The administration has concluded that it cannot put Mohammed on trial in federal court because of the opposition of lawmakers in Congress and in New York. There is also little internal support for resurrecting a military prosecution at Guantà ¡namo Bay, Cuba. The latter option would alienate liberal supporters.
This may change, of course, as President Obama has not made an official announcement, but it seems unlikely, as everything else at Guantà ¡namo has ground to a halt. Faced with ferocious opposition to any plans that made it through his wall of compromise and cowardice, Obama has demonstrated that he is content to continue holding the remaining 174 prisoners at Guantà ¡namo on the basis of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, even though the AUMF perpetuates the false notion that the Guantà ¡namo prisoners are neither prisoners of war, nor criminal suspects, but are still that third category of prisoner invented by the Bush administration: "enemy combatants," or, as they now are, "alien unprivileged enemy belligerents," who occupy a unique, and uniquely disturbing position, which, for the majority of the men, is still akin to a legal black hole, despite the fact that they were granted habeas corpus rights by the Supreme Court in June 2008.
Consider the facts: On the trial front, even though the Task Force recommended that 34 of the remaining prisoners should face trials, the administration is currently proceeding with the trial of just one man, Noor Uthman Muhammed, in the military commissions (following the scandalous betrayal of justice last month in the case of the former child prisoner Omar Khadr), and in federal court, the officials who spoke to the Washington Post suggested that even a successful outcome in Ghailani's trial would lead to nothing more than possibly a single "clean case against an unknown."
As for the rest of the prisoners, there are 48 whom the Task Force recommended should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and 58 Yemenis who are going nowhere. Excluding Omar Khadr, Ibrahim al-Qosi and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, the three remaining men convicted in trials by military commission, this leaves just 33 prisoners "approved for transfer," who, if new homes can be found, might be the only prisoners to be released from Guantà ¡namo in the next two years, confirming the extent to which the closure of the prison has become irrelevant to President Obama and the Democrats in general.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantà ¡namo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at:www.andyworthington.co.uk.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
4
3
2
