Capitol Hill Struggles With Closing Gitmo

Jun 21, 09:35 PM

Current Headlines: By Lesley Clark, The Miami Herald

Jun. 21--In testimony before the U.S. Helsinki Commission, a senior U.S. diplomat acknowledged Thursday that the Guantanamo Bay detention center is a "source of frustration" for the Bush administration.

But State Department legal advisor John Bellinger told the commission, chaired by South Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings, that the U.S. government has been working with dozens of countries to try to find places to transfer some of the detainees.

"We fully and acutely realize Guantanamo has become a lightning rod for criticism around the world," he said, defending the prison camps as serving an important purpose. "Everyone will agree these people need to be detained -- somewhere."

The detainee population in the prison camps that front the Caribbean in remote southeast Cuba stands at "approximately 375," according to a Pentagon statement issued this week.

And officials are negotiating with other countries to take about 80 of them, including men who have been held at the U.S. Navy base for more than five years.

Hastings, a Broward Democrat, chaired the morning hearing on the fate of the controversial prison camps in his role as chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission. It's an independent U.S. government agency created in 1976.

He scolded Europe to get on the stick and help the United States.

"Guantanamo has to be closed, over and out," Hastings declared. "But if Europe isn't prepared to stand up and take their share, I believe they ought to mute some of their criticism."

Hastings held the session amid persistent protests from Code Pink, antiwar advocates who have become part of the Capitol Hill debate on Bush administration policies that permit indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without charges.

At the point when Bellinger declared universal agreement that Guantanamo captives need to be detained, some protesters hissed, "Lies."

About a dozen joined the hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building, including some wearing orange jumpsuits in imitation of Defense Department garb for dangerous detainees. And their behavior drew an admonition from Hastings.

Guantanamo, he said, stirs intense emotions. But he insisted that the protesters be quiet and permit the witnesses to speak.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer also spoke at the hearing, upbraiding the Bush administration for its Guantanamo policies and practices.

"The system of justice at Guantanamo -- if it can be called that -- is not only inconsistent with our values and inspiring outrage internationally, but also ineffective," he said in a prepared statement.

He noted that across five years of detention without trial "many detainees have reported physical and mental abuse" and that 'four detainees have committed suicide in the past year -- acts that one State Department official coldly described as 'a good PR move.' "

The committee met just days after the Defense Department revealed that it had transferred six long-held captives away from the prison camps -- four to Yemen and two to Tunisia.

One of the Tunisian transfers drew human rights protests because the man, Abdullah bin Omar, 51, had told his lawyer that, as an Islamic activist at odds with his native country's secular government, he feared torture and persecution.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which has filed unlawful detention lawsuits on behalf of Guantanamo detainees, said that before bin Omar's capture by U.S. forces, he had been living with his wife and eight children in Pakistan, where he unsuccessfully sought political asylum.

It claimed he had been convicted in absentia in the early 1990s of association with a "moderate, nonviolent Islamist political party, Ennahdha" -- and sentenced to 23 years in prison.

"What has happened to American justice? How are we any safer by sending cleared men back to notorious regimes in the dead of night?" bin Omar attorney Zachary Katznelson asked earlier this week.

While the State Department seeks to find places for the men the United States has held without charge as so-called "enemy combatants," it cannot send them to places where they have a credible fear of persecution.

In eight earlier instances, the Defense Department transferred Guantanamo captives to Albania rather than to their native countries, such far-flung places as China, Algeria, Egypt and Uzbekistan.

Miami Herald staff writer Carol Rosenberg contributed to this report.

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