The White House said on Tuesday U.S. President Barack Obama would sign an annual defense policy bill even if it keeps in place a ban on transferring detainees from the Guantanamo Bay military prison to the United States.
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The White House has complained about provisions restricting the closing of detention facilities at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that are still contained in the measure, but has not issued another formal veto threat.
Obama does not like the NDAA’s Guantanamo provisions, but can not successfully veto it. The overwhelming House and Senate votes signal that should he reject the legislation, both chambers would be able to muster the two-thirds majorities needed to override it, an embarrassing blow presidents usually try to avoid. As one of the oldest democracies in the OSCE, the United States of America should lead by example, by making it crystal clear that everyone has the right to a fair trial.
The Pentagon is expected to release a report as early as this week detailing plans to transfer a few 53 of the centre’s remaining 112 detainees to prisons on Colorado, Kansas and SC.
A plan detailing how to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center is expected this week from the Pentagon.
While the men being held at Guantanamo Bay may be vile criminals who deserve harsh justice, we, as a country, have treated them unfairly and in patently un-American ways.
Earnest hinted last week that the president might use his executive authority to close the prison.
The president plans to send Congress a blueprint for fulfilling his campaign pledge to close the US prison in Cuba. “They shouldn’t. It would be a very weak argument because I’ve asked them for a plan and they haven’t given me a plan”.
Former White House counsel Gregory Craig and Cliff Sloan, Obama’s special envoy for closing Guantanamo in 2013 and 2014, claim that law is unconstitutional.
The president had threatened to veto the defense authorization bill for the past four years over its Guantanamo provisions, but, until this year, he’d always relented and signed the bill.
The law enforcement officers also said they were concerned about militant attacks on prison transports carrying the detainees to and from the federal facilities on USA roadways.
“No. I don’t think I said that”, Earnest answered.
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The letter appears to have been timed to U.S. Senate action on the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, which, as noted by the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, “includes language saying that no money from it can be used to transfer or release those detainees onto US soil”. “This is standard practice whenever carrying out human rights monitoring of detention facilities, but we were not able to do this”, Omer Fisher, Deputy Director of OHDIR, said at a press conference. We made bad mistakes with the Guantanamo Bay prison. Facilities at Leavenworth in Kansas, Charleston in SC and Florence in Colorado have been touted as potential sites for housing them.
