Legal News

Holder to Europe: Anyone Want a Gitmo Detainee?

By Ashby Jones

Attorney General Eric Holder is in Germany today, where he’s slated to give a speech later asking for help from U.S. allies in closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As part of the overture, Holder is prepared to ask for a show of hands from European countries, asking if anyone will take a few. (Anyone? Anyone? Portugal? Lithuania?)

A few hours before the release, he gave some sense of the specifics. Click here for the AP story.

At a meeting with reporters, Holder said: “We have about 30 or so where we’ve made the determination that they can be released. So we will, I think, relatively soon, be reaching out to specific countries with specific detainees and ask whether or not there might be a basis for the moving of those people from Guantanamo to those countries,” Holder said.

There are 241 prisoners at Guantanamo, and Holder has been visiting European leaders this week asking for help relocating detainees as he seeks to carry out President Barack Obama’s order to shutter the detention site over the next nine months.

Previewing his later speech, Holder said that while the U.S. created the Guantanamo site, closing it is a shared responsibility for the U.S. and its allies.

“Mistakes were made” in the creation of the post-Sept. 11 Guantanamo program, Holder said, but he has been telling European officials over the past week that “the problem that it created is best solved by a unified response.”

Several European nations, including — yes, Portugal and Lithuania — have said they will consider taking such detainees. Others, like Germany, are divided on the issue.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy already has made what was billed as a symbolic gesture of agreeing to take one Guantanamo detainee.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 29, 2009 (boomark / email).