There’s a real push to close down the prison at Gitmo. Most of the people still there are from Yemen, and that’s proving to be an issue for this and the next administration. The US is willing to repatriate the prisoners, but there is the requirement that the home country will continue to keep them in confinement. There are a couple of problems with this:
1) The Yemen government cannot (legally) hold anyone without formal charges being pressed. Of course that supposedly is the law in the US as well…
2) The government of Yemen claims not to have the resources to take the 100 or so prisoners into its prison system. I’m of two minds on that. I mean, c’mon, what’s another 100 people into their prison system? On the other hand, Yemen is poor and there are already many stories of how crowed the prisons are. Of course the reflexive action from the Yemeni government is to ask for money to build a new prison for them. I’m not sure how amenable the US government is to giving more money to Yemen, too much of it disappears….
Talks were ongoing, and there was even the semblance of progress according to some reports. Then the embassy got bombed and things ground to a halt. My own personal opinion is that the Bush administration has to put up or shut up. Either announce to the world what the charges against thee men are and the evidence, or admit that there isn’t enough evidence to hold them. Since we are a country of laws, this shouldn’t be too big an issue….