Efforts to close Guantanamo at standstill: Gates

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Efforts to explore ways of closing the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay have reached a standstill due to legal and practical problems, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday.

By Andrew Gray

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Efforts to explore ways of closing the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay have reached a standstill due to legal and practical problems, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday.

"The brutally frank answer is that we're stuck and we're stuck in several ways," Gates told a U.S. Senate hearing when asked about his desire to shut down the detention site for terrorism suspects at a U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Human rights groups and many governments, including allies of the United States, have called on the Bush administration to close the prison, saying it violates international legal standards and harms America's standing in the world.

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Gates has said he wants to close the site, where inmates have been held for years without trial, after he took over from Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in late 2006 and assigned officials to look into the issue.

But the former CIA chief said the effort had run up against several major problems. The first was that the United States had identified about 70 prisoners who could be returned home in theory but not in practice.

"The problem is that either their home government won't accept them or we're concerned that the home government will let them loose once we return them home," he said.

Some 270 detainees remain in Guantanamo Bay and more than 500 have left since the site opened in January 2002, according to the U.S. military.

The Pentagon says some 36 former Guantanamo inmates are "confirmed or suspected of having returned to terrorism."

Gates cited a Kuwaiti former inmate who carried out a suicide bombing in Mosul in northern Iraq last month. Both the bomber's family and the U.S. military have said he carried out the attack.

The United States has also failed to come up with a solution for inmates who cannot be freed for security reasons but will not be charged under the military commissions system for trying war crimes suspects, Gates said.

"We just have a hard time figuring out ... what do you do with that irreducible 70 or 80 or whatever the number is," he told the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

There was also a widely held reluctance to house any of the prisoners in the United States, Gates said.

"We have a serious 'not in my backyard' problem. I haven't found anybody who wants these terrorists to be placed in a prison in their home state," Gates said.

"Those three problems really have brought us to a standstill," he added.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California who questioned Gates at the hearing, said the prison was responsible for an "enormous loss of (U.S.) credibility ... in the eyes of the world."

When Feinstein said she knew Gates felt the same way as she did about Guantanamo, the defense secretary interjected "I still do," but he offered no further comments on the issue.

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)