Category Archives: Obama

This week, President Obama announced his intention to lift the ban on the transfer of prisoners from GITMO to Yemen.

President Obama will announce Thursday that the White House plans to lift the ban on sending detainees from Guantanamo Bay to Yemen, Fox News confirms, a move that could effectively resume efforts to close down the prison.

That effort, however, has been stymied because many countries don’t want the detainees or are unwilling or unable to guarantee that once transferred, detainees who may continue to be a threat will not be released.

There are currently about 166 prisoners at Guantanamo, and 86 have been approved for transfer as long as security restrictions are met.

This week, the Pentagon asked Congress for more than $450 million for maintaining and upgrading the Guantanamo prison. More than 100 of the prisoners have launched a hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention, and the military earlier this month was force-feeding 30 of them to keep them from starving to death. Source: FOX news

The Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Leopold notes that the Obama administration intends to start with 30 non-Yemeni detainees. Hagel will have to approve any orders for release, but there’s a reason Obama fought for him as the nominee and I’ve got a feeling this was part of the bigger picture. The Atlantic has some more background on this and hilariously links to ProPublica as a source.

I’ve written before about the problems with Obama’s intention to release various terrorists of Yemeni origin from GITMO. Yemen has been a hotbed of activity lately, despite this administrations best efforts to prop up the government and its military with weapons and drones.

Last Fall, Breitbart pointed out that one of the attackers in Benghazi was believed to be a former GITMO detainee:

President Barack Obama is about to release or transfer 55 Gitmo prisoners, despite reports that the Libyan believed to be behind the killing of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens was a former Guantanamo inmate transferred to Libyan custody.

The large percentage of those scheduled to be released are Yemeni, according to a list made public by the Obama administration.

Obama stopped the release or transfer of Yemeni inmates in 2010, because the conditions in the country were viewed as too “unsettled” at the time.

Embedded in that snippet is the list of detainees being considered. Here at LL1885, we looked into some of their dossiers to see the threat assessment on them. From what we viewed, few of them seemingly have a threat assessment worthy of release; most had medium to high risk assessments.

For example, the last one on the release list is Belckacem Bensayah ISN 10001 with a threat assessment of HIGH risk to the US and its allies as well as being a HIGH intelligence value detainee; he has an extensive list of terrorist activities and known associations to Al Qaeda (begins on page 5): Continue reading →