BEIJING -- President Obama directly acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay will not close by the January deadline he set, but he said he hoped to still achieve that goal sometime next year.
Obama refused, however, to set a new deadline.
In an interview in the Chinese capital with Major Garrett of Fox News, Obama said he was "not disappointed" that the Guantanamo deadline had slipped, saying he "knew this was going to be hard."
Hypocrisy, thy name is James Inhofe when it comes to prosecuting terrorists.
A significant number of the remaining 215 inmates of Guantánamo Bay could be transferred to a maximum-security prison in rural Illinois, according to a source in President Barack Obama's administration.
More than eight years after two hijacked planes
smashed into the Twin Towers of lower Manhattan killing thousands and
sparking foreign wars, five men accused of helping to plot the carnage
are to be brought to face trial in a civilian courthouse just a few
blocks away from Ground Zero.
The
defendants, who include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-declared
mastermind of the al-Qa'ida attacks of 2001, will be transferred,
possibly in a matter of weeks, to New York City from the fortified US
military camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they are currently being
held.
According to The Associated Press,
Eric Holder will announce later today that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and
four other 9/11 defendants will be brought from Guantanamo to New York
to stand trial, in a real criminal court, for the crimes they are
accused of committing. This is a decision I really wish I could
praise, as it's clearly both politically risky and the right thing to
do.
On the night that Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election,
21-year-old Mohammed el Gharani was sitting in a segregation cell in
Guantanamo Bay's high security Echo Block.
He remembers the excitement among his fellow prisoners at the
prospect of an Obama presidency. "Everyone was very hopeful; people
were saying he was going to change things, that he would close the
prison," Gharani, who was released in June, says.
"Even the guards were telling us that if he won, things would improve for us."
The Louisiana Board that licenses psychologists is facing a growing legal
fight over torture and medical care at the infamous Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons.
In 2003, Louisiana psychologist and retired
colonel Larry James watched behind a one-way mirror in a U.S. prison camp while an
interrogator and three prison guards wrestled a screaming near-naked man on the
floor.
