Saturday, March 7, 2009

Switzerland to Help in Detainee Relocation

Reuters reports that Switzerland is in the process of reaching a deal on relocating detainees released from Gitmo. Switzerland's Foreign Minister has been in talks with new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and it appears the two reached a tentative agreement on Switzerland accepting detainees. The deal seems to depends on the U.S. giving the Swiss information on the prisoners so that the Swiss can assess security concerns regarding each detainee. Its still not clear how many detainees they will take, but I'm sure it depends on how dangerous each one is.

I feel like we must be making some kind of deal with the Swiss government on this one and the most obvious deal would involve the U.S. laying off of Swiss banks a little bit on the search for terrorist funds. Swiss banks have been a focal point of the effort to disrupt terrorist financial networks, and if there is one thing the Swiss don't like it is people messing with their banking system. I've just got to think that we will need to make concessions to other countries to accept these potential terrorists, and this is the most obvious one I can think of when it comes to Switzerland.

I still have a concern about the U.S. being left with potentially dangerous terrorists that other countries won't accept, and that we can't prosecute for some reason. What will we do with them? If that ends up happening it will be interesting to see what kinds of solutions we come up with.

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