KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
Just a few days before President Obama leaves office, 10 more detainees have been transferred from the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That's according to the foreign ministry of Oman, which announced today it had accepted the detainees, quote, "in consideration of their humanitarian situation." Obama campaigned on a pledge to close that facility. And while he has reduced the number of inmates, there will still be dozens of people in the prison when he leaves office. To talk more about this, we are joined by Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald. Welcome.
CAROL ROSENBERG: Hi.
MCEVERS: So does Oman's announcement come as a surprise, I mean, right before Obama is ready to leave the presidency?
ROSENBERG: Well, we knew that Oman would take some, and they have taken up to 20 detainees before for resettlement through this rehabilitation program. And we know that this has been a positive and successful program, that both the U.S. government and the detainees are satisfied with the arrangements. They take them into a rehab center, and in some instances they've allowed their families to come over. All of the detainees so far have come from Yemen, which is a neighbor, and so they're culturally familiar. So, no, the answer in short is this is not a surprise.
MCEVERS: Do we know much more about who these 10 detainees are?
ROSENBERG: That we don't, and that's unusual. Usually by now we've gotten the identities of the detainees. There were 19 captives as of yesterday who were cleared for release, now there should be nine left, but they can't all be Yemeni numerically. So I think we could expect probably an Afghan or two among them in this new program.
MCEVERS: So there were 242 detainees when President Obama took office, there are now 45 who remain. Aside from a number of nine that you mentioned that have been cleared for release, what happens to the rest?
ROSENBERG: Ten of them are actually accused of not just being prisoners of war, but being war criminals, including the five men accused of orchestrating the September 11 attacks and the man accused of arranging the al-Qaida bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000. And the rest are what we would call the forever prisoners, they're 26 people who've been taken prisoner in this war - the war on terror - which has no one on the other side basically to surrender. Typically you take a prisoner of war and when the war ends you return them, but because this isn't a war with a country and there is no one on the other side to surrender, we call them the forever prisoners, people that the Obama administration and before them the Bush administration considered too dangerous to release - indefinite detainees. And they stay at Guantanamo until some board at some time decides that there is a way to get them out of there and send them somewhere else.
MCEVERS: President-elect Donald Trump has tweeted, quote, "there should be no further releases from Gitmo. These are extremely dangerous people who should not be allowed back onto the battlefield." What else do we know about what would happen with Guantanamo under Trump?
ROSENBERG: Well, we know that when he campaigned he said he wanted to load it up with some bad dudes, which to me means that he wants to find more war prisoners to put there. So I think that we can anticipate that Guantanamo will get some attention under this administration, that at some point they'll cancel President Obama's closure order. You can't close Guantanamo as long as there are detainees there, but there's an executive order on the books that says close it, and I expect that we'll hear from the Trump administration that it's back in business, whatever that means.
MCEVERS: Carol Rosenberg is a reporter for The Miami Herald, she joined us on Skype. Thank you.
ROSENBERG: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.