Next Stop Nowhere
As part of their efforts to shut down the Guantánamo Bay detention center, Obama Administration officials were poised in late April to make a bold, stealthy move: they instructed the U.S. Marshals Service to prepare an aircraft and a Special Ops group to fly two Chinese Uighurs, and up to five more on subsequent flights, from Gitmo to northern Virginia for resettlement. In a conference call overseen by the National Security Council, Justice and Pentagon officials had been warned that any public statements about Gitmo transfers would inflame congressional Republicans, according to a law-enforcement official who asked not to be named discussing internal deliberations. Then on May 1, -Virginia GOP Rep. Frank Wolf got tipped off. Furious, he fired off a public letter to President Obama, charging that the release of the Uighurs—Muslim separatists opposed to the Chinese government—could "directly threaten the security of the American people." White House officials were not happy. One called Wolf's chief of staff and accused his boss of playing politics. "Now we know how you're going to play this," Jim Papa, chief Obama liaison to the House, said during the conversation, according to Wolf staffer Dan Scandling. (Papa did not comment; a White House official said there were multiple briefings for Wolf's office.) The flight never took off.
The blowup illustrates the challenge Obama faces to meet his goal of shuttering Gitmo—a problem that grew last week when the Senate voted 90-6 to strip money for the closure from a funding bill. "This may be harder than health care," said one senior official, who also requested anonymity. A federal court has ordered the release of Gitmo's 17 remaining Uighurs. But they can't be returned to China because they would likely be tortured or executed. Sending them to northern Virginia seemed to make sense: a -Uighur community is located there, and Wolf has been a critic of China's human-rights record and has championed the Uighur cause. But Wolf told NEWSWEEK he fears the detainees might attack Chinese diplomats in D.C. "Let them go to some other country," he said.
So far, there are no takers. Since Albania accepted five in 2006, the Pentagon has been rebuffed repeatedly by other countries. Last week the State Department asked Germany to resettle nine Uighurs. But its government is expected to stall until after a September election, if not longer, according to a European diplomat who asked not to be identified. The Germans, the official said, "want the U.S. to take Gitmo detainees first." That could be a long time coming.
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Michael Isikoff has been an award-winning investigative correspondent for Newsweek since 2004. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, presidential politics and other national issues. His book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," co-written with David Corn, was an instant New York Times best-seller when it was published in September, 2006. The book was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "fascinating reading" and "the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations" in the run up to the war in Iraq. Since January 2009, Isikoff has been an MSNBC contributor, making regular appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball w/ Chris Matthews.
Ever since the events of September 11, Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. His blog "DeClassified: Investigative Reporting in Real Time," which appears regularly on Newsweek's Web site and is written with MarkHosenball, has become a must-read for senior U.S. intelligence officials. Isikoff and Hosenball won the 2005 award from the Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative reporting online.
Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of Newsweek reporters, by the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. For that coverage, Isikoff obtained exclusive internal White House, Justice Department and State Department memos showing how decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration led to abuses in the interrogation of terror suspects. Isikoff was also part of a reporting team that earned Newsweek the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, the highest award in magazine journalism, for their coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.
Isikoff's exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998, including profiles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and a guest appearance on "Late Show with David Letterman." His coverage of the events that lead to President Bill Clinton's impeachment earned Newsweek the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff's reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2001, Isikoff was named on a list of "most influential journalists" in the nation's capital by Washingtonian magazine.
Isikoff is the author of "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story," a book that chronicled his own reporting of the Lewinsky story and was hailed by a critic for The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news service as "the absolutely essential narrative of the scandal with revelations that no one would have thought possible." The book, also a New York Times bestseller, was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Book of the Month Club.
Isikoff came to Newsweek from The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter since September 1981. There he covered the Justice Department and the Persian Gulf War, reported on international drug operations in Latin America and worked on the Post's financial news desk. Isikoff graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in 1974 and received a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1976.
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