Hagel favors closing of Guantanamo

Some Republicans, democrats resist

WASHINGTON, April 13, (AP): Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel says he backs President Barack Obama’s call to close the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Obama announced within days of his inauguration in January 2009 that he wanted to shutter the facility that houses terror suspects, but Republicans and some Democrats in Congress have resisted. They have argued that the prison at the naval installation is the ideal location for military tribunals and have fought efforts to transfer prisoners to the United States.

Hagel was asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday if he were in favor of closing Guantanamo. He said he backed the president.

Meanwhile, an upcoming session of the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals has been postponed amid defense complaints that a Pentagon computer failure and mishandled emails may have compromised their work.

A military judge on Thursday postponed until June a hearing scheduled for next week. It’s for a prisoner accused of plotting the deadly al-Qaida attack on the USS Cole and his lawyers raised the alleged breach.

The chief defense counsel for the military tribunals at the US base in Cuba, meanwhile, has ordered defense lawyers to stop using the Department of Defense email system for legal matters until security issues are resolved.

Lawyers say a server failure resulted in at least the temporary loss of thousands of pages of documents and that many of their emails were improperly turned over to prosecutors. A Malian gendarme (right), walks behind a prisoner on April 11, 105 kms north of the northeastern Malian city of Gao, in day four of Operation Gustav, a hunt for Islamist fighters in a valley in northern Mali and one of France’s largest military operations during its threemonth intervention in its former colony. Operation Gustav comes with France preparing to withdraw three-quarters of the 4,000 troops it deployed in January to block a feared advance on the Malian

capital Bamako by al-Qaeda-linked insurgents. (AFP)