Guantanamo

Barack Obama, detainees, Gitmo, Guantanamo, indefinite detention, Military Commissions

Gitmo task force report: work half done; federal courts preferred; Congress reworking Military Commissions

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The Obama administration’s Guantanamo task force is far behind in determining the disposition of the 229 remaining detainees being held at Gitmo. As officials work with a very few in Congress to reach agreement on revisions to the Military Commissions Act, the task force received two and six-month deadline extensions today while presenting President Barack Obama an interim report on the due date of the final report. The language within it reflects the President’s desire to move as many cases to federal court as possible yet indicates rules of evidence may preclude that choice and the task force cannot easily reconcile administration views on “rule of law” with the Laws of War.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Six months before President Barack Obama’s self-imposed deadline to close the controversial detention center at Guantanamo Bay, senior administration officials said more European allies are offering to accept detainees from there, despite Congress’s refusal to allow any such transfers to the U.S.

But serious obstacles remain if the president’s closure deadline is to be met, including resolving which prisoners might be detained indefinitely without trial, where they would be detained once Guantanamo is shut and where future military commissions might be held. One presidential task force on future interrogation policies on Monday asked for a two-month extension for submitting a report that was originally due on Tuesday. Another task force on future detention policy asked for a six-month extension for its report.

“These are hard, complicated and consequential decisions,” one senior administration official said. “Let’s not kid ourselves.”

The Los Angeles Times reports al Qaeda’s lawyers are not happy:

9/11, al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Keep Gitmo Open, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Military Commissions, Pentagon, September 11, World Trade Center

9-11 families pressure Obama to keep Guantanamo prison open

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Writing for the McClatchy Newspapers, Carol Rosenberg further reports on the reactions of 9/11 family members who this past week observed the Military Commission hearings of high-value al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo:

Heartbroken survivors of the 9-11 attacks have emerged as a key constituency in the campaign to stop Obama from making good on his Jan. 22 executive order to empty the prison camps and revise the controversial military trials within a year.

Obama argued that Guantanamo has become an anti-American recruiting tool in the arsenal of al-Qaida. Moreover, he said military commissions designed in the Bush years lacked fundamental U.S. guarantees of due process and were at odds with American values.

“There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world,” he said in a May 21 address to the nation on terrorism policy. “Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al-Qaida that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law.”

But, three times stretching back to the candidacies of Obama and Sen. John McCain, who each pledged to “close Guantanamo,” the Pentagon has brought parents, siblings and children of 9-11 victims to watch the attack’s alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and co-conspirators defend themselves at a court designed by Bush administration officials to mete out military justice.

Three times, the court watchers described the antics of the confessed al-Qaida acolytes as making a mockery of American justice.

And three times, they held news conferences urging the White House to keep the prison camps open and war court here intact as the speediest, safest way to close the books on the former CIA-held captives accused of mass murder in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

“I did not come with a vengeful heart,” said Pompano Beach, Fla., mother Janet Roy, whose firefighter brother, William Burke, died saving others at the World Trade Center. “I came to see for myself … I know the right thing is being done here, in a carefully thought-out manner.”

Theirs is a powerful and emotional message from a sampling of victims’ kin, chosen by lottery, escorted to this base gingerly and with sensitivity to the families of the 2,974 people killed in al-Qaida’s coordinated hijackings that sent planes plunging into the Pentagon, Twin Towers and a Pennsylvania field.

READ THE REST, keep Gitmo open, and keep al Qaeda’s killers out the United States and our federal court system.