EU fails to agree on who will host Guantánamo prisoners

EU leaders "stressed that American authorities must show ex-inmates pose no security threat before they can be resettled," reports the Associated Press.

But therein lies the rub.

If the detainees are deemed too dangerous to be hosted on European soil, should they then be set free to attack from somewhere else? If not, where then should they be held if the US detention facility in Cuba was so bad?

"Not our problem," say the Europeans.

"There is no question that chief responsibility to do with solving the problem of this detention center lies with those who set it up, the Americans themselves," said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. "But it is also a question of our credibility – of whether we support the dismantling of this American camp or not."

Like herding cats?

If that credibility is really at stake, the EU will have to overcome long odds to salvage it, given that the 27-member EU has a hard time agreeing on most issues.

Here's how the Monitor's Europe Bureau Chief Robert Marquand put it in a recent article: "In an EU that is often characterized as divisive and dissembling on hard national problems, and that could not agree this freezing winter on how to collectively deal with gas shut-offs in the Russia-Ukraine dispute, the Obama team may have to be patient [when it comes to who will host Gitmo prisoners]."

That virtue of Obama's may well be tested soon.

As Monitor correspondent Caryle Murphy reports today, "two Saudis formerly jailed at the US prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have joined Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch, and authorities here worry that two other ex-Guantánamo inmates may have strayed back to militancy because they have recently disappeared from their homes."

Gunmen opened fire Monday night at a checkpoint outside the US embassy in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, the BBC quoted Yemeni officials as saying.

The clock is ticking.

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