Word: craig
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Craig, it turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. Four days later, former Vice President Dick Cheney attacked Obama on Fox News Channel for dismantling the policies he and Bush had put in place to keep the country safe. More significant was the reaction within Obama's camp. Democratic pollsters charted a disturbing trend: a drop in Obama's support among independents, driven in part by national-security issues. Emanuel quietly delegated his aides to get more deeply involved in the process. Damaged by the episode, Craig was about to suffer his first big setback...
...Fate of Guantánamo Bay Obama repeatedly promised during the presidential campaign to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, but Guantánamo proved much easier to say than to do. Craig was under pressure to eliminate related Bush policies that made it infamous: indefinite detention without charge or trial and the use of military commissions - special courts that curtailed defendants' rights...
...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...
...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, including ankle bracelets...
...Unwilling to execute Craig's plan, the White House had no backup. Though Durbin thought it could win the fight, Obama's political team worried about antagonizing lawmakers at a time when the President was seeking more money for Iraq and Afghanistan as well as a host of economic concerns. "The precincts were reporting that there was going to be stiff opposition" to Craig's Guantánamo plan, says a top official. It became "a question of what is achievable," he adds...