Guantanamo Approaching Shutdown, Measure Approved for Transferring Prisoners

“An important step toward closing down Guantanamo”: This is how Barack Obama saluted the measure — part of the National Defense Authorization Act, the Department of Defense 2014 budget approved Thursday — from Hawaii, where he is spending his end of year vacation. Thanks to the agreement between Democrats and Republicans, at this point, it should be easier to free the Cuban prison of the better part of the 185 prisoners who remain detained there. However, warns the president, the motion by Congress is not enough. “The White House should have senior authority in deciding when and how to prosecute the prisoners,” wrote Obama.

During these years, Guantanamo has been the political subject most capable of unleashing polemics and tensions between the White House and Congress. From the first day of his presidency, Obama declared that the prison would be shut down.

“It is expensive. It is inefficient. It damages the international standing of the United States,” Obama would often say to justify his request. Congress always flat out refused, denying him the funds needed to transfer the prisoners and continually reaffirming the need to keep the prison going as a citadel in the fight against terrorism.

This time things turned out differently. Perhaps because other things appeared as priorities in defending the United States — the Iranian nuclear dispute, the question of the stupor and sexual violence among troops, the spying of the National Security Agency, the withdrawal from Afghanistan — the Guantanamo question lost the better part of its polemical fire, and Democrats and Republicans were able to reach an agreement. The measure approved Thursday will give the White House senior authority in approving the transfer of prisoners to their countries of origin. Until now repatriations were particularly difficult. For example, the U.S. could not transfer prisoners to countries accused of being “sponsors of terrorism” — this excluded Syrians from transfer — nor even to those countries considered unprepared to manage prisoners efficiently (this excluded Yemenis, who are the largest group in Guantanamo).

At this point, the Obama administration will have the freedom to negotiate the return of prisoners with individual nations.

“About half of the 158 current prisoners should be home in about a month,” said Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee.

The other half, which Obama would like to transfer to American prisons so they can be tried by regular courts, remains problematic. However, representatives and senators remain inflexible on this point. “There is no other place besides Guantanamo to hold dangerous terrorists,” said James Inhofe, a Republican, who alongside his colleagues (especially Republicans but also Democrats) holds that the presence of alleged terrorists awaiting justice on American soil could stir up a disturbance, and in some cases even constitute a threat to the security of local communities.

Obama has always been firmly opposed to this thesis, repeating that judging those accused of terrorism in U.S. federal courts “is a legitimate tool, efficient and powerful for defending the nation.” Faced with new resistance in Congress, at this time, Obama has even openly threatened to resort to his own powers to surpass opposition in Congress.

“The executive power should have the authority to decide where and when to judge the prisoners of Guantanamo,” he wrote from Hawaii.

Beyond the official declarations that were more or less threatening, the administration nevertheless seems to have chosen precisely the path of reserved negotiation with the countries of origin in order to repatriate the prisoners. Recently, two Saudi prisoners, two Algerians and two Sudanese have gone home. Slowly and quietly, Guantanamo is thus emptying. Furthermore, that its opening was a mistake is something now said by many. In an article published by the Detroit Free Press, retired Army Gen. Michael Lehert, the first Guantanamo commander, wrote that the prison “should have never been opened” and that many prisoners “should have never been sent to Guantanamo … there was not adequate proof to connect them to war crimes, and so they were of little value in terms of intelligence gathering.”