2001 to go on a “dream vacation.”

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