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Friday, June 12, 2009
This is a rush transcript of "Special Report With Bret Baier" from June 11, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
IAN KELLY, STATE DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN: We understand that there are some concerns about some of the details of the resettlement, and we're confident that we can work — work these things through with the government of the U.K.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS WALLACE, FOX HOST: That was the State Department doing some damage control after it apparently forgot to tell the British it had struck a deal to relocate some Chinese Muslim detainees in Bermuda. It's all part of the Obama administration's effort to unload Gitmo inmates, wherever it can.
Let's bring in our panel: Mort Kondracke of Roll Call; Nina Easton of Fortune magazine; and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.
So let's — and you need a program to keep track of this. Four Uighers to Bermuda, the remaining 13 to Palau. Is this, Charles, a sensible way for dealing with them and, possibly, a model for dispersing — dispensing with all the Guantanamo, or at least most of the Guantanamo detainees?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, it certainly has an element of comedy about it. You can see the new al Qaeda slogan, "Join al Qaeda, see the world."
It's win-win. If al Qaeda defeats the United States, you rule the world out of Mecca. If you lose, you end up on a tropical island, Bermuda shorts, holding a daiquiri in your hand.
Look, the Uighers are the easiest of the issues. It's hard to get excited about the Uighers, because they're like the Basques or the IRA. They are terrorists, but they're not particularly anti-American. They're ambitious...
WALLACE: At least they weren't before they went to Guantanamo.
KRAUTHAMMER: I'm not sure how — you know, how much that will change them. Their interest is in the western elements of China, which are Muslim, and liberating it.
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Their ambitions are geographically circumscribed, so getting them out of Guantanamo is reasonably easy. And yet we had to shop around to 100 countries who said no, and they end up on these island dependencies in the middle of nowhere.
The real issue is going to be the Yemenis, who the Saudis have hinted they may take, but the Saudis have a record of releasing people who end up at war with us again.
And the insoluble issue is the ones who are not tryable and not releasable, who are going to be stuck in Guantanamo with nobody in the U.S. taking them.
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