Savage Washington

Luiza Ch. Savage covers political life south of the border. Follow Luiza on Twitter: @luizachsavage

Categories: Savage Washington

How to become Barack's BFF

by Luiza Ch. Savage on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 5:02pm - 8 Comments

Okay, I’m guessing here, but I imagine that if some country called the White House tomorrow and said, hey buddy, I’ll take those Gitmo guys off your hands — they’d get more than a handwritten thank you note.

One of Obama’s first acts as president was to issue an executive order on closing the US detention facility at Guantanamo within a year. Trouble is, he hasn’t been ably to convince allies to take many of the 240 detainees– and now it appears that nobody in the US wants them either.

Lawmakers from both parties are having a severe case of Not in My Back Yard. Today the Senate voted overwhelmingly to strip funding for the Gitmo closure from a war funding bill and said no money would be authorized until Obama comes up with a plan for dealing with the detainees. TPM has an interesting analysis of howTeam Obama screwed this one up.

It’s hard for the White House to ask other countries to take in the detainees if the US doesn’t take any itself. And he has already disappointed supporters by saying he will carry out modified military commissions rather than criminal trials for the detainees.

The opposition by lawmakers, which was blamed in some quarters on Republican fear-mongering, got new credence today when Obama’s own FBI director Robert Mueller piled on, saying the FBI has concerns about bringing detainees to the US — even in supermax prisons — because they could radicalize others or orchestrate attacks from their cells.

Obama is planning a speech tomorrow on national security and is expected to address the issue. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney is planning his own speech tomorrow about how Barack Obama is screwing up.

Can Saudi Arabia come to the rescue? And if so, what do they get in return?

More by Luiza Ch. Savage

Dean P

This is worse than just the dumbest argument in the history of forever. Somehow lawmakers in the US have forgotten that the US has many prisons (and, in fact, the world’s largest prison population), and keeps all sorts of violent offenders behind bars, with relatively few problems. It’s not like the detainees are going to be put out on their own recognizance. This is just proof that there was never a Republican fear-mongering story that the Democrats didn’t wet their beds over.

Plus, shipping them to other countries runs into all sorts of constitutional issues with respect to challenging incarceration and habeas petitions.
Sisyphus

And it’s just soooo hard to get a gun to protect your self …….

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/05/20/guantanamo/index.html

Madness.
Wayne

There is another far simpler and far more effective way to deal with the ones that you take away from the battlefield -> don’t

avr

Very true. We wouldn’t now have an Omar Khadr problem, at the very least.
Al Heck Brakes

They’ve been not taking away children from the battlefield by the thousands. It’s only occasionally that they forget to blow one to smithereens. Also – women, old people, wedding guests, farmers, taxi drivers, police and military allies, and many other people. So don’t be so hard on them. They’re killing the people who scare you as quickly as they can.

http://carnewsandviews.com jwl

“Saudi government’s rehabilitation program for jihadis”

wtf? I see Tapper’s byline but the article reads like something from the Onion. And this war kicked off a number of years ago because of Saudi born terrorists, it is one stop shopping in Saudi apparently.

“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 President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year …. 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.” NY Times Jan 22 2009
Maggan

That head line looks lto me like a suggestion that perhaps Canada should step up to the plate in order to win favor with the Americans! Let them deal with this problem, it is none of our making. We also have enough criminals of our own.
Karl Raab

Seeing the ridiculous spelling errors in the excerpt on the home page, I thought you were some semi-literate high school dropout, so I was about to skip your story. But then I noticed that all of the apostrophes on the home page were missing – except the one after Conrad Black’s name. So I did read your story and enjoyed it. Are your editors or webmasters or whoever trying to be cute, or are they spelling challenged? Sloppy writing doesn’t do Canadians any favours.