Retired Generals, Admirals Back Obama’s GTMO Closure
Former Officers Meet With DOJ, Defense Department
By Spencer Ackerman 9/29/09 12:10 PM
A group of senior retired generals and admirals who support President Obama’s beleaguered plan to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay said that they were “encouraged” by a meeting yesterday afternoon with Attorney General Eric Holder, and said they heard no reservations from Holder about the administration’s determination to close the facility by its January deadline.
“He was very attentive,” said ret. Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, one of 15 retired flag officers who met with Holder yesterday, and who are scheduled to meet with Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn Tuesday afternoon and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair Wednesday morning. “We expressed our views to the attorney general, and he did express the fact that he shared those goals with us,” said Taguba, who became famous in 2004 for investigating detainee abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. “There is a joint deliberative process of reviewing all those {Guantanamo detainee} cases again to ensure that they haven’t missed any of the options that they’re trying to develop toward that plan” to shutter the facility by January, a plan vociferously criticized by congressional Republicans.
The group, assembled by Human Rights First, said during a joint interview Tuesday morning that they heard from Holder that the administration has completed its review of case files for all the 240 detainees at Guantanamo that it inherited from the Bush administration and has reached decisions for charging, transferring or releasing about half of them.
Ret. Army Gen. David M. Maddox rejected the assertion, made by Obama in a May speech, that some detainees at Guantanamo could be neither responsibly charged nor released, and must be held instead in a form of indefinite detention. “Our goal is the number that remain in that category at the end should be zero,” said Maddox, a former commander of Army forces in Europe. He said he was “impressed” to hear that Holder “shared that goal.” In his May speech, Obama pledged to “exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country” before considering preventive detention; reportedly, the Obama administration has decided against seeking a new law granting it additional preventive detention powers.
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http://washingtonindependent.com/61200/retired-generals-admirals-back-obamas-gtmo-closure
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