GLOBAL JOURNALIST: What should happen to Guantanamo prisoners?

Stuart Loory, Lee Hills Chair in Free-Press Studies at the Missouri School of Journalism: The day after he took office more than a year ago, President Obama promised the nation and the world that he would close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in one year. That deadline is past and the prison is still a long way from shutting down. The problems for President Obama in this country are legal, political, economic and diplomatic. The problems of some of the captives are in many cases a matter of heart-rending tragedy. Take the Uighurs from China, for example. They are a dissident Chinese Muslim group, and 17 or 18 of them left their homes in the Xinjiang Province in Northwestern China to seek freedom in the Western world early in this decade. They made their way to Afghanistan in the hope of getting to Turkey but shortly after 9/11 some bounty hunters denounced them to American forces as terrorists and the bounty hunters collected $5,000 for each person they turned in. The Uighurs were sent to Guantanamo where, after several years, the Bush administration decided they were being wrongfully held. But they could not be sent home again. They would have been prosecuted and perhaps executed by the Chinese as subversives. There was a plan to send them to suburban Washington D.C. where there is a large Uighur community but few Americans wanted that to happen. So the group has been split up and sent around the world. Six have gone to the Pacific Island of Palau where the U.S. government paid $100,000 each for their resettlement. There are plenty of other problems about Guantanamo that have not yet been resolved. Let’s start with Scott Horton. His article in the March 2010 issue of Harper’s Magazine, "The Guantanamo Suicides,", indicates a serious cover-up of alleged murders that started in the Bush administration and continued into the Obama administration, and it looks like, as far as the United States government is concerned, the case is closed. Tell us a little about this.