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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.

3. Mr. Obama in January 2009 signed an executive order to shut down the detention camp within a year. What happened?

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor/File
The Obama administration proposed relocating members of Al Qaeda in Guantánamo Bay deemed to dangerous to release or put on trial to this maximum security prison in Thomson, Ill.

A. The Obama administration developed a multifaceted plan to close Guantánamo. First, eligible detainees would be transferred to their home country where they could be released or would continue to be detained, depending on individual circumstances.

Second, certain terror suspects at Guantánamo were to be transferred to the criminal justice system to face trial in American courts. If convicted, they would serve their terms in a maximum security federal prison.  

Third, a group of Al Qaeda suspects deemed too dangerous to release but too risky to put on trial would be held indefinitely without charge. The administration purchased an empty state prison in Illinois to house these and any other transfers from Guantánamo who could not be released or put on trial.

The plan was derailed by Republicans and some Democrats in Congress who objected to bringing Al Qaeda suspects onto US soil where they would immediately be entitled to constitutional protections not available at Guantánamo. They are enforcing a ban on Guantánamo transfers through amendments tacked onto the annual defense appropriations bill.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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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