Where do things stand at Guantánamo? Six basic questions answered.

President Obama this week pledged to “reengage” with Congress to find a way to close the terror detention camp at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, naval base. The renewed focus comes as 100 of the 166 detainees are reported to be engaged in a hunger strike. Here is a brief look at where things stand now.

5. How many of the Guantánamo detainees have been cleared for release to their home country? And why haven’t those transfers taken place?

Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
Former Guantánamo Bay detainees wear black hoods during a protest outside the US embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, in April to demand the release of Yemeni detainees from Guantánamo Bay.

A. Of the 166 prisoners currently at Guantánamo, 86 have been approved for release. Nonetheless, in addition to blocking transfers to the US, a defense appropriations amendment also bars any transfer of detainees overseas without congressional approval.

The single largest group of cleared detainees is comprised of citizens of Yemen. Mounting tension and fighting in Yemen and growing concern about Yemen-based militant imam Anwar al-Awlaki and the spin-off group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, prompted the administration to put those transfer plans on hold. Mr. Awlaki was killed in a US drone attack in 2011, but concern about other militants and the stability of the government in Sanaa has kept transfer plans on a back burner.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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