In an abrupt departure from President Obama's plans, the Senate today voted overwhelmingly against paying for closure of the U.S. military-run detention facility for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The 90-6 vote was the capstone of a weeks-long Republican drive to turn an issue that had been a cornerstone of Obama's campaign message into a political liability for Democrats whose constituents do not welcome the prospect of detainees being brought from the island prison to U.S. soil.
The vote comes on the eve of a national security address planned by Obama on Thursday in which he is expected to discuss in more detail his plan for closing Guantanamo, which he ordered shut days after his inauguration. He set a January 2010 deadline for its closure.
The administration requested $80 million to pay for closure costs, but Democrats balked after Republicans raised pointed questions about where and how the detainees would be transferred to the U.S. -- either in its prisons or its communities.
"It was a mistake to submit an amount [of money needed] without no plan," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who voted to strip the $80 million that had been included in a $91-billion bill to finance wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The issue likely will resurface later this year in other budget debates, but the Senate vote -- coupled with a similar decision by the House last week to drop funding for closing Guantanamo -- signals that Obama has a lot more political groundwork to lay before Congress will go along with the plan.
"There's been a major retreat by Democrats and Republicans," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the rare Republican who supports closing the Guantanamo facility. "Time is not on our side."
Pushing back against growing congressional opposition to moving detainees to the United States, a top Pentagon official said today that closing the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, would require prisoners to be moved to the U.S. and urged lawmakers to think more strategically. Yet the director of the FBI also warned Congress today that moving detainees from Guantanamo to the U.S. -- even into maximum security prisons -- poses potential security risks.
Michele A. Flournoy, undersecretary of Defense for policy and the Pentagon's No. 3 official, said that if allied nations were going to take detainees, the U.S. also needed to take some into its prisons.
"When we are asking allies to do their fair share in dealing with this challenge, we need to do our fair share," Flournoy said today. "This is a case where we need to ask members of Congress to take a more strategic view. Many of these members called for the closing of Guantanamo, and we need their partnership in making that possible."
But FBI Director Robert Mueller said that bringing detainees from Guantanamo Bay into the U.S. could pose a number of possible risks.
Mueller, appearing before the House Judiciary Committee, was asked what concerns the FBI has about the prospect of transferring some of the 240 inmates currently held at the Naval base in Cuba to American prisons.
"The concerns we have about individuals who may support terrorism being in the United States run from concerns about providing financing, radicalizing others," Mueller said, as well as "the potential for individuals undertaking attacks in the United States . . . All of those are relevant concerns."
Rep. Jerold Nadler (D-N.Y.) prodded the FBI director to agree that dangerous detainees could be safely kept in maximum security prisons. Mueller balked at Nadler's suggestion, noting that in some instances imprisoned gang leaders have run gangs from inside prisons. "It depends on the circumstances," Mueller said.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said today that he wanted neither to have detainees released into the U.S. nor to see them imprisoned here.
"We don't want them around the United States," Reid said.
With Obama set to deliver a speech about Guantanamo and detainee policy on Thursday, the White House is billing the address at the National Archives as a major statement on national security.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has predicted that between 50 and 100 detainees would eventually be moved to American prisons and that some of the Chinese Muslims, who are held at Guantanamo but not considered dangerous, would be released into the U.S.
Flournoy would not offer her own prediction of how many detainees the U.S. or its allies would eventually take. She said the administration was going through each case individually, and there were no decisions on where detainees might be moved.
"I am optimistic that all of us will take more than we have agreed so far," she said. "This is a challenge that will require all of us to step up and make hard choices."
European allies so far have offered to take only a couple additional detainees from Guantanamo. If the U.S. cannot move more of the detainees to allied countries, it will be faced with holding large number of detainees it cannot transfer to their home countries.
Officials have been reluctant to send many of the remaining 240 detainees to their countries of origin, fearful that the suspects would either be allowed to rejoin the fight against the U.S. or could be abused in prison.
Closing Guantanamo has proven to be a far more tricky political proposition than some in the Obama administration believed it would be. Top officials have remained largely silent, failing to offer broad arguments about how closing Guantanamo could help the U.S. position in the world. Obama is expected to answer these questions Thursday.
The administration has created task forces to deal with various aspects of interrogation and detention policies -- and craft new practices on how to handle current and future detainees.
The work is complicated by the fact that many of the detainees currently in custody were captured at different times, Flournoy said. "We are dealing with an inheritance," she said. "We are dealing with . . . people . . . taken into custody when different policies were in place."
One of the most critical questions facing the administration is what to do with the potentially dozens of detainees it cannot release, transfer or try. Until now, the detainees have been held indefinitely in Guantanamo.
But if they were moved to the United States, the Obama administration may seek congressional approval to continue to hold them without formal charges.
Pressed for the administration's position, Flournoy offered few details, but did not disavow continued detention without trial -- at least for some of the detainees.
"The desire is to provide due process to as many of these detainees as possible," she said.
Human rights groups remain strongly opposed to the Obama administration's push for congressional approval for detention without trial.
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