Guantanamo’s fate yet to be decided

The White House postponed a meeting of the administration’s top senior foreign and defense policy officials scheduled for today to debate the future of the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, terrorism detention center, but officials said the issue of whether to close the facility was likely to be discussed at a later date.

The meeting was scheduled to help senior leaders decide whether the Guantanamo prison could be closed and its detainees moved to facilities in the U.S. without risking their release by the courts. Plans for the White House meeting were first reported Thursday by the Associated Press.

After legal defeats and growing criticism at home and abroad, Bush administration officials have begun reconsidering the future of Guantanamo and U.S. detainee policies. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has urged that the prison be closed, and former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called last week for its shutdown.

But the White House denied Thursday night that any decision was at hand, noting that several important issues had yet to be addressed, including the repatriation of detainees who have been marked for release and the setting up of new war crimes tribunals.

“No decisions on the future of Guantanamo Bay are imminent,” said Gordon Johndroe, a White House spokesman. He said that today’s meeting was “no longer on the schedule” but that senior officials were expected to take up the issue again.

The administration’s internal debates come after a series of legal setbacks to its detention policies and to plans for war crimes trials for the first of the approximately 380 prisoners still being held at the U.S. naval base.

This month, two military judges threw out the only two pending war crimes cases against alleged Al Qaeda and Taliban associates. The judges said that neither detainee had been properly classified to stand trial.

The White House is also under increasing congressional pressure to change its Guantanamo policy, with several bills under consideration that would force the administration’s hand.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), author of one of the bills that would shutter Guantanamo, said he was encouraged by reports that the administration was moving toward closing the prison.

“The right thing to do is to close the Guantanamo Bay prison as expeditiously as possible, while requiring that criminal detainees be transferred to state-of-the-art, maximum-security facilities within the United States,” Harkin said in a statement.

Gates has acknowledged in congressional testimony that he has been pushing to close Guantanamo and to move the detainees to U.S. military courts. AP reported that a proposal under consideration would move the prisoners to Ft. Leavenworth, the Army base in Kansas that is home to a large military prison.

Gates testified that the Guantanamo facility’s history had given it a “taint” and that war crimes trials there would lack international credibility.

Johndroe, the White House spokesman, noted that President Bush had “long expressed a desire” to close Guantanamo but that he wanted to make sure it was done in “a responsible way.”

Hundreds of detainees have been held without trial at Guantanamo since the first prisoners arrived in January 2002. The prison has been at the center of worldwide criticism over the administration’s handling of detainees and its system for holding and prosecuting them.

Pentagon officials say they expect about 80 of the detainees at Guantanamo to be put on trial for war crimes. About 85 are due to be released or transferred to other countries.

The rest, numbering more than 200, are in legal limbo, without the right to appeal the military’s decision to continue holding them. If they were moved to U.S. soil, legal scholars argue, they probably would be covered by habeas corpus, the right to challenge their detention.

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peter.spiegel@latimes.com

Times staff writers James Gerstenzang in Huntsville, Ala., and Claudia Lauer in Washington contributed to this report.