Detention report behind schedule

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is delaying completion of reports examining U.S. detention and interrogation policy, officials said Monday, in a sign of the formidable issues it faces in grappling with how to handle terrorism suspects as it prepares to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The work of a Justice Department-led task force, which had been scheduled to send a report on detention policy to President Barack Obama today, will be extended for six months, according to senior administration officials. A second task force examining interrogation policy will get a two-month extension to complete its work, which had also been due today.

“These are hard, complicated, consequential decisions,” one official said in a White House briefing in which four officials spoke to reporters on the condition that the officials not be named. “What we are trying to do is to make sure that we make the right decisions. And so they are looked at, they are reviewed and re-reviewed. By teeing them up to the president, we want to make sure that we have looked at every single angle, because he will challenge us on these issues.”

The officials said the administration remains committed to closing the prison in Cuba by January 2010, as Obama ordered, but the delays are an indication of the political and legal complexities of making good on the president’s timeline.

Some of the Guantanamo Bay detainees may be deemed too dangerous to release but also too difficult to prosecute in federal court or before a military commission.

Officials said Monday that it is still unclear how many Guantanamo Bay prisoners might be placed in some system of prolonged detention, and how that system might be structured. But they said that Obama will seek congressional backing for any system and not unilaterally assert his authority to hold detainees indefinitely under the laws of war. Officials had previously said they were considering an executive order to establish a system of indefinite detention.

“There is no intent in the administration to rely on anything other than congressional authority,” said one senior administration official. He said any system of prolonged detention would include periodic follow-up reviews on whether a detainee continued to pose a threat to national security.

A separate interagency task force is examining the cases of the 229 detainees who remain at Guantanamo Bay, and is on track to complete its work by October. Officials said more than half those cases have been reviewed, with recommendations to transfer more than 50 detainees home or to third countries, and to prosecute others.

While the task force report focusing on detention policy has been delayed, officials released an interim report on Monday evening. It said the decision on where to prosecute detainees will be made by lawyers from the Justice Department’s national security division, along with personnel from the Defense Department, including military prosecutors. Various factors will be considered, including the need to protect intelligence sources and methods, and “evidentiary problems that might attend prosecution in the other jurisdiction,” according to the report.