Lawmakers work on shutting down Guantanamo facility
USA Today
By Richard Willing
July 9, 2007

WASHINGTON — Members of Congress plan to push measures to stop funding for the Guantanamo Bay detention center and grant new legal rights to detainees when Congress returns this week.

"As long as Guantanamo stays open, it undermines our defining principles as a nation of equal justice under law," said Rep Jim Moran, D-Va., author of a funding proposal that would give the Bush administration six months to close the Cuban facility.

The Bush administration wants to close the 51/2-year-old camp if authorities can keep holding dangerous detainees who "should never be released" or put on trial, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said June 29.

Administration officials, he said, were "working harder on the problem."

Moran said the administration needs a deadline to focus on a situation that has "dragged on way too long."

The Guantanamo Bay detention facility opened in early 2002 to house Taliban members and al-Qaeda associates captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The administration determined the men were not entitled to prisoner-of-war status because they did not wear uniforms and attacked civilian targets, violations of the Geneva Conventions. Housing the prisoners outside the USA has made it harder for them to challenge their detention in U.S. courts.

Some detainees who were released or who attempted to file legal challenges said they were tortured by interrogators, which the Pentagon denies. The International Committee of the Red Cross has criticized the United States over the detainees' legal status.

Moran says he will propose that funding for Guantanamo, pegged at $150 million a year, be phased out and that most of the estimated 375 detainees be brought to the USA and tried in civilian or military courts. In a bow to Gates, Moran will propose that the government be permitted to hold a small number of the "worst of the worst" detainees without bringing charges.

The proposals will be part of a defense spending bill the House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to take up Thursday or Friday, Moran said.

Moran has been the most active House Democrat pushing plans to either close Guantanamo or transfer some of its detainees. In late June, he wrote President Bush to ask that the Guantanamo center be closed. That letter was signed by 140 other representatives; all but one was a Democrat.

Rep. Dave Obey, D-Wis., the Appropriations Committee chairman, has not taken a public position on Moran's proposal but said he favors closing the Guantanamo detention center.

In the Senate, Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., plans to attach to a defense spending bill an amendment that would grant detainees the right to challenge their detentions through habeas corpus petitions, spokesman David Carle said. A law passed by Congress last year eliminated habeas corpus rights for detainees. The defense bill is to be taken up by the full Senate on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Two other Democratic senators, Tom Harkin of Iowa and Dianne Feinstein of California, have filed bills that would close Guantanamo, Harkin spokeswoman Jennifer Mullin said.

Spokesmen for the Justice and Defense departments declined to comment on the proposals.

Though the Bush administration backs closing Guantanamo under certain conditions, some congressional Republicans do not. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, a candidate for president and the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, has called closing Guantanamo "misguided" and "dangerous."

Allowing Guantanamo prisoners to challenge their detentions in court would give them more rights than prisoners of war who "play by the rules," said Jeremy Rabkin, an international law professor at George Mason University in Arlington, Va. He said it would help many "potentially dangerous" terrorists win their release in American courts "not designed to try unlawful combatants."

Moran acknowledged that some groups that favor allowing all detainees access to American courts will oppose his proposal to allow the Defense Department to continue to hold some without trial.

Any bill without such a provision was unlikely to get 218 votes to pass the House of Representatives, he said.

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