Free Republic

A majority of American voters wants to keep the military prison at Guantanamo Bay open, and many feel it has made the United States safer. A new Fox News poll finds 63 percent of voters want to keep the detention facility known as Gitmo open, while 28 percent say it should be closed and the terrorist suspects moved to federal prisons in the United States. There’s across-the-board agreement on keeping the prison open, although the degree of support varies by political party. Democrats favor keeping Gitmo by a 7 percentage-point margin, independents by 31 points and Republicans by 66 points....

Obama to Restart Transfers From Guantanamo By JULIAN E. BARNES, EVAN PEREZ and ADAM ENTOUS WASHINGTON—The Obama administration is set to restart transfers of detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.S. officials said, kick-starting a long-stalled drive to close the prison. In a speech Thursday, President Barack Obama will reassert his case that closing Guantanamo is crucial to U.S. counterterrorism goals. While he isn't planning to detail in the speech how to speed up transfers from the prison, officials said the president in coming weeks plans to lift the administration's prohibition on sending detainees to Yemen. The president in the speech...

Full Title: Obama’s emptiest Benghazi talking point; Plus: Where is Gitmo recidivist and alleged Benghazi jihad plotter Abu Sufian bin Qumu? The man depicted in the photo above is Abu Sufian bin Qumu. [Go to Michelle Malkin site for picture] I told you about him on September 20. He’s the former Gitmo detainee released in 2007 who was named as the possible lead plotter in the bloody attacks on our consulate personnel, staff, and private security contractors in Benghazi. We haven’t heard a thing about him from the commander-in-chief, who has vowed repeatedly to track down the killers and “bring...

Again with Guantanamo. Whenever this president can't answer a direct question about some failure of American security, or at least can't answer it satisfactorily, he goes into his riff about the need to ... close the brig at Guantanamo. This shtick always works. It gets his true believers applauding and his habitual critics stirred up. Ah, the best of both possible political worlds! Best of all, he never has to get back to that embarrassing question, having changed the subject. There's a reason that an offshore military prison was set up where it was: to confine terrorists and those suspected...

Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood’s epigrammatic founder, was never at a loss for the chilling turn of phrase. His rally cry, the Brotherhood’s signature pledge that “Jihad is our way” and “Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope,” is the soundtrack of the “Arab Spring.” It speaks for a region over two-thirds of whose putative liberty lovers prefer to kill apostates than to abide freedom of conscience. Their embrace of the very sharia chauvinism that ties together Banna, bin Laden, the Saudi royals, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev explodes the Western myth of the moderate Muslim majority. Yet the...

Guantanamo Bay prisoner Obaydullah says he is "losing all hope" after joining a widening hunger strike in February to protest his indefinite detention at the US military jail. In his declaration, signed on March 27 but made public Friday, the Afghan prisoner vowed that he and his fellow detainees "plan to remain on strike until we are treated with dignity" despite the difficulties and health consequences. More than a month after Obaydullah's declaration was signed, 100 out of 166 inmates held at the prison on the remote US naval base in southeastern Cuba are on hunger strike, prison spokesman Samuel...

Trays of halal meat for detainee meals are stored in arefrigeration unit at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay. BOB STRONG/REUTERS A selection of lunch meals offered to detainees are displayedin a food preparation area at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay. BOB STRONG/REUTERS I heard it again on the Today Show this morning: Two days into his presidency, by Executive Order, President Barack Obama called for closing Guantanamo but was blocked by Congress at every turn. Really?!Essentially, a segment of mainstream media in their lazy journalism (or liberal bias) is merely adopting the excuse and language used...

Hmmm... Obama has replugged the record player that plays the broken GIMO record: "I'm gonna close GITMO...I'm gonna close GITMO...I'm gonna close GITMO..." He had a filibuster-proof Senate (and even with Dem holdouts, using a finance maneuver, Reid could have used the nuclear option or something similar to it on the 5-6 Senate Dems that would have wanted to keep it open). And the Pelosi House at one time could have defunded GITMO, or refused to fund it in 2009. Things must be worse with his hard-core base than we thought...for him to try this redux. But... the Pentagon supposedly...

Barack Obama during his Tuesday press conference said once again that he wants to close the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay. NBC Tonight Show host Jay Leno offered the President some advice Tuesday saying, "He should do what he always does: declare it a small business and tax it out of existence":

Leno Tells Obama How to Close Gitmo: 'Declare it a Small Business and Tax it Out of Existence' By Noel Sheppard Created 05/01/2013 - 9:05am Barack Obama during his Tuesday press conference said once again that he wants to close the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay. NBC Tonight Show host Jay Leno offered the President some advice Tuesday saying, "He should do what he always does: declare it a small business and tax it out of existence": JAY LENO: President Obama held a press conference earlier today, and he said he still wants to close the Guantanamo Bay prison...

Cannot accept prisoners' hunger strikes -- too cruel. "GITMO is something that is not in the best interest of the American people." Calls upon Congress to act but is also considering "executive options."

With almost 100 Guantanamo prisoners now on a hunger strike to protest the alleged mistreatment of Korans, President Barack Obama announced on Tuesday plans to “re-engage” Congress to fulfill his failed campaign promise of shutting down the terrorist detention facility. "I'm going to go back at this," Obama promised. "I've asked my team to review everything that's currently being done in Guantanamo, everything that we can do administratively, and I'm going to re-engage with Congress to try to make the case that this is not something that's in the best interests of the American people." Obama also expressed concern over...

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri is a man with blood on his hands. A year before 9/11, the Saudi al Qaeda operative masterminded the bombing of the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole, killing 17 sailors as the vessel refueled in the Yemeni port of Aden. A Guantanamo tribunal was ready to arraign him last year, but since the Obama administration took office, it's been a case of trial and error. No trial -- plenty of error. As the 10th anniversary of the Oct. 12, 2000, attack looms, the White House has inexplicably frozen the prosecution. The Justice Department said this week that "no...

MIAMI (Reuters) - Guantanamo war crimes prosecutions of five prisoners charged with plotting the September 11 hijacked planes attacks will be delayed by two months because of lost files caused by Pentagon computer problems, U.S. military officials said on Wednesday. A weeklong pretrial hearing had been set to begin on Monday in the death penalty case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and four alleged co-conspirators. The judge overseeing the case postponed the hearing until June 17 at the request of defense lawyers who said three to four weeks' worth of their confidential work files had...

Top officials at the Guantanamo Bay detention center on Tuesday defended a raid that resulted in a violent clash with detainees, saying the operation was critical and the handful of injuries on both sides were minor. Soldiers with riot helmets and shields swept into recreation yards and met with resistance from several dozen prisoners, the leadership of the detention center said in interviews with journalists visiting the U.S. base in Cuba for the first time since Saturday's clash. The confrontation ended within minutes, but not before two guards were struck in the head by prisoners and five prisoners were injured,...

ONE man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago. I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity. I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial. I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here. Years ago the military said I...

ONE man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago. I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity. I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial. I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here. Years ago the military said I...

TRIPOLI, Libya — A security official says the leader of an Islamic extremist militia in Libya suspected of involvement in an attack in Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador has been shot. Sufyan bin Qumu, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, was shot Sunday in the area of al-Thruwn in the eastern city of Darna, a stronghold of Islamic extremists. The security official says he was taken to a nearby hospital and is in the intensive care unit. He spoke anonymously in line with regulations.

MIAMI (AP) -- Months of increased tension at the Guantanamo Bay prison boiled over into a clash between guards and detainees Saturday as the military closed a communal section of the facility and moved its inmates into single cells....Prisoners fought guards with makeshift weapons that included broomsticks and mop handles when troops arrived to move them out of a communal wing of the section of the prison known as Camp 6, said Navy Capt. Robert Durand, a military spokesman. Guards responded by firing four "less-than-lethal rounds," he said...."The ICRC continues to follow the current tensions and the hunger strike at...

The U.S. military says guards have clashed with prisoners amid a hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay, leading officers to move detainees from communal to single cells at Camp 6.