Pentagon push-back: Guantanamo Bay

by Julian E. Barnes

Pushing back against growing congressional opposition to moving detainees to the United States, a top Pentagon official said today that closing the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, would require prisoners to be moved to the U.S. and urged lawmakers need to think more strategically.

Michele A. Flournoy, undersecretary of Defense for policy--the Pentagon's No. 3 official - said that if allied nations were going to take detainees, the U.S. also needed to take some into its prisons.

"When we are asking allies to do their fair share in dealing with this challenge, we need to do our fair share," Flournoy said today. "This is a case where we need to ask members of Congress to take a more strategic view. Many of these members called for the closing of Guantanamo, and we need their partnership in making that possible."

Senate Democrats dropped plans Tuesday to provide funding for closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Lawmakers are poised to bar the transfer of detainees to the U.S., and Capitol Hill has become skeptical about the administration's detention policy. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said today that he wanted neither to have detainees released into the U.S. nor to see them imprisoned here.

"We don't want them around the United States," Reid said.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has predicted that between 50 and 100 detainees would eventually be moved to American prisons, and that some of the Chinese Muslims, who are held at Guantanamo but not considered dangerous, would be released into the U.S.

Flournoy would not offer her own prediction of how many detainees the U.S. or its allies would eventually take. She said the administration was going through each case individually and there were no decisions on where detainees might be moved.

"I am optimistic that all of us will take more than we have agreed so far," she said. "This is a challenge that will require all of us to step up and make hard choices."

European allies so far have offered to take only a couple additional detainees from Guantanamo. If the U.S. cannot move more of the detainees to allied countries, it will be faced with holding large number of detainees it cannot transfer to their home countries.

Officials have been reluctant to send many of the remaining 240 detainees to their counties of origin, fearful that the suspects would either be allowed to rejoin the fight against the U.S. or could be abused in prison.

Closing Guantanamo has proven to be a far more tricky political proposition than some in the Obama administration believed it would be. Top officials have remained largely silent, failing to offer broad arguments about how closing Guantanamo could help the U.S. position in the world.

But Obama is set to make a speech about Guantanamo and detainee policy Thursday.

The administration has created task forces to deal with various aspects of interrogation and detention policies--and craft new practices on how to handle current and future detainees.

The work is complicated by the fact that many of the detainees currently in custody were captured at different times, Flournoy said. "We are dealing with an inheritance," she said. "We are dealing with.... People... taken into custody when different policies were in place."

One of the most critical questions facing the administration is what to do with the potentially dozens of detainees it cannot release, transfer or try. Until now, the detainees have been held indefinitely in Guantanamo.

But if they were moved to the United States, the Obama administration may seek congressional approval to continue to hold them without formal charges.

Pressed for the administration's position, Flournoy offered few details, but did not disavow continued detention without trial--at least for some of the detainees.

"The desire is to provide due process to as many of these detainees as possible," she said.

Human rights groups remain strongly opposed to the Obama administration's push for congressional approval for detention without trial.