Prison Closings

President Obama signaled his intention Wednesday to press forward on his plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, despite a growing challenge from both political parties and a limited set of options to make his detainee policy work. In a sign of his lost momentum, the Senate on Wednesday voted 90 to 6 to block funding for the shutdown. The vote followed criticism that the administration was backtracking on Americans' security.

The Obama administration has begun the process of reviewing files of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay to determine who can be prosecuted and who can be transferred to other countries, officials said Friday, a crucial first step toward closing the prison. The review, begun this week, is also key to a decision on whether the administration can turn the page completely on the Bush administration's detention policies.

Hozaifa Parhat, a fruit seller from China's Muslim west, spoke passionately before a Guantanamo tribunal about his love for America and swore he never planned to fight the United States. The Chinese, however, were another matter. "I left my country to try to get something, get back and liberate my people and get our country independence," the ethnic Uighur testified in November 2004.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca on Monday threatened to close the Men's Central Jail and perhaps a second detention facility when he and other county department heads are forced to cut their budgets. Baca said closing the downtown Los Angeles jail, which would greatly reduce the capacity of the county jail system and lead to more early releases of inmates, might be necessary to bridge what he estimates will be a $72-million gap in his budget.

President Obama's early moves to condemn torture, order the closure of Guantanamo and commit to combat climate change won him accolades from international human rights advocates turned off by the go-it-alone attitude of the Bush administration. Now the world's lawyers are worried that those goals could languish on the diplomatic back burner as the president and his team concentrate on the global economic crisis.

President Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, one of his first acts after taking office, is putting fellow Democrats on the political hot seat as word spreads that terrorism suspects and other detainees would be relocated to the U.S. or transferred to domestic prisons. States and municipalities around the country are saying "not in my backyard," and Republicans are raising the prospect of relocated detainees putting Americans in danger.

A bill by Senate Democrats would fund the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but it would block the transfer of any of the detainees to the United States. The move is aimed at sidestepping a political minefield that President Obama has confronted in his promise to close the military prison during his first year in office. Lawmakers of both parties have bristled at the notion of bringing Guantanamo terrorism suspects to detention facilities in the United States.

Obama administration officials said Monday they would not meet self-imposed deadlines for deciding what to do with scores of detainees too dangerous to release from the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The delays, involving those who cannot be tried, raise questions about whether the White House can close the prison by January, as President Obama pledged when he took office.

The Obama administration could transfer Guantanamo inmates to be tried and detained at a hybrid military-civilian prison in the United States as part of a proposal being examined by U.S. security agencies, officials said Sunday. The proposal for creating a combined detention and trial facility for Guantanamo inmates in an existing U.S. maximum-security prison is likely to be controversial.

The Obama administration plans to appoint veteran diplomat Daniel Fried as special envoy to oversee the closure of the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention camp, two senior U.S. officials told the Associated Press. Fried currently is assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs.