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Former Bush State Dept official Philip Zelikow testified today about the closing of Guantanamo Bay. He compared it to the former prison known as Alcatraz, which was closed because of its horrendous reputation. He also feels that the U.S. could easily hold any prisoner from Guantanamo Bay, while Republicans are trying to claim otherwise with their usual fearmongering.
Zelikow: Guantanamo, in world public opinion, had become a toxic problem for the United States of America, and so we needed to address that as an issue in our foreign policy.
Dick Durbin asked if we could hold any transfers from Gitmo to federal correctional facilities in the United States safely, Zelikow answered:
Zelikow: Sir, we hold people who are far more dangerous in such institutions including quite dangerous terrorists like Ramzi Yousef, who's currently residing in a maximum security facility inside the US now. I'll also add that I've had the opportunity on behalf of one of the federal judges who have been working through the habeas petitions to be asked to examine classified files and provide expert advice on holding these folks and one of the things that strikes me now and struck me then is we have a vast amount of experience in how to judge the continued incarceration of highly dangerous prisoners since we do this with thousands of prisoners every month all over the United States including some really quite dangerous people. We routinely make these decisions...
So far, Obama has only nominated one ambassador - career professional Susan Rice as ambassador to the UN. Here she is in September talking about Obama's foreign policy.
Following up on reports of Obama's intended Herculean cleaning of the Agean Stables at the Department of Defense, where the entire body of Bush-appointed deputies and under-whatevers are expected to be fired, the Washington Post now reports that the incoming Obama administration has told every single Bush political appointee as an ambassador that their services will no longer be required come January 20th.
That's an awful lot of ambassadors. An unusually high percentage of Bush's ambassador picks throughout his presidency - about half - have been "political appointees," as opposed to career foreign officers and without fail those political appointees have been big campaign donors, each raising over $100,000 for Bush and lots more for the Republican Party.
Nations that have had these, usually clueless, ambassadors foisted upon them just so that Bush could thank his biggest funders with a prestige sinecure include: Canada, Mexico, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia, Belgium, Hungary, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, France, Portugal, Switzerland, Singapore and the European Union as well as a host of smaller nations. The United States is the only nation which habitually staffs its top diplomatic positions in other countries with check-writing rank amateurs rather than professional diplomats.
