By PETER BAKER and CHARLIE SAVAGE
Peter Baker reported from Kaneohe, and Charlie Savage from Washington. Eric Lipton contributed reporting from Washington.
c.2010 New York Times News Service
KANEOHE, Hawaii – The attempted bombing of an American passenger plane on Christmas Day could greatly complicate President Obama’s efforts to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as lawmakers in both parties call on the administration to rethink its approach.
The task of determining what to do with the detainees held at Guantanamo has already proved so daunting that Obama is poised to miss his self-imposed one-year deadline for shuttering the prison by Jan. 22. But evidence that al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen was behind last week’s failed plane attack will make it even harder since nearly half the remaining detainees are from Yemen.
“The current threats emanating from Yemen dramatically increase the political costs of closing Guantanamo,” said Matthew Waxman, a former top Pentagon official who handled detainee issues and supports trying to close the detention center. “To close it anytime soon, the Obama administration either has to send many detainees back to Yemen – widely viewed as a major terrorist haven – or it brings many of them into the U.S. for continued detention without trial.”
The possible impact on Guantanamo represents just one ramification of the Christmas Day plot. The administration is already reviewing changes in intelligence analysis and aviation screening to address what the president on Tuesday called “human and systemic failures” that allowed a 23-year-old Nigerian with known radical views to board a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with explosives in his underwear.
Obama, who is spending the holidays with his family in his home state of Hawaii, was briefed Thursday on the preliminary results of twin reviews into the breakdown leading up to the failed attack, and he ordered his senior advisers and agency heads to meet with him in Washington next week.
Obama spoke by telephone separately with John O. Brennan, his counterterrorism adviser, and with Janet Napolitano, his secretary of homeland security, but he offered no fresh assessment Thursday as he waited for more reports later in the day. The president said in a written statement that he would meet with agency directors on Tuesday “to discuss our ongoing reviews as well as security enhancements and intelligence-sharing improvements in our homeland security and counterterrorism operations.”
The reviews were expected to tell the president that the government had intercepted conversations about a possible attack by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula but did not correlate it with information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the man arrested in the airline plot, that might have pointed to his plans.
They also were looking at how explosives were brought on to the plane despite security procedures and what changes might be required to detect such materials in the future.
Napolitano announced that she was sending top deputies to meet with leaders from major international airports in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and South America to review security procedures and technology used to screen passengers bound for the United States.
“We are looking not only at our own processes, but also beyond our borders to ensure effective aviation security measures are in place,” Napolitano said in a statement.
The Guantanamo issue officially is not under review, but leading members of Congress are pressing Obama to either abandon plans to close the prison or to suspend any transfers of prisoners to Yemen.
Obama inherited 242 detainees at Guantanamo when he came into office, and his team has released or transferred 44. Of the 198 remaining, about 92 are from Yemen, and of those, about 40 have been cleared for release.
But a senior administration official said Thursday that Obama’s interagency team had already decided quietly several weeks ago that the security situation in Yemen was too volatile to transfer any more detainees beyond six who were sent home in December. The government concluded it had to release those six because it was about to lose habeas corpus hearings in court that would order them freed.
As for the rest, “we all agreed we couldn’t send people back because of the security situation,” said the official, who like others requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The administration has been trying to help Yemen develop a rehabilitation program like one in neighboring Saudi Arabia that has been judged largely successful in transitioning former detainees back into society. But the senior official said such a program appears unlikely to be set up, and without it, sending dozens of Yemenis back home would not be feasible.
The administration will re-examine the question in late 2010, when an Illinois prison is ready to take remaining Guantanamo detainees, the official said.
Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman, said Obama remained “as committed to closing the detention facility at Guantanamo” as he was a year ago, in part because it is a magnet for anti-American propaganda.
“That facility has been used as a rallying cry and recruiting tool by al-Qaida and its affiliates, including al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula,” LaBolt said.
But criticism has grown with reports that two former Guantanamo detainees released to the Saudi program under President George W. Bush in 2007 are now involved in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which has claimed responsibility for the Christmas attack.
Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both Republicans, and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, sent a letter to Obama asking him to stop the transfer of the six detainees sent to Yemen in December, even though that transfer had already been completed. Other Republicans joined the call to reverse Obama’s Guantanamo policy.
“Turning these terrorists over to other countries is not working, and we shouldn’t import them into the United States,” Rep. John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, said in a statement. “It’s time for the president to halt terrorist transfers to other countries, including Yemen, and to re-evaluate his decision to close the prison at Guantanamo.”
Some Democrats have expressed concern, too, including Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Feinstein still supports closing Guantanamo but said that “Guantanamo detainees should not be released to Yemen at this time” because “it is too instable.”
But David Remes, a lawyer representing Yemeni detainees who are challenging their detention without trial, said the administration was transferring only detainees deemed not to be a threat.
“I don’t see what the chaos in Yemen has to do with whether to return Yemenis to their home because these men have been determined not to be dangerous to the U.S.,” he said. “It’s a non-sequitur.”