Joe Biden Hopes to "Show Some Progress" on Closing GITMO

According to NBC News today, Biden quietly moves to start closing Guantánamo ahead of 20th anniversary of 9/11:

The administration hopes to transfer a handful of the remaining terrorism suspects to foreign countries, the people familiar with the discussions said, and then persuade Congress to permit the transfer of the rest — including 9/11 suspects — to detention on the U.S. mainland. Biden hopes to close the facility by the end of his first term, the people familiar with the discussions said.

Obama made a very unquiet attempt to close GITMO, and do you remember what happened with that?

Congress, however, resisted the [Obama plan to] transfer of detainees to the U.S. The House and the Senate rejected funding for the move and also blocked the transfers, with many Democrats voting against the Obama administration's plans.

You can say that again, NBC News. Congress couldn't shut that down fast enough. Even Bernie Sanders voted to keep GITMO in Cuba. 

Finally, in the last two paras, NBC gets down to the real story.

At a minimum, people familiar with administration discussions said, the Biden White House hopes to show some progress on closing Guantánamo by the 20th anniversary of 9/11 ... "People are starting to focus on it more," a person familiar with the discussions said.

Oh, so he just wants to show progress on closing GITMO, not to be confused with making progress on closing GITMO. That makes sense.

Obama's problem was that he and his advisors evidently really believed there was some kind of consensus around closing GITMO, and he ran straight into a wall of opposition in Congress and with the public. 

Kudos to Joe for having a better grasp on that political reality.

Gitmo Joe: I'm Old Enough to Remember When ...

With the start of a new administration comes the restart of the old failed effort to close Gitmo. We already did that for Obama's eight years. But apparently that doesn't count, so now Joe Biden has to step up to the plate.

Biden launches review of Guantanamo prison, aims to close it before leaving office

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Biden administration has launched a formal review of the future of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, reviving the Obama-era goal of closing the controversial facility, a White House official said on Friday.

-- snip --

“The NSC will work closely with the Departments of Defense, State, and Justice to make progress toward closing the GTMO facility, and also in close consultation with Congress,” [National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne] added.

-- snip --

Of the prisoners who remain, nine have been charged or convicted by military commissions. The most notorious is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused Sept. 11 mastermind. About two dozen have not been charged but have been deemed too dangerous to release.

Joe's options on closing Gitmo seem to come down to a very few. He could execute the remaining detainees, unlawful combatants that they are, and then close Gitmo. (That's my choice.)

He could move them to other countries, but that would require willing countries, and we've run out of those.

He could move them to a prison in the U.S., but there is a law against that and absolutely zero political appetite to change that law. Hell, even Bernie Sanders voted to prohibit funding to transfer, release, or incarcerate detainees detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to or within the United States. Really, that makes it unanimous. Nobody who wishes to get elected or reelected in these United States will vote to move the Gitmo gang here.

He could prosecute them in the US, but that didn’t work out so well the one time it was tried (here). Oh, the guy was convicted on a couple counts, but was also acquitted of 224 individual counts of murder that he'd committed by conducting the bombings that destroyed the American Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. That outcome does not fill me with confidence that we could risk sending even the 9/11 planner to trial.

What to do, what to do?

Maybe Joe should do nothing; it's usually best. There is lots of good advice about that here: Will Joe Biden Repeat Obama’s Mistake?

Le Gîte Maux?

Will there be a Guantanamo-a-la-Franaise? Could be, if MP George Fenech gets his way. It would not be the first time France had a prison island, after all.

But as France struggles to adapt to the increased threat from jihadists, the French MP who led a parliamentary inquiry into the November terror attacks in Paris believes Ile de Ré should also welcome the country’s most dangerous jihadists.

George Fenech, MP for centre-right Les Republicains party, believes a Guantanamo à la Francaise could be set up on the island to house all those jihadists who are expected to return from fighting in Iraq and Syria.

"A French Guantanamo would be the simplest solution," said Fenech. "An institution dedicated to radicalised individuals would be a solution," he told right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles.

And Fenech believes the ideal place for an offshore prison would be Ile-de-Ré, where there is already a jail that needs renovating in the town of Saint-Martin de Ré.

Fenech says the prison could be adapted to house the “tidal wave” of radicalized fighters returning from the Middle East although the local tourist board and residents might have something to say about his plan.

The MP says he is concerned by the government’s lack of preparation for the impending return of hundreds of French jihadists if and when Isis are toppled.

-- Snip --

Fenech’s idea is not the only radical suggestion put forward by MPs since the deadly rampage in Nice.

Right wing MP Alain Marsaud wants a law passed to allow the French to carry arms in certain conditions and also suggests the creation of armed civilian defence patrols.

Other MPs have talked of arming police with rocket launchers in certain sensitive spots so rampaging lorries can be stopped, while some have talked about bringing back the death penalty.

I like the Gîte Maux idea far better than the one about rocket launchers.

Promises, Promises

This is a great compilation of President Obama's increasingly hollow promises (boasts? threats? pleas?) to close GITMO.

Of course, he can close it any time he likes. The only thing he can't do is bring the detainees to the United States, not so long as U.S. law prohibits that. But then, if he closed it, he'd have to dispose of the remaining detainees somehow or somewhere else, and that is a practical problem he is unable to solve.

Congress is highly unlikely to let him off the hook, given the large bipartisan consensus against bringing the detainees here. And that is not even considering the toxic relationship between Obama and Congress in this, his Lame Duck year.

What to do? I say, why not release and kill?

Not Yet Closing Time For GITMO

This week Congress voted down an amendment to the FY17 National Defense Authorization Act that would have struck out existing prohibitions on the use of funds to transfer terrorists housed at GITMO to the United States, or to construct or modify facilities in the U.S. to house detainees transferred from GITMO. The amendment was defeated 259-163 with 21 of the Noes coming from Democrats.

This defeat should not have come as a surprise to the author of the amendment, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who had tried it before with the same results.

As time runs out on the Obama administration, it is releasing GITMO detainees in a rush and sometimes without due regard for the safeguards that will be applied to releasees in their new locations. According to the administration's own reports to Congress, about one in three former detainees are known or suspected to have reengaged in terrorism. Such reckless disregard has created distrust between the administration and Congress that will be the kiss of death for any more Nadler amendments.

It is not yet closing time for GITMO, but Nadler can dream while he cries in his beer. Shall we open all the doors and let this bunch out into the world?

A Thought Experiment: Release All GITMO Detainees Today ...

... then kill them all with drones tomorrow. Well, why not? The Obama White House desperately wants to close GITMO - it's "not who we are" and a terrorist recruitment tool, etc. - but, at the same time, it seems to have no angst whatsoever about using its Disposition Matrix, Obama's secret Kill List, the Facebook of Death.

The Obama administration already hunts down and kills released detainees, like this one for instance, only not immediately and not en masse. If it's serious about emptying out GITMO, why not give mass targeted killing a chance? It would satisfy most critics on the right, and would not necessarily upset all the critics of GITMO on the left.

There are critics of drone warfare, to be sure. But many of the activists who oppose GITMO seem to be single-issue types who are so obsessed with the fact we hold detainees at all that they have no energy left for protesting the administration's practice of killing instead of capturing its enemies. Maybe a mass execution would come as a relief to them after the last seven years of frustration over Obama's many failed plans to close GITMO.

The most recent of those plans has the anti-GITMO groups fearing a bait-and-switch tactic, in which Obama would move detainees from Cuba to some new place in the U.S. but continue to hold them indefinitely. See this great piece by Spencer Ackerman: 'No one but himself to blame': how Obama's Guantánamo plans fell through :

As one of his first acts in January 2009, the president decreed that Guantánamo be closed within a year and set subordinates to work on the details. As Obama spoke of “responsibly” closing the facility, civil libertarians began to perceive a gap between what they meant by closing Guantánamo and what the White House meant.

They wanted the president to announce that he would try the long-held detainees in federal courts, then hold those convicted and release those acquitted or unable to stand trial because torture tainted the evidence against them. They also wanted him to forswear trying those charged in military commissions that the supreme court had junked in a 2008 ruling. Every such group, from the ACLU to Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch, understood the phrase “closing Guantánamo” to mean putting an end to those practices, which they contended had undermined longstanding US commitments to the rule of law and human rights.

-- snip --

The human rights groups so encouraged by Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo smelled a bait-and-switch. Even if Obama got what he wanted, he wouldn’t be closing the facility in any substantive fashion. The indefinite detentions without charge, the military commissions, everything, save torture, that made Guantanamo internationally infamous would live on, except this time closer to home.

The best thing in the article is this amazing quote that shows just how detached from reality professional activists can get. Referring to the resettlement to Bermuda of four Uighur detainees - those are fighters of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement who were captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan where they had been receiving training from Al-Qaeda - one activist had this fantastical vision of what might have been:

Cori Crider of the human rights group Reprieve, who has represented numerous Guantánamo detainees, considers the Uighur resettlement an early, unforced and underappreciated capitulation that sowed the seeds for further failure.

“Just think for a minute if those snapshots had been in America – if from spring ’09, everybody’s mental picture of ex-detainees was five dudes in T-shirts and hipster beards at a backyard barbecue. Everything later would have gone down differently,” Crider said.

The sight of ex-detainees at play in Bermuda so moved Ms. Crider that she wants to build the Uighurs a home and furnish it with love, grow apple trees and honey bees and snow white turtle doves. You know the song. Just change the lyrics to 'grow hipster beards, wear dirty tees, and grill halal kabobs.'

"Everything later would have gone down differently." What?? What color is the sky in Cori Crider's world? In what alternative universe would American voters have a mental picture of dudes with hipster beards when they see Islamic violent extremists, even ones like the Uighurs who only kill Chinese victims?

To share her fantasy, you would have to ignore a massive load of reality. There are practical obstacles to releasing detainees, such as Pentagon foot-dragging that has effectively sabotaged the release mechanism, something that will likely increase as time runs out on Obama's last term. But, more importantly, there is an overwhelming bipartisan political consensus against closing GITMO or bringing detainees to the U.S. You could start with the recent vote on the current defense spending bill, which contained provisions to prevent the transfer of detainees to the U.S. That bill passed the Senate by a vote of 91 to 3, and passed the House 370 to 58. When Obama vetoed the bill, Congress overrode his veto and kept the provisions against transfer.

The same thing happened back in 2009, when Democrats controlled Congress, and the administration wanted to bring detainees to the U.S. and put some of them on trial. That time even Bernie Sanders voted against the bill, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said this:

“You can’t put them in prison unless you release them [from GITMO],” he said. “We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”

There is no other issue on which so many of our elected representatives agree, and they agree emphatically. GITMO's detainees can't come here, so there will be no backyard barbecue photo-ops. Sorry Ms. Crider, but if you want a cute pet that will signal your virtue you should look into getting a rescue dog. 

So if transfer to the U.S. isn't politically possible, and if we've run out of foreign partners willing to accept more detainees, what can Obama do to make good on his Number 1 political promise of closing GITMO? Back to my thought experiment: since targeted killing using drones is a very feasible option for ex-detainees, as well as for the would-be detainees that we aren't trying to capture anymore, why not release and kill them?

For whatever reason, Official Washington does not have the same objection to extrajudicial killing that it does to detention, not even the objection that it is a cause of terrorist recruitment and radicalization. That is very puzzling to me, because drone warfare clearly is a tool for recruitment and radicalization. There is a broad consensus for that proposition, coming from drone operators themselves as well as from the ranks of senior U.S. military leaders and intelligence and counterterrorism officials and foreign policy experts. Yet, the administration drones on and on, seemingly with no qualms about counterproductive backlash or even the very iffy evidence that leadership decapitation is an effective strategy in the first place.

Why no qualms? I don't know, but maybe it's because the physical and mechanical distance between us and the victims makes drone warfare a political winner even when the victims are unintended (and there may be many unintended victims), while up-close-and-personal measures against detainees in our custody make us queasy.

It's crunch time on Obama's promise to close GITMO, and here's my contribution to the all-nighters his dwindling band of loyal staffers are no doubt having. Go to Pakistan, ask them to accept our ninety or so remaining detainees - the worst of whom, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attack, is their citizen anyway - and relocate them to North Waziristan where we can pick them off at our leisure.

Food for thought.

D'Oh! Released GITMO Prisoner Returns to Al-Qa'ida Leadership Role

Ode D'Oh! to the Sea

On Sunday, President Obama told CNN's Candy Crowley that he is "going to do everything I can to close" the detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Then, on Monday, the news broke that his Special Envoy charged with negotiating detainee transfers from GITMO is resigning. The resignation may or may not be due to disagreements with the Defense Department, as the New York Times speculated, but I don't suppose it bodes well for Obama's plan to close GITMO by transferring the remaining detainees to other countries.

Even worse, last Thursday the State Department announced that it has designated a Saudi national named Ibrahim al-Rubaysh, a former GITMO detainee who had been repatriated to Saudi Arabia in 2006, as a heavy hitter al-Qa'ida leader who is currently active in Yemen.

The Department of State has designated the Egyptian Ajnad Misr group, and Ibrahim al-Rubaysh, an al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) senior leader, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists under Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, which targets terrorists and those providing support to terrorists or acts of terrorism.

-- snip --

Ibrahim al-Rubaysh is a senior leader of AQAP, a designated FTO and Specially Designated Global entity. He serves as a senior advisor for AQAP operational planning and is involved in the planning of attacks. He has served as a senior AQAP sharia official since 2013, and as a senior AQAP sharia official, al-Rubaysh provides the justification for attacks conducted by AQAP. In addition, he has made public statements, including one in August 2014 where he called on Muslims to wage war against the United States. In addition, since October 14, 2014, Ibrahim al-Rubaysh has been subject to a five million dollar Reward for Justice [here].

We had the guy, but we let him go? Well, that's embarrassing. Especially considering that the U.S. military recommended Ibrahim al-Rubaysh for continued detention in a memo dated 30 November 2005, according to declassified records published in the New York Times [here]:

Executive Summary: Detainee is assessed as n Al-Qaida member who traveled to Afghanistan intent on training for jihad in Chechnya, but stayed and joined the Taliban. Detainee stayed in Al-Qaida guesthouses and attended that group's Al-Farouq terrorist training camp. He participated in hostilities in Tora Bora. Detainee is also linked to known Al-Qaida members. It is assessed this detainee is a MEDIUM risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies. JTF GTMO determined this detainee is of MEDIUM intelligence value.

Despite that assessment, we released Ibrahim al-Rubaysh just a few months later. Why be in a hurry to release a detainee who was an AQ member captured while escaping from Afghanistan, and who might pose a future threat to our interests?

Beats me. Maybe someone was overcome with emotion after reading his sappy poem "Ode to the Sea", which was published by the University of Iowa Press.

ODE TO THE SEA

By Ibrahim al-Rubaish

O sea, give me news of my loved ones.

Were it not for the chains of the faithless, I would have dived into you, And reached my beloved family, or perished in your arms.

And it goes on from there, a real tear-jerker about how the cruel Caribbean Sea was keeping him captive far from his loved ones.

Don't feel too sorry for poor Ibrahim. After the U.S. government unchained him in 2006, he left his beloved family behind in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia when he fled to Yemen to rejoin al-Qa'ida.

This experience with al-Qa'ida's poet-planner is bound to kill whatever appetite Congress may have had for further detainee releases. Will Obama actually close GITMO in his final quarter? Don't bet on it. 
  

Close GITMO? We've Heard That Song Before

Last Wednesday, Senator Dianne Feinstein tried to resuscitate a dead political issue by releasing a Government Accountability Office study on the feasibility of closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and transferring its inmates to prisons in the United States. She had commissioned the GAO study in 2008.

Why release the report now, three years after the expiration of the Obama administration's self-imposed deadline to close GITMO? Because, as she told the New York Times:

“This report demonstrates that if the political will exists, we could finally close Guantánamo without imperiling our national security.”

Really? Where does she think this political will might exist? Not in these United States, where both the House and the Senate passed bills to prohibit closure back in 2009, when that was still a live possibility. Passed them by overwhelming margins. Gallop polls back then found that 65 percent of Americans opposed moving GITMO prisoners to the U.S., and by even higher margins opposed moving the prisoners to their own states.  

One day after Senator Feinstein's trial balloon, another Senator introduced the latest amendment to prohibit closing GITMO:

The Senate late Thursday night approved a Republican amendment [to an annual defense authorization bill on the Senate floor this week] that would prohibit the transfer of terrorist detainees from Guantánamo Bay to U.S. prisons.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) introduced Amendment 3245, which would prevent the Department of Defense from using funds to move suspected terrorists from Gitmo facilities to prisons within the United States.

Kelly Ayotte is a Republican but the Senate is controlled by Democrats, and the amendment passed 54 to 41. Count that vote and see how much political will there is to close GITMO.

The defense authorization bill already contains a ban on transferring any more GITMO detainees to foreign countries. There's that political will thing, again.

Senator Feinstein might as well pull that trial balloon back down and put it away. 

Promises Don't GITMO Broken

This afternoon, the ACLU pointed out an ironic coincidence of timing:

On the same day that President Obama announced the launch of his 2012 reelection campaign, he abandoned one of his major promises from 2008.

Today, the Obama administration announced that it will prosecute the suspects accused of planning the 9/11 attacks in the Guantánamo military commissions system. This is a reversal from Attorney General Eric Holder's November 2009 announcement that the 9/11 defendants would be prosecuted in federal courts.

The ACLU has invested a lot of effort in closing GITMO on Obama's watch, and they must be feeling politically whip-lashed today.

Personally, I feel no grief whatsoever at the final collapse of that particular campaign promise.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Is Not Going Anywhere For A While

Here's another nail in the coffin of the administration's stated goal of closing Gitmo.

Congress's 2011 Full Year Funding Resolution, dated December 7, says:

(SEC. 1116) None of the funds made available in this or any prior Act may be used to transfer, release, or assist in the transfer or release to or within the United States, its territories, or possessions Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any other detainee who is not a United States citizen or a member of the Armed Forces of the United States; and is or was held on or after June 24, 2009, at the United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by the Department of Defense.

So neither KSM nor any other detainee will be transferred to the USA. And, after yesterday's report on the re-engagement of former detainees in terrorism, the administration would be on exceedingly thin ice if it transferred any more to other countries.

Read the whole resolution here.

Gitmo Catch-and-Release Confirmed

The Director of National Intelligence released this report tonight. The key paragraph reads:

As of 1 October 2010, 598 detainees have been transferred out of Department of Defense (DoD) custody at the U.S. Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (GTMO) detention facility. The Intelligence Community assesses that 81 (13.5 percent) are confirmed and 69 (11.5 percent) are suspected of reengaging in terrorist or insurgent activities after transfer. Of the 150 former GTMO detainees assessed as confirmed or suspected of reengaging in terrorist or insurgent activities, the Intelligence Community assesses that 13 are dead, 54 are in custody, and 83 remain at large.

The WaPo report on this development quotes an administration official trying to give it a favorable spin:

But the administration official pointed out that the last administration "knew of recidivism, too, but went ahead because they, too, wanted to close" Guantanamo.

"Our record is still good, and the effort to close Gitmo is still worth it," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the report publicly.

Give it up, Mr. Anonymous Official. The attempt to close Gitmo has gone exactly nowhere for two years, and after today's report it is finally dead. And not just plain dead. To judge by the early reactions coming from key members of Congress, it is Sonny-Corleone-at-the-toll-booth dead.

CIA Identities Protection and the John Adams Project

The Washington Times has a bit more on a story they first reported two weeks ago concerning a conflict between the CIA and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) over a certain type of legal assistance that DOJ allows for Gitmo detainees. Bill Gertz, a reporter with a long record of receiving leaks from inside the intelligence community, says that a CIA security assessment has concluded that the privileged interaction of certain Gitmo detainees with their legal teams creates a danger for CIA officers.

See CIA Says Gitmo Officers at Risk of Exposure:

A team of CIA counterintelligence officials recently visited the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and concluded that CIA interrogators face the risk of exposure to al Qaeda through inmates' contacts with defense attorneys, according to U.S. officials.

The agency's "tiger team" of security specialists was dispatched as part of an ongoing investigation conducted jointly with the Justice Department into a program backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The program, called the John Adams Project, has photographed covert CIA interrogators and shown the pictures to some of the five senior al Qaeda terrorists held there in an effort to identify them further.

Details of the review could not be learned. However, the CIA team came away from the review, conducted the week of March 14, "very concerned" that agency personnel have been put in danger by military rules allowing interaction between the five inmates and defense attorneys, according to an intelligence source close to the review.

The team also expressed concerns about the inmates' access to laptop computers in the past. Some of the inmates who are representing themselves in legal proceedings were granted laptop computers without Internet access. However, the officials fear that future unfavorable court rulings could provide the inmates with the capability of communicating outside the island prison.

The joint investigation, which recently added U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald to the Justice Department team, was stepped up earlier this month after a disagreement between Justice Department and CIA officials over whether CIA officers' lives were put in danger at the prison.

The probe was launched last year but was given renewed attention after CIA counterintelligence officials expressed alarm at the recent discovery of photographs of CIA officers, without their names on the photos, in a cell at the prison.

Mr. Fitzgerald, who investigated the press disclosure of clandestine CIA officer Valerie Plame beginning in 2003, has been meeting with CIA officials for the past several weeks as part of the probe.

The prosecutor was called into the case after agency officials voiced worries that Justice Department investigators did not share their level of concern over the danger that al Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo, including Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, could secretly send information on the identities of CIA officers to al Qaeda terrorists outside the prison through the attorneys.

A senior Justice Department National Security Division official, Donald Vieira, recused himself from the probe earlier this month as a result of the interagency dispute. Mr. Vieira was a Democratic counsel on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, before taking a post at the Justice Department.

Spokesmen for the CIA and Justice Department had no comment. The new chief defense counsel for Guantanamo, Marine Corps Col. Jeff Colwell, also declined to comment on the recent CIA security review conducted at Guantanamo.

Spokesmen for the ACLU and the John Adams Project have denied that any lawyers working to represent Guantanamo detainees have compromised the security of CIA personnel, asserting that they have operated within rules set by a military judge.

[TSB note: I'm sure no lawyer would violate those rules; well, some would, but the ACLU's word is good enough for me.]

Military lawyers and some civilian lawyers seeking to represent the detainees have held meetings with the detainees over the past several months.

[TSB note: the detainees are meeting lawyers who are "seeking to represent" them? The Gitmo Gang is such a hot property that they are fielding offers now? Next we'll hear that these lawyers compete for Gitmo clients by offering percentages of future book, movie and lecture revenues, and that the ACLU is sending literary agents to look out for the Gitmo Gang's interests.]

Regarding the interagency dispute, some CIA officials are said to be concerned that Justice Department investigators may have been advocates on behalf of the Guantanamo Bay detainees prior to joining the Obama administration.

The worries were heightened after the recent disclosure that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had signed Supreme Court briefs supporting a court review of the case of convicted terrorist Jose Padilla. Mr. Holder apologized last week for failing to disclose his role in the briefs during Senate confirmation hearings last year to be attorney general.

Mr. Holder announced in November that he would shift military trials of five al Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo to a federal court in New York. However, under protests from critics, he reversed the decision and is expected to announce soon either another civilian trial location or military trials at the Cuban prison.

Newsweek magazine reported March 29 that CIA concerns were heightened after 20 color photographs of CIA officials were found in the cell of Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, a detainee who U.S. officials think is one of the financiers of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Officials familiar with the photos said they included snapshots of CIA officers in public areas.

According to U.S. officials, the photographs were obtained by the John Adams Project through private investigators who were able to track down the CIA officials.

What Would John Adams Do About the ACLU?

The Washington Times has a story today about an escalating conflict between the CIA and the Justice Department that was brought on by Justice's toleration of certain practices by legal supporters of Gitmo detainees. See Justice, CIA clash over probe of interrogator IDs.

The CIA and Justice Department are fighting over a secret investigation into a controversial program by legal supporters of Islamist terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay that involved photographing CIA interrogators and showing the pictures to prisoners, an effort CIA officials say threatens the officers' lives.

-- snip --

According to U.S. officials familiar with the issue, the current [CIA versus Justice Department] dispute involves Justice Department officials who support an effort led by the American Civil Liberties Union to provide legal aid to military lawyers for the Guantanamo inmates. CIA counterintelligence officials oppose the effort and say giving terrorists photographs of interrogators has exposed CIA personnel and their families to possible terrorist attacks.

This is the part I found most interesting:

The officials said the photographs of the CIA officers found recently at Guantanamo were obtained by a joint program of the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers called the John Adams Project.

The project, according to a Washington Post report in August, hired contractors to photograph CIA officers who were thought to have carried out terrorist interrogations. Those photographs were then to be provided to defense lawyers representing some of the Guantanamo detainees as part of an effort to identify the interrogators, for possible use as witnesses in military or civilian trials.

Joshua Dratel, a lawyer representing the John Adams Project, declined to comment directly on whether his group hired investigators to photograph CIA officers and supply them to military defense lawyers.

However, Mr. Dratel said in an interview that "none of the John Adams Project lawyers have done anything inappropriate or contrary to the protective order or any other rules that apply" to the prisoners.

ACLU spokesman John Kennedy also declined to comment on whether the project obtained photographs of CIA officers. However, he said none of the John Adams Project lawyers disclosed the identities of CIA officers to detainees held at Guantanamo.

The John Adams Project of the ACLU is so named because future President John Adams provided legal representation to British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre. Presumably, the Gitmo Bar thinks that is analogous to what they're doing. But, after reading today's Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Gitmo's Indefensible Lawyers, I'd say the ACLU is lucky they don't have to answer to the President Adams who signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. That guy would have put the Gitmo Bar away for a loooong time.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's Rap Sheet

Unclassified summaries of the evidence against KSM and his four co-defendants, prepared for their Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Gitmo, can be viewed here.

Former Gitmo Detainees Excited in Palau

Progress on closing Gitmo continues at its customary glacial pace, as 6 former Guantanamo detainees resettle in Palau:

Six [Uighur] Chinese Muslims newly released from Guantanamo Bay were wide awake and excited Sunday as they traded life behind bars for rooms with ocean view in the tiny Pacific nation of Palau, which agreed to a U.S. request to resettle them.

-- snip --

{Palau President Johnson] Toribiong said the Uighurs would be provided medical care, housing and education, including English lessons and instruction in skills that will help them find a job.

The U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement it would continue to consult with Palau regarding the former detainees.

Before this transfer of the Uighurs, about 221 prisoners remained at Guantanamo.

Evidently the Uighurs overcame their original objections to refuge in Palau.

Six detainees down, only 215 more to go.

Ex-Gitmo Detainee and Rehab Dropout Killed In Saudi Arabia

A Saudi radical and al Qaeda operative whom we released from Gitmo in 2007 was killed last week in a firefight with Saudi security forces, the Christian Science Monitor reported today:

Two Yemen-based militants dressed as women, one of whom was a former Guantánamo prisoner, were intercepted at a Saudi checkpoint last week.

-- snip --

The two fighters discovered last week, Rayed Abdullahi al-Harbi and Yousef Mohammed al-Shihri, were both on a Saudi government most-wanted list issued in February. Al Shihri is a former Guantanamo detainee, and the brother-in-law of Saeed al-Shihri, the Yemen-based deputy commander of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who also was at Guantánamo, spokesman Turki said.

The Long War Journal provided some background on al Shahri:

One of the names on the Saudi most-wanted list that matches the list of Saudis repatriated from Guantánamo is Yousuf Mohammed Mubarak Al Jubairi Al Shahri. In the U.S. government's files, one of the repatriated detainee's names is given as Yussef Mohammed Mubarak al Shihri. Yussef allegedly traveled from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan using al Qaeda's Mashhad transit hub. Once in Afghanistan, he was allegedly trained at the notorious al Farouq camp and fought against the Northern Alliance. Yussef's brother is a "known al Qaeda operative."

If the Yussef Mohammed Mubarak al Shihri identified in the U.S. government's files is the same man who is now one of Saudi Arabia's most-wanted, it is no surprise that he returned to the fight. The U.S. government identified Yussef as a hardcore ideologue who "hates all Americans because they attack his religion." The U.S. government's unclassified files note: "Since Americans are his enemy, he will continue to fight them until he dies."

Yussef al Shihri was one of the "kids of Guantanamo" - teenage battlefield detainees who were held in a separate facility apart from the rest of the Gitmo Gang - and his case received quite a bit of sympathy from the usual quarters.

According to Saudi news accounts:

Al-Shiri was transferred from Guantánamo to Saudi Arabia in 2007. He was immediately put into the Ministry of Interior’s hugely successful rehabilitation program for arrested extremists.

Two years after entering the program, al Shihri had fled to Yemen where he reconnected with his al Qaeda associates, and last week he was sneaking back into the Kingdom bearing four suicide bomb vests when he was intercepted.

That "hugely successful rehabilitation program" still has some kinks to work out, obviously. Perhaps now the Obama administration will have seconds thought about trying to palm off our Yemeni detainees on the Kingdom.

Will Saudi Arabia Become the New Gitmo?

The administration continues to make progress, of a sort, on its commitment to close Gitmo. They have now resorted to begging the government of Saudi Arabia to accept our Yemeni detainees, who are the most problematic of the Gitmo Gang, into Saudi Arabia's deradicalization program. Good try, but it doesn't look like the Saudis will agree.

From today's Washington Post:

The [Saudi's success at the] rehabilitation of militants ... has convinced the Obama administration that Saudi Arabia is the ideal place to send dozens of Yemenis being held at Guantanamo.

-- snip --

As President Obama's promised January deadline to close Guantanamo approaches, the fate of 97 Yemenis remains the administration's biggest obstacle to closing the facility and forging a new detention policy. They are the largest community left at Guantanamo, roughly half of the prisoners who remain there, and are viewed as among the most radicalized, with deep jihadist roots inside Yemen, Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland.

-- snip --

Publicly, Saudi officials have said they will accept the Yemenis only if they come willingly. Privately, Saudi officials interviewed here say they would like to find a different solution. If Saudi Arabia were to accept the Yemenis -- a decision that most observers say will require the blessing of King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz -- it risks becoming a greater al-Qaeda target. The kingdom also has close ties to Yemen's government, which would probably consider the detainees' transfer to Saudi Arabia a public embarrassment. Yemen has publicly declared that it wants its detainees to return home.

If the Yemenis participated and then rejoined al-Qaeda, it would be a severe blow to the program as well as to the kingdom's pride.

"It's a no-win situation for the Saudis. They can't rehabilitate these guys, and they don't want to become America's jailor," said Christopher Boucek, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has studied the rehabilitation program.

Apparently, the Saudi deradicalization program depends upon a kind of social surveillance that wouldn't be available in the case of foreigners like Yemenis.

Saudi officials say their success with former [Gitmo] detainees such as [Khalid al] Jehani lies in members of his family and tribe, who keep constant watch over him, and cannot be duplicated with those whose social networks and roots lie outside Saudi Arabia.

"If I try to do something bad, my family will tell the government about me," said Jehani, who joined a radical Islamist movement in the Philippines and trained al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. "How can you trust that will happen with a family living in Yemen?"

How, indeed?

Jehani is echoing - unconsciously, I'm sure - the Victorian English politician J. A. Roebuck, who memorably nailed that same point when he argued in the parliamentary debates on the Second Reform Act of 1867, "if a man has a settled house, in which he has lived with his family for a number of years, you have a man who has given hostages to the state, and you have in these circumstances a guarantee for that man’s virtue."

Without the guarantee that would be provided by such hostages, why should the Saudis agree to take any of our Yemenis off our hands?

Gitmo's Loss is Kuwait's and Belgium's Gain

Closing Gitmo just got a tiny bit closer to reality, as two more detainees were released.

From the U.S. Department of Justice press release:

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice today announced that two detainees have been transferred from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to the control of the governments of Kuwait and Belgium.

-- snip --

Khalid Abdullah Mishal al Mutairi, a native of Kuwait, was transferred to the Government of Kuwait ... Another detainee was transferred from Guantanamo Bay to the Government of Belgium. Pursuant to a request from the Government of Belgium, the identity of this individual is being withheld for privacy reasons.

The press release notes that more than 550 detainees have been release since 2002. By my count, that leaves 224 more detainees to go.

Closing Gitmo: Closer to the Deadline, Further From Reality

The Washington Post reported today that the Obama administration has relieved White House Counsel Gregory Craig of responsibility for carrying out the President's commitment to close Gitmo by January 22, 2010. This strikes me as rearranging the deck chairs on the political Titanic that is the administration's self-imposed deadline.

From White House Regroups on Guantanamo:

Even before the inauguration, President Obama's top advisers settled on a course of action they were counseled against: announcing that they would close the facility within one year. Today, officials are acknowledging that they will be hard-pressed to meet that goal.

The White House has faltered in part because of the legal, political and diplomatic complexities involved in determining what to do with more than 200 terrorism suspects at the prison. But senior advisers privately acknowledge not devising a concrete plan for where to move the detainees and mishandling Congress.

To address these setbacks, the administration has shifted its leadership team on the issue. White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig, who initially guided the effort to close the prison and who was an advocate of setting the deadline, is no longer in charge of the project, two senior administration officials said this week.

-- snip --

To empty the prison, the administration will need to find facilities to house 50 to 60 prisoners who cannot be released and who cannot be tried because of legal impediments, according to an administration official. The administration must also win congressional funding for the closure process, find host countries for detainees cleared for release, and transfer dozens of inmates to federal and military courts for prosecution.

Craig's explanation is priceless:

"I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives."

He thinks he may have been wrong about that "broad consensus?" Only may?

Let's see. Congress has denied the administration any funding to transfer, release or incarcerate any of the Guantanamo detainees in the United States. A Gallup poll found that by better than a 2-to-1 margin the public opposes closing Gitmo. Senior Democratic officeholders, such as the Senate Majority Leader, have spoken out in the strongest terms against bringing any Gitmo detainees to the United States. And other countries are not exactly lining up to receive our 'releasable' detainees.

Mr. Craig should have realized long ago that a consensus for closing Gitmo doesn't exist much outside of the Obama White House. He needs to get out more often.

"No Plan B" for Gitmo Detainees

Foreign Policy Journal's blog has noted with sympathy yesterday's BBC interview with Ambassador Daniel Fried, the unlucky fellow in charge of resettling our Gitmo detainees somewhere, anywhere, outside of the United States. Poor Ambassador Fried has to unload the 226 detainees who remain in Gitmo not later than January 22, 2010, in order to meet the Obama administration's self-imposed deadline for closing the detention center. He's been making progress, having found new homes for about eight detainees in the last six months.

Ambassador Fried, who refuses to criticize the U.S. Congress, couldn't avoid remarking to the BBC that his job is made harder by the utter refusal of U.S. politicians to take in any "cleared detainees," i.e., those whom the administration has ruled may be released provided someone can find a jurisdiction that will accept them.

Mr Fried's tough job has not been helped by the decision of Congress to block the transfer of any cleared detainees from Guantanamo to the US mainland.

He says he will not criticise Congress, but told me: "It is fair to say, as just an objective statement, that the US could resettle more detainees [worldwide], had we been willing to take in some."

He's not kidding that Congress is unwilling. The Senate has voted 90-6 to forbid the transfer of any Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States, and the House has been equally recalcitrant.

Still not criticizing anyone, Fried continued:

"But I also have to state that parliamentarians in Europe and the US have raised questions about security - and we have to respect those opinions." [See those opinions here]

So, without cooperation from those parlimentarians, how will Ambassador Fried be able to meet the January deadline? He really can't say.

"President Obama's timetable is what we've got, we don't have Plan Bs."

Maybe it's time to think up a Plan B. I'll start: let's return them to their home countries whether they want to go or not.