is he doing a good job at this diplomacy? is he asking for the right things and making his offers the right way? that s a very interesting point. last week, yemen s minister for human rights showed up in washington thinking she was going to lobby for the release of these 59 individuals. her trip was scheduled to be ten days long. she left after three days. she didn t get the meeting she thought she was going to get. she was very upset with the reaction of the americans, very upset with the way her embassy staffed her, and she left washington in a huff. does this mean there s a bigger hurdle than we thought there might be based on what s on paper? it s guantanamo bay. there s always a hurdle. this is something that president obama has been saying from day two, and from the first week, this is when al qaeda in thearian pearabian peninsula, t same week president obama said he s going to sign the legislation to close guantanamo, they show up with two more detainees, there s the und
other people from the other countries that were heavily represented at that prison. these guys from yemen, most of them were cleared. they were set to start going home in december of 2009 until a guy with ties to al qaeda in yemen tried to bomb an american plane with a bomb stuffed in his underpants at christmastime 2009. that put a hold on the plans to send prisoners home to yemen and that eventually led to congressional de facto bans on the u.s. government sending anyone to yemen from guantanamo. so there has been this intractable problem of something president obama wanted to get done, he wanted to closed this prison, but he s been stuck with this prison that congress won t let him close. he s stuck with a roster of mostly yemeni prisoners that are mostly cleared to be released, but he s blocked from releasing them. now a majority of prisoners at guantanamo are refusing food and hunger striking because they think there s no end to any of it. we now know at least we can maybe know
happen? joining us now is gregory johnson. he s the author of the last refuge, yemen and america s war. why would the new government in yemen want these people back? the old government wanted them back. abdi ali abdullah wanted them back. he knew how important closing guantanamo bay was to president obama, and he played politics with it. he essentially held the prisoners ransom a second time, trying to get as much from the obama administration as he possibly could. the new government, president mansour hadi in yemen, has very little base of support. so he needs a lot of international support, particularly from the united states, to offset his lack of domestic support. so what he s doing is essentially being a very flexible partner, willing to take these off president obama s hands.
thank you so much. i ve been following you from afar for a long time. his book is called the last refuge, yemen, al qaeda, and america s war in arabiya. [ all ] fort benning, georgia in 1999. [ male announcer ] usaa auto insurance is often handed down from generation to generation. because it offers a superior level of protection and because usaa s commitment to serve military members, veterans, and their families is without equal. begin your legacy, get an auto insurance quote. usaa. we know what it means to serve. a talking car. but i ll tell you what impresses me. a talking train. this ge locomotive can tell you exactly where it is, what it s carrying, while using less fuel. delivering whatever the world needs, when it needs it. after all, what s the point of talking
bomber, every time the president makes a move on this, something from yemen comes up and trips him up. in terms of the objections to sending whether or not it is safe to send former guantanamo prisoners who have been cleared for release in terms of their raw assessment of dangerousness, however they do that, in terms of whether it s safe to send them to a place like yemen, can this government or the previous government make any meaningful assurances about this? does any of it strike you as substantive or is all of this politics? a lot of it is politics. the bush administration sent people back to saudi arabia because it trusted the saudi government. send them back to afghanistan because it trusted, in sort of a way, what the afghan government was. there hasn t been that same amount of trust in yemen, and the real irony is that the group in yemen, al qaeda, the group responsible for these underwear bombs, these cartridge bombs, that group has former guantanamo bay detainees in it,