The detention center at Guantanamo Bay and the flawed justice system created to try terrorist suspects held there are among the most complicated legacies of the Bush administration. They're Obama's problem now. The president elect has said he will shutter Gitmo and put some of the detainees on trial in American criminal courts or military courts martial (his campaign did not return calls seeking comment.) But the prisoner mess created by Bush with the stroke of a pen in November 2001, and made messier over seven years, will take time and resourcefulness to clean up. Here are four reasons the controversial facility will probably still be open for business a year from now.
The Yemeni Factor. Any route to closing Guantanamo involves repatriating most of the roughly 250 detainees still held in Cuba. Sending detainees home requires negotiating the terms of their release with the home country. Since Yemenis make up the largest group of prisoners in Cuba, talks with the government in Sanaa will be key. But Yemen has been the hardest country to engage on the issue, according to a former senior official familiar with the process. The Bush administration has asked home countries to impose restrictions on the returnees. Saudi Arabia, for example, has imprisoned some Gitmo veterans, limited the travel of others and put those it thought it could co-opt through a "de-radicalization" program. "Yemen doesn't want to be seen as doing anything for the United States," says the former official, who declined to be named discussing sensitive diplomacy. Even if it agreed to U.S. demands, Yemen might not have the capability to honor them. "It has areas of the country that are poorly governed and its borders are porous," said the former official. If the new administration is willing to release detainees without demands on the home country, the process can go quickly. But the risk is that some might pose future security threats to America.
Other detainees face possible torture if sent home—most notably Gitmo's 17 Uighurs from China. Ken Gude of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank headed by former Clinton White House aide (and Obama ally) John Podesta, has suggested the United States. ask its allies to help create an international resettlement program for those detainees who can't return to their countries. The goodwill Obama has already generated in Europe and elsewhere will help. But the process will take time.
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