In his first TV interview since being elected President, Barack Obama confirms that he'll end one of the most prominent recent sources of anti-Americanism; detention of terrorist suspects at Guantanomo Bay. The President-Elect also vowed to end waterboarding and other techniques of aggressive interrogation. He promised that principled opposition to all torture would be "part and parcel of an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world." See video below:
The Daily Telegraph's Con Coughlin warns, however, that the closure of Guantanomo will not be uncomplicated:
"The Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba... holds about 250 die-hard al-Qaeda supporters... The reason that the hard-core al-Qaeda supporters - including Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks - continue to be held at Gitmo is that, as most of them were picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan and other war zones, it is not possible to prosecute them the same way you would civilian criminals. The police are hardly likely to be able to scour the mountains of Tora Bora assembling evidence for the prosecution case... There have already been suggestions that former Gitmo detainees have carried out terror attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq after being released from Gitmo. What if one of those released by President Obama then masterminded a repeat of the 9/11 attacks? Let's not forget that al-Qaeda emerged as a global terror threat when Bill Clinton was president, and Obama should take care that the return of a Democrat to the White House does not result in the U.S. taking the soft options in fighting the war on terror."
