Guantanamo not surprised deadline won’t be met
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba – Guards didn’t go through the prison camps Wednesday and unpin the presidential closure order from detainee bulletin boards. And the detention center didn’t put in an urgent call for reinforcements.
Rather, President Barack Obama’s acknowledgment – in television interviews in China – that his administration would miss its Jan. 22 deadline for closure barely caused a ripple in the place slated for closure.
“That’s certainly a portent of things to come for us,” said Navy Rear Adm. Tom Copeman, commander of the prison camps housing 215 war on terror captives. “But the president doesn’t command and control his military forces through news conferences.”
In addition, units of the Virgin Islands and Rhode Island National Guard have just arrived for one-year assignments at the detention center, planned by the Pentagon before the president issued his closure order.
Commanders reported no unrest in the eight camps that house detainees in a range of facilities – and lawyers reported no real surprise, either.
Some detainees now get to see Al Jazeera and other news channels and were already aware of the tug of war between the White House and Congress over whether and where the captives might go in the United States. Others had watched improvements and reinforced security measures around the camps and already doubted the deadline would hold.
“They think they’re moving – but not soon,” said Marine Capt. Chris Kannady, defense lawyer for a Sudanese man accused of training al-Qaida members. “Their concern is, ‘What conditions are we going to be walking into? Who is going to be in charge of this prison?’”
Only 26 detainees have left since Obama took office – one to New York for trial, one dead to Yemen as a suicide and the rest home to their native countries or resettlement elsewhere.
“You see no one’s packing up and getting ready to leave,” Kannady said. “There’s absolutely no evidence now that it’s going to be closing.”
The admiral, whose official schedule Wednesday reported 65 days until Jan. 22, didn’t declare himself disappointed by the news the target for closure would slip.
“It is what it is,” he said. “We’re a small piece of the puzzle of this whole thing. Our job is to provide for the legal, safe, humane care and custody of these guys until such time it is no longer required.”
Obama said he was still hopeful his administration would succeed in closing the detention center in 2010. But, “I’m not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend upon cooperation from Congress,” he told Fox News.
He also defended his Justice Department’s decision to move to a federal court in New York City the war crimes conspiracy trial of five former CIA captives here accused of mass murder in the Sept. 11, 2001.
But the uncertain end date also raised other questions – chief among them whether the Pentagon will stage full-blown military commissions trials here.
Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed five other men here would face war crimes trials but said officials had not yet selected a U.S. site to stage them.
At the war court Wednesday, Afghan Mohammed Kamin boycotted his pretrial hearing while defense lawyers complained to Air Force Col. Thomas Cumbie that the Pentagon had not yet turned over accounts of 17 interrogations of their client.
Kamin, 31, allegedly trained with al-Qaida after U.S. troops invaded his country, spied on U.S.-led coalition bases there and planted missiles and mines that never exploded.
He was sent here in 2004, and charged more than a year ago with providing material support for terrorism. The case has been in a go-slow mode while the Obama administration has amended the rules for the military commissions created during the Bush years.
Cumbie gave Pentagon attorneys until Dec. 15 to provide Kamin’s lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Rich Federico, with his client’s interrogations, or explain why they can’t. He threatened unspecified “sanctions.”
