Hillary Clinton

If she decides to run for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton is going to have to create some separation on some issues from the policies of both her husband and her former boss, and we will see that process unfold in the coming years. Hopefully for the better. Hopefully on principle. This could be an example.

A recent article on President Obama's attempts to close Guantánamo Bay describes the president as wanting to close the prison, and frustrated at his inability thus far to work the politics of doing so. And then there's this:



One recent plea, two sources told Newsweek, came from Hillary Clinton, who, just before she left office in January 2013, sent a two-page confidential memo to Obama about Guantánamo. Clinton had, during her years in the administration, occasionally jumped into the fray to push her colleagues to do more on the issue. One of those occasions was at a White House meeting of Obama’s national-security principals in August 2010. “We are throwing the president’s commitment to close Guantánamo into the trash bin,” she chastised White House aides, according to three participants in the meeting. “We are doing him a disservice by not working harder on this.” But at the end of the day, Clinton had little leverage to get the White House to act. Now, in one of her last moves as secretary of State, she was making a final effort to prod her boss to do more. Her memo was replete with practical suggestions for moving ahead on Gitmo. Chief among them: Obama needed to appoint a high-level official to be in charge of the effort, someone who had clout and proximity to the Oval Office. Further, Clinton argued that Obama could start transferring the 86 detainees who’d already been cleared for release. (Congress has imposed onerous restrictions on the administration’s ability to transfer Gitmo detainees—including a stipulation that the secretary of Defense certify that detainees sent to other countries would not engage in acts of terrorism. In her memo, Clinton pointed out that the administration could use “national-security waivers” to circumvent the restriction.) The Clinton missive perturbed White House aides, who viewed it as an attempt to put them on the spot, according to a senior administration official. It’s unclear how Obama himself reacted to the memo; there’s no evidence that it spurred him to action. (The White House declined to comment for this story.) But whether or not the memo played a role in changing the president’s thinking, the mere fact that Clinton felt the need to write it was noteworthy, because it suggested the degree to which Guantánamo, four years into the Obama presidency, remained an irritant for her—and for many other high-level administration officials as well.

I thought to myself as I read this, “but Clinton’s departure is precisely when the Administration moved backwards on this front, by reassigning Daniel Fried, who had been in charge of resettling detainees.” Fried’s reassignment was reported January 29. That was technically while Hillary was still at State — Kerry took over on February 1. Still, whoever transferred Fried, she must have written that memo (which pissed off Obama’s minders) at almost precisely the moment State eliminated the person most focused on working towards Gitmo closure.

"I've asked my team to review everything that's currently being done in Guantanamo, everything that we can do administratively, and I'm going to re-engage with Congress to try to make the case that this is not something that's in the best interests of the American people." He said the facility is expensive, inefficient, "a recruitment tool for terrorists" and hurts America's international standing, and he took Congress to task for blocking its closure. Obama conceded that it may be a difficult case to make to the American people that the detainees should be transferred out so the facility can be shuttered, because, "I think for a lot of Americans, the notion is out of sight, out of mind, and it's easy to demagogue the issue. That's what happened the first time this came up.

But emptywheel notes Which causes emptywheel to wonder about the timing: With Clinton pushing and providing strategies, why reassign the person most motivated and best positioned to carry her ideas through? In public statements , the president continues to say the right thing:So, perhaps there is a good explanation for the reassignment of Fried. Hopefully, we will learn more. Because Gitmo remains an abomination , and everything legally possible should be done by the administration to get it closed, as soon as is possible. Ideally, it will be closed before the next presidential campaign really begins. But as we look ahead to 2016, it's good to know that the leading potential Democratic presidential candidate not only was privately urging the administration to get the job done, but she also was brainstorming how to do it.