The administration of US President Barack Obama did not send a witness to a Senate hearing on closing the notorious US-run Guantanamo prison based in Cuba.A Senate Judiciary subcommittee held the Closing Guantanamo: The National Security, Fiscal, and Human Rights Implications hearing Wednesday. It was the first hearing since 2009 held to discuss the possibility of Guantanamo closure.
An aide for Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), a strong advocate of the prisons closure, told the Daily Beast that the White House declined to send a witness while it had received an invitation.
This comes as President Obama reiterated his 2008 presidential campaign pledge for closing Guantanamo during a White House news conference on April 30.
Senates Wednesday hearing was chaired by Senator Durbin who put forth a proposal of how to shut down Guantanamo.
We can transfer most of the detainees to foreign countries. And we can bring the others to the United States, where they can be tried in federal court or held under the law of war until the end of hostilities, Durbin said as quoted by the Associated Press.
Earlier this year, US officials admitted that an overwhelming majoring of Guantanamo prisoners will never be charged and that less than 1 in 8 inmates might ever see the inside of a courtroom.
In 2010, President Obama's Guantanamo Review Task Force said that only 36 of the prisoners at Guantanamo would eventually be prosecuted as they lacked any evidence to charge the rest of prisoners.
However, Army Brigadier General Mark Martins, the chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals, has called that number ambitious saying at most 20 prisoners could face war crimes tribunals.
During Senates Wednesday hearing, a number of Republican Senators, including Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), opposed Durbins proposal arguing that shuttering Guantanamo would endanger the lives of Americans.
Demonstrators took part in the Close Guantanamo Protest outside the Senate Hart Building on Wednesday while the hearing was being held.
Despite Obamas repeated pledge to close Guantanamo, 166 men remain in the infamous prison, most of them without any charge for over a decade.
More than 130 detainees at the Guantanamo prison have been on hunger strike for almost six months to protest their indefinite detention and torturous treatments at the hand of US military personnel.
And now, during the holy month of Ramadan, the hunger striking prisoners observe fasting as prison authorities continue to forcibly feed them through nasal tubes, which human rights groups say amounts to torture.
By Press TV
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