Castro is running out of jail cells for dissidents.
Via LA Times
President Obama has recharged his campaign for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center with a strategy legal experts say holds out new hope of achieving that signature objective of his presidency.
After years of being thwarted by Congress from transferring detainees cleared of terrorism suspicions from the remote prison at the U.S. naval base in southern Cuba, the administration has in less than three months resettled 27 of the long-held foreign men in countries as far-flung as Estonia, Oman and Uruguay.
Dozens more are ready to be moved out as soon as other countries agree to take them, a diplomatic task that received an unexpected boost last month with an appeal by Pope Francis for predominantly Catholic nations to help empty the prison.[…]
Obama has for years opposed indefinite detention at Guantanamo for the moral stain it has left on America’s reputation, but the money issue may offer better prospects for wearing down those opposed to closing the prison.
“It makes no sense to spend $3 million per prisoner to keep open a prison that the world condemns and terrorists use to recruit,” the president said during his State of the Union address Tuesday night. “It is not who we are. It is time to close Gitmo.”[…]
Most of the 75 Yemenis at Guantanamo have been cleared, but U.S. authorities have been reluctant to send them home to a country engulfed in political chaos and increasingly under the sway of Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Among the 27 prisoners released since early November have been 12 Yemenis, all sent to other countries in apparent recognition that their homeland won’t be stable any time soon.