Protesters rally for hickss guantanamo release in Washington DC July 17, 2012
Protesters rally for hickss guantanamo release in Washington DC July 17, 2012. Reuters
The Obama administration in 2009 rejected a request for a review of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where the Bush administration had used the facility since 2002 to conduct terrorism investigations, saying that it had not completed an exhaustive review of the “high risk” environment created by its use. The White House said in July that “a complete review of the status of the detainees” was currently underway.
When Congress passed a law in the 1990s that tightened the oversight and accountability of the prison, it limited its detention capacity to about 11,000 detainees.
The latest changes mean that no detainee at Guantanamo – or any U.S. prison anywhere else – is likely to be released before President Barack Obama leaves office.
A spokesman for the Pentagon has previously said that although the Department of Justice has jurisdiction over Guantanamo Bay, the Obama administration has been able to transfer detainees and their lawyers, although a Justice Department spokesman said on Wednesday there have been no such transfers since Obama took office in January.
But he added that the Pentagon does not have legal authority to transfer Guantanamo Bay to the Obama administration without congressional authorization, since it is part of a U.S. military base in Cuba and is the federal government’s main human capital asset.
That authority has been used several times to transfer people from the prisons at Guantanamo to the U.S. military’s Central Com점보카지노mand base in Colorado, which provides intelligence and tactical-operational intelligence gathering to the Pentagon and other U.S. government agencies.
The new Guantanamo law authorizes the Bush administration to move an estimated 500 prisoners from a maximum of 15 different Guantanamo Bay facilities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to military bases in Florida an바카라d Texas, and to transfers in New Mexico and Arizona. That would include the more than 70 “high-risk” detainees held at the prison since June.
A State Department spokesman said that despite the Obama administration’s “disavowal” of the law’s requirement for “complete” review of the Guantanamo facility, he added that it remains the Obama administration’s intention “to move to an indefinite detention facility in connection with any future t호 게임errorism convictions in the United States.”
A Justice Department spokesman said: “With respect to any Guantanamo-based detainees, however, the Department of Justice is reviewing the law and the law is in effect.”
Obama said this month that he would soon complete his “exhaustive” review of the Guantanamo facility as part of his efforts to secure “i