The president should offer his Guantanamo plan to Congress (Buck McKeon-R OpEd)

[morningfog]

The May 1 editorial “Guantanamo, again,” on President Obama’s promise to re-engage Congress regarding the Guantanamo Bay prison, correctly pointed out that he has failed to certify any transfers of terrorist detainees to other countries. In part, this is because his administration agrees that many of the detainees at Guantanamo are simply too dangerous to transfer or release. For other detainees, the House Armed Services Committee has worked closely with the Senate to ensure that the certification requirements to allow a transfer to go forward are reasonable.

I have reached out to the president on many occasions and offered to discuss a path forward. Each time, I have been met with silence. Podium pronouncements aside, neither the president nor his staff have ever approached my committee with a plan, which must be the cornerstone of any effort to close the prison.

My committee will begin considering the fiscal 2014 National Defense Authorization bill this month, with final action in the House expected soon after. If the president is serious about a renewed effort to close the facility, he should seize the opportunity and send up his plan. Tell us his proposal for handling current detainees and how he would treat future terrorist captures.

No one believes that Guantanamo offers the perfect solution to the challenges presented by this unconventional war. It is, however, the solution Americans have arrived at after 10 years of debate, court challenges and legislation. If the president has a better solution, now is the time to offer it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-president-should-offer-his-guantanamo-plan-to-congress/2013/05/02/b2004922-b363-11e2-9fb1-62de9581c946_story.html

[Heather MC]

1. The President should come out and say he wants Gitmo to stay open forever

The Republicans would have it shut down within 24 hours.

[frazzled]

2. You're using an op-ed from this creepy Republican to attack the president??????

Read up on this guy. Shame.

Obama presented complete and detailed plans for closing Guantanamo, and the Congress consistently voted to prevent it.

So why, if Obama is so passionate about closing Guantanamo, hasn’t he? The question is a tricky one: There are very real political and legal hurdles, not to mention ever-present national security concerns. To the extent that we can name a single obstacle that’s keeping bulldozers from razing the infamous detention center, it might be the inability of the White House, Congress and foreign governments to come to an agreement about where to put the detainees.

The challenge in closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay is not actually the detention facility itself. The problem is the 166 detainees, each of whom has to be moved somewhere else. A basic premise of Gitmo, after all, was that these are people would be kept in perpetual limbo. Each detainee can leave that limbo through one of four different routes: a civilian trial, a military tribunal, a foreign country’s prison system or freedom.

Sounds simple enough, right? Except that the first two routes – civilian trial or military tribunal – were blocked by Congress, which passed legislation barring the federal government from funding trials for Guantanamo detainees or buying a prison in the U.S. to house them.

The third route, to send the detainees to a foreign country’s prison system, is only legal if the U.S. can be sure that the detainees will not be tortured there. Given some of the countries from which the detainees originate, this is not always an easy guarantee to make. And there have been doubts about foreign governments’ ability to appropriately safeguard the detainees. A 2008 Washington Post article portrayed Yemeni officials struggling to convince their U.S. counterparts that they could safely accommodate prisoners from Guantanamo, while U.S. officials worried that they might be released.

The fourth route, freedom, actually already applies to 86 of the 166 detainees. The U.S. government believes they can be safely released back into the world, but it has nowhere to send them. For many of these individuals, their home country will not take them or might torture them, meaning the U.S. has to find an entirely different country to release them to.

There’s been a great deal of political attention to this last category. Recent congressional legislation allows the Pentagon to get a special “waiver” allowing it to ship detainees to third countries, but only if a senior administration official pledges that the receiving country can guarantee that the detainee will never take up (or, in some cases, return to) terrorism against the U.S. Given that a recent study estimated that between 16 and 27 percent of released Gitmo detainees have participated in terrorism since leaving the facility, it’s hard to imagine any top political officials betting their careers on newly released detainees never returning to extremism. Whether the significant political risk of using these waivers is a bug of the program or a feature, the effect is the same, and in January the Obama administration effectively shut down the State Department office dedicated to closing Guantanamo.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/04/30/obama-just-gave-a-powerful-speech-about-the-need-to-close-gitmo-so-why-hasnt-he/

[morningfog]

3. I'm not "using" anything.

Just posting it. I know the guy is a creep. He's calling Obama's bluff. I think Obama's should shut him up.

[bemildred]

4. Obama should ignore this pompous asshole and take his case public.

The only reason Buck wrote this OpEd in the first place is because Obama went public on the subject, Buck would much prefer to ignore it. And in any case only outside pressure will get the Congress to do anything, they will just jerk you around forever if you play their game.

[frazzled]

5. You need to state your intentions when you post an article

Otherwise, the correct assumption of readers is to assume you support the content and source of the article posted. This is a disingenuous, duplicitous op-ed from a high-ranking Republican who chairs the House Armed Services committee. My assumption when you post his article with no explanation or commentary is that you agree with it. To not add such commentary is either just being lazy or attempting to dupe people into thinking this is a good argument. We're left not knowing which one.

[morningfog]

6. I don't need to do anything.

Thank you very much. I can post news and open it for discussion. I could not care less about what anyone here thinks of me.

[Solly Mack]

7. McKeon vows to keep Gitmo open (2011)

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47761.html


Rep. McKeon Votes Against Torture Ban
http://hometownstation.com/content/rep-mckeon-votes-against-torture-ban


McKeon is full of shit.