Suicide bombers sink President Obama's Guantánamo ploy

One of President Obama's solemn promises made during his election campaign – and one that endeared him to all of the anti-Bush media – was to close Guantánamo and either release all the inmates or put them on trial in the US.

It is now obvious, since some detainees who were let out by President Bush under strong media and international political pressure, were, ahem, terrorists after all. They are behind the new wave of Al Qaeda suicide bombing attacks coming from Yemen.

So now US officials are telling Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, who broke the Monica Lewisnky scandal during the Clinton administration, that suspending the sending of detainees back to Yemen is "politically, a no-brainer."

Isikoff raises the possibility that far from being shut down within President Obama’s first term, Guantánamo is likely to stay in business for the foreseeable future. He reports top State Department lawyer John Bellinger, a persistent advocate of closure, as saying:

I'm beginning to think that Guantánamo is not ever going to be closed. I would bet some money that it's not going to get closed in the Obama presidency.

Well, that certainly would create a dilemma for the president, whose closure promise is still at the forefront of his public statements. As recently as last Tuesday, while announcing the stopping of further transfers to Yemen, he said:

Make no mistake: we will close Guantánamo prison, which has damaged our national-security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.

It’s just that, according to Isikoff, it won’t happen as promised by the end of this month, so no doubt the recruiting ground angle will be conveniently forgotten. The more accurate reading would be that the policy of closing Guantánamo just made it easier to recruit jihadists, as the failed Nigerian suicide bomber example suggests.

Yemen, Isikoff reports, is home to about 92 Guantánamo detainees, nearly half the facility's current population of 198. He continues:

The senior Obama administration official (who requested anonymity because of the political insensitivities) says that "security concerns" along with congressional politics prompted Obama's phone call to Attorney General Eric Holder this week in which he directed that further transfers to Yemen be halted.

But a key development, little noticed by the national news media but a small bombshell inside the White House, was a statement issued by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, last Tuesday stating that Yemen was now too "unstable" for any more Guantánamo transfers and calling on the president to suspend them, according to another senior administration official.

Once the White House had lost Feinstein, who had previously sponsored legislation to close the base, officials realised they had little hope of sustaining any transfers back to Yemen.

Other political complications also come into it, such as political opposition to moving most of the detainees to an all-new correctional facility, and a Congressional appropriations bill, passed overwhelmingly last year and which expires on September 30, that blocks all movement of detainees to the US unless they are standing trial.

Isikoff says the likelihood the Congress to lift the rider – in an election year – is much more difficult when the proposal is to move more than 100 detainees rather than 20 or 30.

A further irony is that lawyers acting for many of the detainees say their clients will oppose transfers, preferring to stay where they are, under Geneva Convention conditions, rather than face a tough US high-security jail.

Is it really less than a year since we said good riddance to George W Bush and his anti-terrorist policies – even as President Obama’s pitch for peace with the Muslim world has been roundly repudiated?

Israel remains the only place where suicide bombing has declined – surely, a lesson that is still to be learned in the West. For more on this, read Newsweek correspondent Dan Ephron on why peacemaking with the intransigent Palestinians is passé and how their cause is now only for losers.