Word: guant
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...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...
...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...
...quietly killed the Gitmo plan in the second week of May; Craig never got a chance to argue the case to the President. "It was a political decision, to put it bluntly," says an aide. The stumble had long-term consequences: later that month, Congress blocked the release of Guantánamo detainees in the U.S. and restricted their transfer there for trial. The White House realized it had to start over on a signature issue. (See pictures of prison life inside Baghdad's Camp Cropper...
...Obama's Archives speech is now the template for Administration policy. Attorney General Holder recently announced that the U.S. would prosecute 10 Guantánamo detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other plotters of the 9/11 attacks. But he also announced, to the chagrin of human-rights groups, that five other Guantánamo detainees would go before the military commissions Obama had shunned in his campaign but embraced in May. Obama will soon announce that detainees will face indefinite detention...