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Gates says US efforts to close Guantanamo at a standstill
US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday that efforts to close the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay have reached a standstill due to legal and practical problems.
- Agencies
- Published: 09:05 May 21, 2008
Washington: US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday that efforts to close the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay have reached a standstill due to legal and practical problems.
When asked about his desire to shut down the detention site for terrorism suspects at the American naval base in Cuba, Gates told a US Senate hearing, "The brutally frank answer is that we're stuck and we're stuck in several ways,"
Human rights groups and many governments, including allies of the United States, have called on the Bush administration to close the prison, saying it violates international legal standards and harms America's standing in the world.
Gates has said he wanted to close the site, where inmates have been held for years without trial, after he took over from Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in late 2006 and assigned officials to look into the issue.
But the former CIA chief said the effort had run up against several major problems. The first was that the United States had identified about 70 prisoners who could be returned home in theory but not in practice.
"The problem is that either their home government won't accept them or we're concerned that the home government will let them loose once we return them home," he said.
Some 270 detainees remain in Guantanamo Bay and more than 500 have left since the site opened in January 2002, according to the US military.
In the Senate, Gates said the United States has also failed to come up with a solution for inmates who cannot be freed for security reasons but will not be charged under the military commissions system for trying war crimes suspects.
"We just have a hard time figuring out ... what do you do with that irreducible 70 or 80 or whatever the number is," he told the defence subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
There was also a widely held reluctance to house any of the prisoners in the United States, Gates said.
"We have a serious 'not in my backyard' problem. I haven't found anybody who wants these terrorists to be placed in a prison in their home state," Gates said. "Those three problems really have brought us to a standstill."
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