Holder: Gitmo May Stay Open Past 2012
The Hill reports:
Attorney General Eric Holder left open the possibility Tuesday that the Guantánamo Bay terrorist prison camp might live on beyond President Obama’s first term.
Asked in a congressional hearing whether the prison would be closed by November 2012, Holder said: “I don’t know.
“We will do all that we can. We have to, obviously, work with Congress. Congress has put barriers in place to what I think is what we should be doing,” Holder said. “So we’ll have to work through those restrictions and work with our allies to try and come up with a way in which we can do that.”
Obama promised during his successful election campaign to close the detention center in Cuba, calling it a recruiting tool for terrorist groups like al Qaeda. He signed an executive order on his second day in the Oval Office that set a one-year timeline for shutting it down.
But both Republicans and Democrats opposed the closure, saying they did not want any terrorist suspects housed in prisons in their home states.
Congress prohibited any federal funds being used to pay for the transfer of detainees from Guantánamo to prisons the United States, and the White House has pushed the issue to the backburner.
With Republicans now in control of the House, and Democrats showing little interest in reopening the debate, Holder conceded under questioning that the prospects for closing Guantánamo have dimmed.
The attorney general said the Justice Department has established a task force to look at each of the 172 detainees being held at the Guantánamo prison to address how they should be dealt with.
Holder’s comments come just weeks after CIA Director Leon Panetta told a Senate panel that Osama bin Laden would probably be shipped to and held at the Guantánamo Bay facility if he were captured.
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