Washington, January 02: Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle in the US are urging the Obama administration to reconsider its plan to close the Guantanamo prison as the nation faces new ‘terrorist threats.’
President Obama has already announced that he will fail to live up to his promise to close the notorious detention center within one year of his reign at the White House.
Now faced by the reality that almost half of the remaining Guantanamo detainees are from Yemen and that the Christmas Day “jet bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, has allegedly received training in Yemen, congressional leaders and government officials are urging the president to abandon plans to close the prison or to suspend any transfers of prisoners to Yemen.
“The current threats emanating from Yemen dramatically increase the political costs of closing Guantanamo,” said Matthew Waxman, a former top Pentagon official who handled detainee issues and supports closing the detention center, according to a New York Times article on Thursday.
“To close it anytime soon, the Obama administration either has to send many detainees back to Yemen – widely viewed as a major terrorist haven – or it brings many of them into the US for continued detention without trial.”
When Obama took office in January 2009, there were 242 detainees at the prison. While 44 of these prisoners were relocated, around 92 of the remaining detainees are from Yemen, and of those, about 40 have been cleared for release.
According to White House officials, Obama remains “as committed to closing the detention facility at Guantanamo” as he was a year earlier, in part because it is a source inviting anti-American propaganda.
“That facility has been used as a rallying cry and recruiting tool by Al Qaeda and its affiliates, including Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman, said.
The administration is mulling plans to transfer the remaining Gitmo detainees to a prison in Illinois on US soil, a proposal that has caused great controversy.
——Agencies