US President Barack Obama has gained support for closing Guantanamo from a current and a former military leader despite opposition in Congress to moving “war on terror” suspects to the US.
Colin Powell, the former secretary of state and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in Republican administrations, and Admiral Michael Mullen, the current head of the joint chiefs, said on Sunday that the “war on terror” prison should be closed.
“I felt Guantanamo should be closed for the past six years, and I lobbied and presented reasons to president [George W.] Bush,” Powell said in an interview with CBS television.
With former vice president Dick Cheney leading the charge, Republicans have attacked Obama for promising to close the prison camp by January without a plan for dealing with the estimated 240 terror suspects held there.
Democratic lawmakers also have opposed transferring potentially dangerous prisoners to US prisons, forcing Obama to defend his “war on terror” policies in a major speech this week.
On Thursday, Obama vowed no retreat on closing Guantanamo Bay, but he also raised the prospect of holding the most dangerous al-Qaeda detainees indefinitely in US “super-max” jails.
‘RECRUITING SYMBOL’
In an interview with ABC television, Mullen said he had long been an advocate for closing the prison because it “has been a recruiting symbol for those extremists and jihadists who would fight us.”
Asked about Cheney’s charge that the recruitment argument amounted to blaming “America for the evil others do,” Mullen said: “It’s my judgment that [Guantanamo] has had an impact [on recruiting]. And it’s time to move on.”
He said detainees released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield in increasing numbers and in recent months the percentage of recidivism had climbed from “5 or 6 percent to the low teens.”
But members of Congress took aim at the notion of transferring Guantanamo detainees even to super-secure prisons that have housed other terrorist suspects without incident.
NOT IN THE US
Senator Ben Nelson, a Democrat who voted to deny funds for closing Guantanamo, said detainees accused of violating “the laws of war” should not be brought to the US.
“I think they need to be kept elsewhere, wherever that is,” he told Fox News. “I don’t want to see them come on American soil.”
Senator Barbara Boxer, another Democrat, told CNN: “We want to close it down, but we want to wait and see what the plan is.”
Senator Jon Kyle, a Republican, said he did not think he could be convinced to support the transfer of prisoners to the US.
“I don’t know why it is better to have somebody in a so-called supermax facility in, say, Colorado than it is to keep them in Guantanamo, a state-of-the-art facility that we built not too long ago for the explicit purpose of holding these people,” he said.
But Powell said the US “can’t keep them locked up forever.”
In the US, added Powell, there are 2 million people in jail.
That amounts to “the highest incarceration rate in the world and they all had lawyers. They all had access to the writ of habeas corpus and they’re all in jail,” he said.
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