Word: april
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...small group of like-minded allies close to Obama was already forming in opposition to Craig. One was National Security Council (NSC) aide Denis McDonough, a former Senate staffer who has a windowless, low-ceilinged basement office next to the Situation Room - and daily access to the President. On April 15, the day before the extension was set to expire, the President invited eight officers of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center to make their case against release in an Oval Office meeting with Obama. An all-hands, full-dress battle over where to strike the balance between civil liberties...
...April 17, Craig took the first step, assembling officials from across government in his office. Not only was he going to bring some prisoners from Guantánamo Bay to the U.S. for trial, he told them, but he was also going to turn some of the detainees loose. Seventeen were Uighurs, members of an ethnic minority from northwestern China, whom Bush and the courts judged had been wrongly swept up in Afghanistan and Pakistan after 9/11. Obama's top national-security advisers - including Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others - had approved Craig's plan to release...
...global game to empty the prison. If the two settled without incident, six more would be let into the U.S. That in turn would help the State Department persuade other countries to take Gitmo detainees. The hope was that those remaining could be tried in federal courts. At the April 17 meeting, Craig directed some of the officials to plan security measures for monitoring the Uighurs once they got to the U.S. and others to develop a plan to convince Congress and the public that it was a good idea. The Uighurs' lawyers agreed to a number of intrusive measures...
...inside the White House, the mood had changed amid the furor over the release of the torture memos in April. McDonough and other NSC advisers assembled in the Oval Office to discuss it. Obama raised questions about security - were the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security on board? Separately, his legislative-affairs staff warned of stiff congressional resistance - and Republicans responded on cue. Word of the plan leaked on April 24, and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell launched three weeks of near daily attacks on the idea of letting the Uighurs loose in the U.S. Dick Durbin, Obama...
...pirates are at it again - and with the same ship. Last April, they took over the Maersk Alabama off Somalia and held the ship's skipper, Capt. Richard Phillips, hostage for five days. The U.S. Navy rescued Phillips after SEAL snipers killed three of the pirates and took a fourth into custody...