Among the starkest changes president-elect Barack Hussein Obama seeks to make from the policy of the outgoing Bush Administration is to close Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Yet this change may result in the release of up to 100 terrorist suspects sitting prison cells there.
Obama promised in an October 31 interview with CNN that he would close Gitmo “as quickly as we can do prudently”. He is looking at creating a new “terrorism court” on the US mainland to try up to 80 terror suspects, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed September 11 master-mind. This new court system would be designed to handle highly sensitive intelligence material, a cross between a military tribunal and a federal court.
Bringing terror suspects and trying them in America, with its traditional rules of evidence and “innocent until proven guilty” stance, could mean that 100 of the 255 Gitmo detainees will probably never be charged, because there is little or no evidence linking them to terrorism.
This would open a whole new set of problems for the freshman Obama Administration, as a number of the home countries the terrorist suspects belong to have said that they would never take them back. Housing them in the US, or giving them asylum, would be a big problem for the Obama Administration.
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