Word: guant
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President Barack Obama's announcement on Tuesday that he is suspending repatriation of Yemeni detainees held by the U.S. at Guantánamo Bay solves one political problem but creates another. In the short term, it neutralizes the GOP talking point that Obama was putting the closure of the detention facility ahead of national security by sending Yemenis home. But it presents a longer-term challenge of how to win the battle to close the facility, which has been a key part of the GOP's strategy to undermine Obama from his earliest days in office...
...Army Major Nidal Hasan who is accused of killing 13 Army personnel at Fort Hood in November - is now living in Yemen and may have been in contact with Abdulmutallab. The chief religious adviser of the Yemeni-based AQAP - Ibrahim Suleiman al Rubaish - also did time at Guantánamo. "The President's continual release of Guantánamo Bay detainees presents an unacceptable risk to American lives," said retired U.S. Navy commander Kirk Lippold, who was captain of the U.S.S. Cole when a pair of al-Qaeda operatives blew up their skiff alongside it, killing 17 of Lippold...
...senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee has joined many of her GOP colleagues in saying such transfers need to be suspended. "Guantánamo detainees should not be released to Yemen at this time," Senator Dianne Feinstein said. "It is too unstable." But the White House shows no sign of changing course. "We're confident that any transfers that we're making are being made not only consistent with our national-security interests," a senior Administration official told reporters on Dec. 29, "but also consistent with what we consider to be a fundamental national-security interest in closing...
During his presidential campaign, Obama criticized Guantánamo as little more than terrorist advertising. The senior Administration official echoed that refrain, saying al-Qaeda has recently used Guantánamo as one of its "recruiting and motivational tools." Because of its notorious reputation, he said, it should be closed as quickly as possible. Critics counter that sending detainees back home - especially to poorer nations like Yemen (where unemployment hovers around 40%) - could allow them to attack again, especially if they were radicalized during their Guantánamo stay. And they maintain that sending such detainees to the Illinois prison...
...threats they posed. The State Department, responding to a law passed this year, sent a classified notice about each of the detainees to Congress 15 days before they were slated to be transferred. Among them were several whose cases had received some attention in the controversy over detainees at Guantánamo: Jamal Muhammad Alawi Mari, who was captured in Karachi, Pakistan where was the head of a local charity with alleged al-Qaeda links; Farouq Ali Ahmed, who had traveled to Afghanistan to teach children the Koran and was arrested without a passport in Pakistan; and Ayman Saeed Abdullah...