Obama Will Try to Quell Concern on Detainees

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Congress Looks for Details From Obama on Gitmo

The Senate says it didn't have enough details to give President Barack Obama the money he wants to close Guantanamo Bay. The AP's Julie Pace looks at how the president plans to address their questions and what gaps will still remain.

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Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), who sponsored the amendment that blocked the funds, said it was "not a referendum on closing Guantanamo. Instead, it should serve as a reality check since, at this time, the administration has not yet forwarded a coherent plan for closing the prison."

Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), one of the six Democrats who voted to preserve the money, noted that numerous Republicans had supported the Guantanamo closure when it was announced, and he called claims that "this president -- or any president -- would be party to releasing dangerous people into the United States . . . absurd, offensive and baseless."

Led by the Justice Department, the administration task force has so far cleared 30 prisoners for release and expects more to be added to the list. But a refusal to accept any detainees in this country would probably frustrate U.S. efforts to persuade other nations to take any.

Obama yesterday invited to the White House leaders of about a dozen human and civil rights organizations as well as law professors. Administration participants in the 90-minute session included Holder, White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Several participants discussed the meeting on the condition of anonymity. One said Obama argued that there was no trade-off between American values and national security, but that GOP demagoguery in Congress was dominating the issue. Another said Obama seemed irritated that some of those who attended the meeting had recently compared his policies to those of Bush.

Anthony D. Romero, head of the American Civil Liberties Union, who has used that comparison, declined to discuss what Obama said but in an interview after the meeting repeated the comparison.

"President Obama's decision to continue George Bush's policies essentially means that they become his own," Romero said. "And if he continues down this path, these policies will certainly become known in the history books as the Bush-Obama doctrine." Romero described the discussion as "freewheeling" and said Obama was "clearly deeply steeped in the issues. But he had little interest in revisiting his recent decisions."

Meanwhile, the Pentagon report on detainees, completed in December by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the subject of numerous Freedom of Information Act requests, found that 27 Guantanamo detainees released to other countries since 2002 had been confirmed as subsequently engaging in terrorist activities and another 47 are strongly suspected of doing so.

Release of the document, details of which were reported yesterday on the New York Times Web site, has been held up by fears at the Pentagon that it could further inflame the debate over closing the facility and upset the White House, according to a U.S. official who has followed the issue but who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk publicly about it.

The official said that there has been no White House pressure to suppress or delay its release but that some Pentagon officials, including Bush administration holdovers, were being overly cautious.

Staff writers Peter Finn, Shailagh Murray, Scott Wilson and Michael D. Shear and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.