Groups Caution Obama Not Breaking from Bush Secrecy

By Edith Honan | Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Civil liberties experts say ongoing cases related to torture and rendition are testing the Obama administration’s assertion it will be more open and transparent than the Bush administration.

Since taking office on January 20, President Barack Obama has extended Bush-era secrecy over documents authorizing waterboarding and other controversial interrogation techniques, and has resisted an appeal by a terrorism suspect seeking to challenge his arrest and detainment.

“It’s not the clean break that people were looking for,” said Steven Aftergood, who heads the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy. “It’s also not the last word.”

Obama has been in office less than a month and several Department of Justice appointees have not yet been confirmed.

But rights groups are already worried Obama will not live up to campaign promises to create a transparent government in contrast to the secrecy of George W. Bush …

Continue Reading

Court Reverses Ruling Bringing 17 Detainees to US

By MATT APUZZO | Associated Press

WASHINGTON – A U.S. appeals court reversed a ruling Wednesday that would have transferred 17 Guantanamo Bay detainees, none of whom are labeled enemy combatants, to the United States.

The ruling casts further uncertainty on the fate of the Turkic-speaking Muslims from western China. Because there is no evidence they plotted or fought against the United States, the government has no authority to hold them at Guantanamo Bay, but deciding what to do with the men has been a diplomatic problem for years.

The military says the men have ties to a militant group that demands separation from China. The United States will not release the Uighurs to their home for fear they will be tortured. Earlier this month, Beijing warned other countries not to accept the men, creating a diplomatic roadblock to President Barack Obama’s plan to close the facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled in October that, since they are not enemy combatants, the Uighurs must be released to the United States. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned that ruling.

Only the executive branch, not the courts, can make decisions about immigration, the appeals court said. That fact doesn’t change, the court said, simply because the United States has held the men for years without charge.

“Such sentiments, however high-minded, do not represent a legal basis for upsetting settled law and overriding the prerogatives of the political branches,” Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote …

Continue Reading

Top Navy Official Reviews Operations at Guantánamo

BY CAROL ROSENBERG | Miami Herald

A fact-finding team led by a senior Navy official was on the ground at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Wednesday, checking the prison camps’ compliance with the Geneva Conventions by order of President Barack Obama.

Obama set a 30-day deadline to review conditions at the controversial 7-year-old detention center, which he has ordered emptied of war on terror detainees by this time next year.

The Pentagon in turn dispatched Navy Adm. Patrick M. Walsh, vice chief of operations, to the camp, with a small team of fewer than a dozen fact finders.

”He is here,” Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum reported from the remote base. “We’re providing support as needed.” …

Continue Reading

Related News: Former USS Cole Commander Slams Obama on Guantanamo

Cheney Warns of New Attacks

Cheney’s dramatic language came while speaking in his office in a non-descript suburban office building in McLean.

By JOHN F. HARRIS & MIKE ALLEN & JIM VANDEHEI | Politico

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans—and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team—understand.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration—“that’s about 11 or 12 percent”—have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.”

The 200 or so inmates still there, he claimed, are “the hard core” whose “recidivism rate would be much higher.” He called Guantanamo a “first-class program,” and “a necessary facility” that is operated legally and with better food and treatment than the jails in inmates native countries …

Continue Reading

Related News: Former USS Cole Commander Slams Obama on Guantanamo

UPDATE: Panetta Takes on Cheney at Hearing

Former USS Cole Commander Slams Obama on Guantanamo

By Carol Rosenberg | Miami Herald

The former commander of the USS Cole, the American war ship that was struck by a suicide boat in Yemeni waters more than eight years ago, on Thursday slammed President Barack Obama’s orders to close the Guantanamo detention center and reassess the prisoners being held there.

”We shouldn’t make policy decisions based on human rights and legal advocacy groups,” retired U.S. Navy Cmdr. Kurt Lippold said in a telephone interview. “We should consider what is best for the American people, which is not to jeopardize those who are fighting the war on terror — or even more adversely impact the families who have already suffered loses as a result of the war.”

Lippold was responding to the decision by a U.S. military judge in Guantanamo to reject a request by Pentagon lawyers to delay next week’s scheduled arraignment of Abd el Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian who’s charged with helping orchestrate the October 2000 suicide bombing of the Cole. The bombing killed 17 U.S. sailors.

In his ruling, the judge, Army Col. James Pohl, said a delay in Nashiri’s arraignment would deny the public’s interest in a speedy trial. He also said nothing that took place at the arraignment would prevent the Obama administration from deciding to deal with Nashiri in a forum other than the military commission now set to hear his case.

Shortly after becoming president, Obama ordered the Pentagon to request delays in all trials pending at Guantanamo for 120 days so that his administration could study the cases against each of the 250 or so men held there as suspected terrorists and decide how to proceed in each case. Obama and his appointee to be the Pentagon’s top legal officer have said they favor trials in civilian courts for terrorism suspects, if possible.

Other military judges granted the delay, including in the case of five men charged with plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. Family members of the 9/11 victims who were in Guantanamo to witness proceedings in that case expressed outrage at the decision.

On Thursday, Lippold called Pohl’s decision “a victory for the 17 families of the sailors who lost their lives on the USS Cole over eight years ago.”

The decision, however, stunned officials at the Department of Defense and White House, which had just begun to grapple with Obama’s order to freeze the war court and empty the detention center within a year …

Continue Reading

Related News: Voters Give Mixed Reviews to Closing of Guantanamo Prison

UPDATE: Charges to be Dropped in Terror Trial

Voters Give Mixed Reviews to Closing of Guantanamo Prison

Guantanamo Bay Map

Rasmussen Reports

U.S. voters are closely divided over whether the government should close the terrorist prison camp at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba.

Forty-four percent (44%) agree with President Obama’s decision to close the camp within the next year, while 42% disagree in a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Fourteen percent (14%) are not sure which is the best course to follow.

In late November of last year, just 32% of voters said the Guantanamo prison camp should be closed. Forty-nine percent (49%) opposed closing the prison despite growing complaints by human rights groups and many foreign countries.

Democrats have changed their minds far more than Republicans. In November, 47% of Democrats favored closing the Guantanamo prison, while 79% of Republicans disagreed. Now 71% of Democrats agree with Obama’s decision to close it, with 68% of GOP voters opposed. The views of unaffiliated voters’ are little changed.

Sixty-eight percent (68%) of voters, however, still say safety is more important to them than fairness in determining where the terrorist suspects should be imprisoned. Just 19% put more emphasis on fairness, while 13% are not sure which is more important. These numbers are virtually unchanged from the findings in November …

Continue Reading

Related News: Safe To Release?

Safe To Release?

A new Pentagon report may complicate Obama’s plans for Gitmo.

By Michael Isikoff | NEWSWEEK

The Pentagon is preparing to declassify portions of a secret report on Guantanamo detainees that could further complicate President Obama’s plans to shut down the detention facility.

The report, which could be released within the next few days, will provide fresh details about 62 detainees who have been released from Guantanamo and are believed by U.S. intelligence officials to have returned to terrorist activities, according to two Pentagon officials who asked not to be identified talking about a document that is not yet public. One such example, involving a Saudi detainee named Said Ali Al-Shihri, who was released in 2007, received widespread attention Friday when Pentagon officials publicly confirmed that he has recently reemerged as a deputy commander of Al Qaeda in Yemen. Al-Shihri, once known publicly only as Guantanamo detainee No. 372, is suspected of involvement in a thwarted attack on the U.S. embassy in Yemen last September.

The decision to release additional case studies from the report is in effect a warning shot to the new president from officials at the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies who are skeptical about some of his plans. Some Pentagon officials, including ones sympathetic to Obama’s goals, note the political outcry would be deafening should another example like Al-Shihri become public six months from now—and it turns out to be a Guantanamo detainee released under Obama’s watch rather than by the Bush administration. “The last thing Obama wants is for one of these guys [at Guantanamo] to get released and return to killing Americans,” said one senior Defense Department official who asked not to be identified because of the political sensitivities.

Continue Reading

Related News: Guantánamo Detainee Resurfaces in Terrorist Group

Jumping the Gun?

Fox News addresses the question, Is Obama really ending the War on Terror?

Watch Video

Related News: See Guantánamo Detainee Resurfaces in Terrorist Group

Guantánamo Detainee Resurfaces in Terrorist Group

By Robert F. Worth | International Herald Tribune

BEIRUT: The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order that President Barack Obama signed that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by a U.S. counterterrorism official. “They’re one and the same guy,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity because he was discussing an intelligence analysis. “He returned to Saudi Arabia in 2007, but his movements to Yemen remain unclear.”

The development came as Republican legislators criticized the plan to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in the absence of any measures for dealing with current detainees. But it also helps explain why the new administration wants to move cautiously, taking time to work out a plan to cope with the complications …

Continue Reading