Leaders Want Obama to Provide GTMO Plan
[Guest post by DRJ]
Barack Obama’s recent foreign policy speech didn’t satisfy Washington leaders regarding his decision to close Guantanamo. Now there are widespread appeals, including from within the Democratic Party, calling on Obama to give them a plan:
“We’re saying, ‘Mr. President, give us the plan,’” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, pressed Obama for details on how he intends to fulfill his promise to close the detention facility on the U.S. navy base in Cuba. Officials report that 240 suspected terrorists are housed there.
“We’re working hard now to figure out what the options are and what the best one would be. And that really is a decision the president is going to have to make, certainly in meeting this deadline of what we do,” Mullen said.”
Mullen may not be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs much longer. Meanwhile, Republicans are focused on the possibility that detainees could end up in America:
“I don’t know why it is better to have somebody in a so-called “supermax” facility in, say, Colorado than it is to keep them in Guantanamo, a state-of-the-art facility that we built not too long ago for the explicit purpose of holding these people,” said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. “There’s nothing wrong with the prison in Gitmo, and there are a lot of problems — as FBI Director (Robert) Mueller pointed out in testimony just this week — with bringing those people to the United States.”
Colin Powell, who wants to be the leader of his own Moderate Republican Party, pointed out it was a procedural mistake for Obama to prematurely seek blanket approval from Congress to move the detainees:
“There’s a lot of internal home resistance to bringing these people into the country. So you come forward with a plan that makes some sense and you tell us how you’re going to resolve all of these cases and do it in a way that we can support and then maybe we can move forward. So I think it was premature to ask for the money,” Powell said.”
Powell is an insider who knows how Washington works, and I think this is his way of saying the Democratic Congress will fund an Obama plan to move GTMO detainees to U.S. prisons but only if they are told which prisons will house the detainees. That way the politicians who will end up with detainees in their backyards can vote “No” while the others can safely vote “Yes.”
— DRJ
Obama wants to vote “present” on his own policies too.
SPQR (26be8b) — 5/24/2009 @ 3:21 pmTomorrow, Obama will hold a press conference to say, “You know, we think the policies of the last administration were right, so we’re going to just keep them in place.” And the press will nod in agreement, and write long stories about the widom inherent in Obama’s flexibility.
Steverino (69d941) — 5/24/2009 @ 4:23 pmWho’s going to be the next Lynne Stewart?
Techie (9c008e) — 5/24/2009 @ 4:27 pmJohn Kyl makes a very good point. Why move them, go through the expense and make Americans uneasy about their presence when they have been successfully housed at GTMO? Why incur greater costs?
Obama is determined to close GTMO, not because it has been a failure at the job it was created for, but because in his eyes (and the media’s), it has come to symbolize everything that is wrong with the America Obama believes himself charged to remake – particularly the past 8 years. To the left, GTMO and Abu Ghraib are interchangable sites of untold horrors.
What has gotten lost in that perception is the fact that to untold countless Haitian and Cuban refugees, especially in the 90’s before Clinton stepped in it, GTMO was the doorway to the promised land. Once reached, the chance of political asylum became a very real and tangible possibility and to many grateful new American’s, became a reality.
So rather keep detainees where it is practical, effective, both safety and expense-wise, a strenuous effort will be made to make sure we distance ourselves from this horrible place called GTMO which certain factions seek to etch into the memory of Americans as nothing but a site where American power ran amok and innocence was persecuted.
Dana (aedf1d) — 5/24/2009 @ 4:50 pmIt would only be appropriate to move the GITMO deatinees to the Federal Correctional Facility at Marion IL.
AD - RtR/OS! (cc5dea) — 5/24/2009 @ 5:14 pmPowell knows how Democrats think!
daleyrocks (5d22c0) — 5/24/2009 @ 6:36 pmAD – I grew up in Marion.
JD (b3f947) — 5/24/2009 @ 6:45 pmAD – Why do you hate the town I grew up in?
JD (b3f947) — 5/24/2009 @ 6:51 pmDRJ,
Solving the Guantanamo problem is a no brainer. The Governator want to sell San Quentin and the Feds are looking for a secure stateside facility to house Gitmo detainees. Here is a move that I think the Republican Party can really get behind.
Neobuzz
Neobuzz (04e70d) — 5/24/2009 @ 7:03 pmI don’t have anything for or against Marion, I just thought it would be appropriate for that facility to host the President’s detainees, and that it would be nice for them to be close to Sen. Durbin after all the wonderful things he’s done
AD - RtR/OS! (cc5dea) — 5/24/2009 @ 7:47 pmtofor the WOT.The Democrats are going to solve the public relations problem, which they created, by closing the state of the art facility on a tropical island and moving the prisoners into a brutal maximum security prison. Their public relations problem will be solved until the media reports that the prisoners were far better off at Gitmo. Brilliant
Terry Gain (6b2a64) — 5/24/2009 @ 8:05 pmMove them to the Rock – Alcatraz – smack dab in the belly of the liberal Beast.
Horatio (e2e328) — 5/24/2009 @ 8:59 pmThose newly blue states who find themselves housing terrorists might fall red again… Obama’s crew isn’t above being reelected
SteveG (c99c5c) — 5/24/2009 @ 9:27 pmComment by Horatio — 5/24/2009 @ 8:59 pm
In case you haven’t noticed it, Alcatraz ceased to be an active prison back in the 60’s, and is now a tourist facility.
AD - RtR/OS! (cc5dea) — 5/24/2009 @ 11:15 pmMarion is an active Fed Prison – a high-security one IIRC.
Who said the tours have to stop? I visited the facility the same week the movie “The Rock” was released – the tour guides certainly capitalized upon the publicity.
For $80 million, the prison can be updated, the prisoners put behind glass, and placed on view for the wandering tourists.
Horatio (55069c) — 5/25/2009 @ 8:19 am“…the prisoners put behind glass, and placed on view for the wandering tourists.”
That would be a basic violation of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war; that, though the terror detainees are not entitled to its’ protections, we have extended to them those protections that do not have national security implications and are just common sense.
AD - RtR/OS! (f03f38) — 5/25/2009 @ 8:55 amGreat analysis. I think you’re right. The real business will be done in the backrooms.
Patricia (2183bb) — 5/25/2009 @ 9:02 am