Obama, Republicans fight over closing Gitmo

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama this week renewed his pledge to shut down the Guantanamo Bay military prison, despite strong objections from Republicans who fear inmates could join Jihadist battles currently raging across the globe.
In the latest salvo in an ongoing fight between Obama and his Republican adversaries in Congress, the State Department said recidivism dropped sharply since Obama took office.
"Opponents of closing Guantanamo cite a 30-percent recidivism rate among former detainees. This assertion is deeply flawed," said Cliff Sloan, who until this year was the State Department’s special envoy for Guantanamo closure.
"Of the detainees transferred during this administration, more than 90 percent have not been suspected, much less confirmed, of committing any hostile activities after their release," he wrote in a New York Times opinion piece this month.
According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 19 percent of Guantanamo detainees transferred out of the prison before 2009 were "confirmed of reengaging in terrorist or insurgent activities."
For prisoners transferred after 2009 -- the year Obama entered the White House -- the figure is 6.8 percent. One of Obama´s first acts as president was to sign an executive order that decreed the closing of the prison.
It’s "time to finish the job," Obama said Tuesday in his State of the Union address.
"As Americans, we have a profound commitment to justice, so it makes no sense to spend three million dollars per prisoner to keep open a prison that the world condemns and terrorists use to recruit," Obama said.
But Republicans, arguing to keep the prison open, have warned of a rise in global Jihadism and highlighted the recent attacks in Paris.
John McCain, who lost the presidential election against Obama in 2008, along with other Republican senators, is pushing for legislation that would halt most prisoner transfers for two years.
They say 30 percent of ex-prisoners return to the fight, and they want those who once posed a medium or high risk of recidivism to be kept behind bars.
They have also called for an end to all repatriations to Yemen, which has been rocked by political turmoil in recent weeks. Most of Guantanamo´s 122 remaining inmates come from Yemen.
"Now is not the time to be emptying Guantanamo," said Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte, who supports the temporary freeze on inmate transfers.
McCain said it was "a badge of honor to have been an inmate at Guantanamo Bay," and criticized Obama for not having a clear plan of what would become of them.
"We’re going to continue to release batches of prisoners, according to this administration, with no plan and the extreme likelihood that approximately one out of every three of them will re-enter the fight," McCain said. On the Fox News network, anchor Bill Hemmer cast doubts on the administration’s claim that confirmed recidivism since 2009 was 6.8 percent.
"When a Gitmo detainee goes back to their country they are a returning war hero, don’t kid yourself," he said, using the nickname for Guantanamo.