WASHINGTON (AP) - The Pentagon's top lawyer said Friday that the Obama administration has not abandoned the possibility of transferring some prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention center to a prison in the United States despite strong congressional concerns.
Defense Department general counsel Jeh Charles Johnson told the House Armed Services Committee that some suspected terrorists might be transferred to the U.S. for prosecution and others sent to a facility inside the U.S. for long-term incarceration.
Johnson also said no prisoners would be released from custody inside the country.
Administration officials had raised those possible moves before, but Congress in June passed a law that would allow detainees held at the Navy-run prison in Cuba to be transferred to the U.S. for prosecution only after lawmakers have had two months to read a White House report on how it plans to shut the facility and disperse the inmates.
Congress also blocked all funding for the transfer of any Guantanamo detainees into the United States for the 2009 fiscal year ending Sept. 30. President Barack Obama has ordered the Guantanamo facility closed by January 2010.
More than 50 have been cleared for transfer to another country. An administration task force is still sorting through the remaining 229 prisoners to determine their fates.