Obama Citizenship

Guantanamo Detention Facilities to Close in a Year

By Phil

The Executive Order; coverage from TheHill.com and ABCNews.com. I’m not sure what the logic is in the President — on recommendation from top people in the Administration — closing down the detention facilities in Cuba. Not only this, but the President is also expected to issue an order closing down CIA-sponsored detention centers around the world.

Of course, one of the key questions is going to be, where will the detainees go? Perhaps the following article from McClatchy.com provides some insight (hint: for you folks in South Carolina, Kansas and California, you could very well be living next to a terrorist–er, “enemy combatant!”):

WASHINGTON - President Obama’s decrees Thursday on the detention and interrogation of accused terrorists increase the likelihood that some detainees now held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba will be moved to South Carolina in a year or less.

On his second full day in office, Obama directed that the controversial Guantanamo detention facility be closed “no later than one year from the date of the (executive) order.”

Senior Pentagon sources in November identified the Naval Consolidated Brig in North Charleston as a possible home for detainees transferred from Guantanamo Bay, along with Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and Camp Pendleton in California.

“Transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay to U.S. soil will endanger American lives,” Sen. Jim DeMint, a Greenville Republican, said of Obama’s order to shut down the military prison. “If the new administration tries to move these known terrorists to South Carolina, they should be ready for a fight.”

Why is the President shutting this part of the naval base down? If the answer has something to do with “enhanced interrogation techniques,” wouldn’t legislation be phenomenally simpler?

Even better question: If you had the responsibility to ensure America’s safety and you had reason to believe that an individual under your control possessed knowledge that would stop a cataclysmic event from happening on American soil, wouldn’t you do anything you could to get that information?

That was a loaded question; your answer directly confirms your specific position on the global war on terror.

-Phil

Full post as published by The Right Side of Life on January 22, 2009 (boomark / email).