Puerto Rico, November 19: President Barack Obama is now confirming what many have long suspected: He will miss his January deadline to close the Guantanamo prison — partly because he cannot persuade other nations to take the detainees.
Prisoners like Walid Abu Hijazi. The 29-year-old is nearing his eighth year at Guantanamo even though the U.S. approved his release in February 2008. No one else has been willing to allow him, or dozens of others, into their territory.
This dilemma is one of the chief obstacles to closing the jail, according to lawyers and human rights groups who monitor U.S. detention policy. Most say Washington bears the main blame because it also refuses to accept prisoners on American soil.
"It's very difficult to persuade third countries to accept the political or security risks involved, especially when the United States has been unwilling to accept that risk itself," said Matthew Waxman, a professor at Columbia Law School.
U.S. officials decline to disclose the details of efforts to relocate Guantanamo prisoners, though in the past they acknowledged the difficulty in resettling ethnic Uighurs from China.
In Abu Hijazi's case, his Chicago-based lawyer, Matthew O'Hara, said he can only speculate that the problem with relocating his client is that the U.S. has no relations with Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, where Abu Hijazi is from.
No charges were ever filed against Abu Hijazi. O'Hara said his client told a military review panel he trained for two weeks at a militant camp in Afghanistan but never fired a weapon except in training and denied being part of the Taliban or al-Qaida.
"He's hanging in there," the lawyer said. "The men there generally have learned not to get their hopes up."
O'Hara doesn't see a possibility of his client being accepted elsewhere.
"Our friends and allies around the world say, 'If you don't want them, why should we take them?' That, I think, is the key obstacle," he said.
The administration says about 90 of the 215 men now held at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba can be released or repatriated, but it has made little progress since Obama announced shortly after his inauguration that he would close the widely criticized prison.
There are other factors causing Obama to miss the deadline. His administration must still resolve where it will try 40 to 60 prisoners suspected of terrorism.
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