Bush won't close Gitmo: White HouseOctober 21, 2008
WASHINGTON (AFP) — US President George W. Bush will likely not close the Guantanamo Bay prison for suspected terrorists before handing his successor the keys to the White House in January, the White House said Tuesday.
"We've long said that it won't be closed before the end of the president's term," spokeswoman Dana Perino said of the facility, reviled around the world as a symbol of heavy-handed US "war on terrorism" tactics.
"The president and his administration are working to get to a position where Guantanamo could be closed -- and have been for some time," she said after The New York Times reported Bush had concluded he could not shutter the prison.
The chief challenge is where to put the detainees now held at the at the US Navy-run prison in Cuba, even as some of their home countries balk at taking them back and Washington says it fears other nations may not keep close enough tabs on them, or in other cases may mistreat their returning nationals.
Faced with human rights groups' charges of wrongly imprisoning people at Guantanamo Bay, or
in its secret network of prisons in Europe, Washington has emphasized the dangerous nature of some who have been released.
"While hundreds of detainees have left Gitmo since 2002, DOD (the US Defense Department) reports that about seven percent of those released have been picked up again -- oh, except for the one who blew himself up in a crowded market in Mosul, killing dozens of others as well," said Perino.
"That is a reminder that Gitmo holds some of the world's most dangerous people, including KSM," she said, using the shorthand for the prison's name and for Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The Bush administration has been locked in a bitter legal battle over the fate of 17 Chinese Muslim Uighurs, and Perino approvingly cited an appeals court ruling blocking a lower court's order that they be immediately released into the United States.
The group has been held in limbo at Guantanamo -- despite being cleared of "enemy combatant" status in 2003 and cleared for release in 2004 by the US government -- because officials cannot find a country willing to take them.
The men cannot be returned to China due to concerns they would be tortured there as political dissidents.
"We'll continue to work to find a place for the Uighurs," said Perino.
"We will continue to work to try the detainees in the military commission process, and we'll continue to work with countries to take back their own citizens who were picked up on the battlefield -- as long as we can be sure they aren't going to be allowed to hurt innocent people," she said.
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