The Obama administration is keen on highlighting the progress it is making in closing down Gitmo. Naturally, it could count on the Washington Post (“Administration Makes Progress on Resettling Detainees“) to do its PR. The Post‘s account gives us a good sense of how the administration sees things in broad terms currently. But a close look reveals that all is far from settled, and the “progress” highlighted in the article’s title and opening lines is, in reality, rather limited.
According to the Post, there are 229 detainees remaining at Gitmo. But, “the cases of nearly 120 have yet to be reviewed.” That is, the administration has yet to review more than half (120 out of 229) of the Gitmo cases. There are about five months left until President Obama’s self-imposed deadline for closing Gitmo, and the administration isn’t even half way done with its work.
That is the real lede for the Post‘s story, but it is only mentioned five paragraphs in.
Indeed, the Post briefly notes that the administration still faces “major obstacles” in closing Gitmo, but doesn’t really get into any of them. For example, the Post says that the administration is trying to determine what to do with the 98 Yemenis still detained there. The administration is wary about sending them back to their home country, which is home to one of the strongest al Qaeda arms on the planet and ruled by a duplicitous and corrupt government.
Thus, the administration is still apparently trying to get the Saudis to take at least some of the Yemeni detainees into its jihadist rehabilitation program. The Saudis have rejected previous overtures in this vein, but the Obama administration hasn’t given up trying. John O. Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, is leading the ongoing negotiations.
But why does the administration still think the Saudi rehabilitation program is a good fit for at least some of the Yemeni detainees? And why isn’t the Post questioning this proposal? There are a number of good reasons to think the Saudi program is not a good option, to say the least, for the Yemeni detainees.
Next, the Post says “[t]hirty detainees have been tentatively approved for prosecution,” with “teams of federal and military prosecutors” still “assessing where to put” 29 of them on trial. So, even for those detainees the administration knows it wants to continue to detain and prosecute, it is not sure how it will go about it. Will the administration try these 29 detainees in federal courts or military commissions? Apparently, the administration does not know.
Somewhat bizarrely, the Post refers to Ramzi Binalshibh (one of the Yemenis who isn’t being transferred any time soon) as “an alleged co-conspirator in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.” This is akin to saying al Qaeda allegedly carried out the September 11 attacks. Binalshibh is not a typical defendant awaiting prosecution. He is a known al Qaeda operative, who has admitted — repeatedly — that he directly participated in the September 11 operation.
The Post says “approximately 80 detainees” have been cleared for transfer or release thus far. When Obama took office earlier this year, press reports indicated that the DoD had cleared about 50 or 60 detainees for release but they couldn’t be freed or transferred because of security or human rights concerns — such as the fear that some detainees would be tortured or killed if they were returned to their home countries. If the Post is right, then the administration has added about 20 to 30 detainees to the “cleared for release” bucket.
But, why hadn’t they been cleared for release previously? More importantly, how did the Obama administration determine that these additional detainees were ok to transfer when the DoD had previously said they were not? What criteria were used to make these judgments?
We don’t know the answers to these questions because there is almost zero transparency on all of this. And the press isn’t really asking any tough questions.
Just because a detainee is cleared for release it doesn’t mean that he is an innocent or a negligible security threat going forward. The Obama administration has not released a list of the “approximately 80 detainees” who have been cleared for release. But we can be reasonably sure that detainees such as Ayman al Batarfi and Mohammed Jawad are up for transfer sometime soon. Batarfi has admitted ties to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s anthrax scientist. Batarfi was also an al Qaeda doctor at Tora Bora in late 2001. Jawad, whose case is a bit more complicated, has been loudly declared an innocent by the left. But there are good reasons to suspect that he did, in fact, participate in attacks on American forces.
Moreover, past transfer and release decisions by both the Bush and Obama administrations have been flawed.
The primary reason the DOD produces recidivism studies is because a fair number of past transfer decisions turned out to be faulty. Abdullah al Ajmi is a case in point. He made sure his Gitmo review board knew that he wanted to kill Americans when and if he got out. Al Ajmi warned that he would “kill as many Americans as he possibly can.” Despite the fact that American authorities determined al Ajmi was “a continued threat to the United States and its allies,” he was released to Kuwaiti authorities, who freed him. Unsurprisingly, al Ajmi blew himself up in Mosul, Iraq, in 2008 –killing more than a dozen Iraqi servicemen and wounding dozens more.
The Obama administration has transferred 11 detainees so far. A close look at the detainees transferred or released under Obama’s watch reveals some troubling facts.
For example, Ahmed Zuhair almost certainly played a role in the killing of William Jefferson, an American diplomat, in Bosnia in 1995. Zuhair even carried around Jefferson’s watch as a trophy. Zuhair, who compiled an extensive dossier of terror before he was captured and shipped to Guantanamo, was transferred to Saudi Arabia in June.
Another example is Binyam Mohamed, who was transferred to the UK earlier this year. There is little doubt, after reviewing the extensive unclassified intelligence amassed against him, that Mohamed was plotting attacks in America at the behest of senior al Qaeda figures at the time of his capture in 2002. Mohamed was transferred for no stated reason, and the press coverage has focused almost exclusively on Mohamed’s claims of torture.
The point behind these examples — Batarfi, Jawad, Zuhair, Mohamed — is simple. Just because the Obama administration may have found a home for the majority of the 80 detainees on the transfer list, it doesn’t mean that they should all be transferred. Nor does it mean that we don’t have to worry about them ever again. But instead of wondering what criteria are used to determine that a detainee is worthy of transfer, the Post simply trumpets the fact that the Obama administration has found a home for many of them.
In sum, the Post‘s account would have been better titled, “Closing Gitmo Still Poses Major Challenges.” But then again, that would have required a bit more research and reporting by the Post.
