Congress Resists Guantánamo Releases
Published: May 12, 2009
As lawmakers amped up the outcry against releasing Guantánamo "terrorists in our neighborhoods," France agreed to accept a "cleared" Guantánamo prisoner and human rights groups continued to press for release of 17 Chinese Uighurs the U.S. government has declared to be no threat to national security.
The Democratic-led House Appropriations Committee last week passed a bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but stripped more than $50 million that President Barack Obama had requested for closing the prison and starting the relocation of its 240 prisoners.
Lawmakers of both parties demanded that the Obama administration present a plan for closing Guantánamo and detailing what would be done with its inmates.
Republican lawmakers said the issue is an example of Obama’s weakness on national security and accused the president of endangering U.S. citizens. They proposed legislation titled the "Keep Terrorists Out of America Act," which would bar moving Guantánamo prisoners to any U.S. facility unless approved by the receiving state’s governor and legislature.
"Our constituents don’t want these terrorists in their neighborhoods," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, a Republican from Ohio.
Several Democrats have also joined Republicans in saying they do not want Guantánamo prisoners in their states or districts.
Administration officials have not said where the detainees would go, but they rejected the idea that U.S. citizens would face any risks from closing the prison by January.
"We are not going to put at risk the safety of the people of this country," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told a congressional hearing.
Some observers said that, in the congressional pushback against Guantánamo detainees, lawmakers appeared be conflating two separate groups of prisoners: those who have been cleared for release because they do not pose a threat to U.S. national security, and others who will be detained in the U.S. to await trials in federal courts, or who cannot be tried but are deemed too dangerous to release.
In the former category are 17 Chinese ethnic Uighurs who the U.S. says pose no security risk, but who have been detained without charge for over seven years at Guantánamo Bay. Their continued detention was found unlawful by a federal district court in January.
The court ordered the Uighurs released into the U.S. because they cannot be returned to China given the threat of torture there, and because no other country has agreed to accept them. But a U.S. Appeals Court reversed that decision when it held that federal courts have no jurisdiction over immigration law and thus are powerless to order the men released into the U.S. even if their continued detention is illegal.
The Uighurs’ lawyers, including the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group, has asked the Supreme Court to hear the case.
In a friend-of-the-court brief filed May 8, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) joined the CCR’s plea.
Jennifer Chang Newell, a staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said, "The Constitution requires that where a federal court has found a detainee’s imprisonment to be illegal, the court must have the power to order his release – including release into the United States when necessary to end the unlawful detention."
"Permitting the government to hold these men indefinitely violates the Constitution and threatens to render habeas corpus a dead letter," she said.
Uighurs are a Turkic ethnic group living in Eastern and Central Asia.
In related developments, the government announced that two long-imprisoned Guantánamo detainees would soon be released.
As indicated by French President Nicolas Sarkozy during President Obama’s recent visit to Europe, France will take in one Guantánamo detainee who has been held prisoner by the U. S. at Guantánamo since 2002.
Lakhdar Boumediene, 43, was arrested along with five other Algerians in 2001 in Bosnia, suspected in a bomb attack plot against the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. A U.S. federal judge ruled in November that the evidence against Boumediene was not credible and ordered him set free.
Boumediene is well known in legal circles because it was in his name that civil liberties attorneys argued at the U.S. Supreme Court the most recent case of prisoners’ right to seek their release through habeas corpus petitions. The court ruled in favor of the detainees in the case, Boumediene v. Bush.
The detainee the U.S. government has now agreed to release is Ayman Batarfi, 38, a Yemeni surgeon who reportedly treated al-Qaeda wounded at Tora Bora in Afghanistan. The government’s decision came as part of a case-by-case review ordered by President Barack Obama to empty the prison camps here by January 2010.
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