Obama Makes Last-Minute Move to Get Detainees Out of Gitmo
The Obama White House transfers its last detainees from Guantánamo in a dramatic midnight-hour move before President Trump throws away the key.
BY JANUARY 19, 2017Every minute brings Donald Trump closer to putting his hand on the Lincoln Bible, and a group of 41 men closer to a lifetime of internment at the U.S. military detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
But lawyers and Obama administration officials are working down to the wire to get remaining detainees out of Guantánamo before Trump throws away the key, potentially for good. With less than 24-hours remaining beforePresident-elect Trump becomes president, Foreign Policy has learned that the White House has made four more transfers, the last of Obama’s administration. The Pentagon will announce their names and destinations on Thursday evening.
In a letter on his last full day in office, President Obama urged House Speaker Paul Ryan one last time to close the detention center.
“If this were easy, we would have closed Guantánamo years ago,” Obama wrote. “But history will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism and those of us who fail to bring it to a responsible end.”
The White House publicly acknowledged for the first time this week what has long been the grim reality for the legal teams representing the detainees and the administration officials charged with their fate: Obama would not be able to make good on his campaign promise and executive order to close Guantánamo, issued almost eight years ago to the day.
In defiance of Trump’s Twitter edict not to make any more transfers, the Pentagon sent 10 detainees to Oman on Monday, and the last four midnight-hour moves come just hours from the moment Trump takes the oath of office on Friday. The 10 men moved on Monday, as well as five others, have been cleared by six national security agencies as no longer posing a threat to the United States, and several of them, the government has admitted, were cases of mistaken identity.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter did not sign off on the transfers of several of the remaining cleared detainees in time for the legally-required 30-day congressional notification. Legal teams for two detainees on this list — a Moroccan and an Algerian — filed emergency motions with federal courts to grant their repatriation before Friday. But the Obama administration opposed the moves, despite judicial orders to prepare the detainees to be moved immediately in case of a favorable ruling. On Wednesday night, the court ruled against the Algerian, and on Thursday afternoon, the Moroccan’s request was shot down.
Of the 41 men who remain as of Thursday, only 10 have been charged with war crimes. The vast majority have been detained for more than a decade,and none were captured by the U.S. military.
If the rest do not make it onto a military plane by Friday, lawyers say, they will likely die at Guantánamo along with the 26 other men known as “forever prisoners” — including the alleged plotters of the 9/11 attacks — the U.S. has determined will be detained indefinitely. The 26 are eligible for their cases to be periodically reviewed.
Many of the detainees are deeply involved in their own defense, and they are aware that Trump’s victory has raised the stakes, according to legal teams who represent them. In recent conversations they’ve expressed their concern if they don’t make it out before Trump enters the Oval Office, they’ll be stuck.
Trump made his own campaign pledges to “load [Guantánamo] up with some really bad dudes,” and “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” While he’s since toned down his vows to return to illegal government torture — at the behest of retired Gen. James Mattis, expected to be confirmed as defense secretary on Friday, who told him torture wasn’t effective — he hasn’t ruled it out. He’s never backed off his plan to keep Guantánamo open, and has doubled down on expanding it, even suggesting he may try U.S. citizens in military commissions there.
Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said his team is planning executive orders for Friday and Monday, including his own, as well as rescinding Obama’s prior dictates. In his “100 Day Action Plan” the New York businessman vowed to do so.
Spicer declined to comment as to whether Trump will issue his own orders for Guantánamo, but given his strong public stances, he is likely to move early to undo the four executive orders on U.S. detention and interrogation policy that Obama issued on his first day in office.
One promise Obama did keep was not to add a single detainee to the population at Guantánamo, relying largely on the federal justice system and foreign partners to deal with the handful of terrorist suspects captured on global battlefields since 2009. For the rest: lethal drone strikes, according to analysts.
Barred by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress from closing Guantánamo and moving the remaining “worst of the worst” detainees to a maximum-security facility on U.S. soil, Obama administration officials have steadily chipped away at the population through the transfers to third-party countries. Trump has echoed lawmakers’ concerns that Obama has been releasing dangerous terrorists who could return to the fight alongside Islamic State.
In contrast to a lengthy process that Obama’s own supporters and officials have criticized as unnecessarily onerous, President George W. Bush released hundreds of prisoners with few measures in place to protect against terrorist recidivism, and most of the detainees that the intelligence community believes have returned to terrorism were released under Bush.
