The Obama administration Thursday created a top level diplomatic position of globe-trotting Guantánamo Closure Czar to plead individual war on terror detainee cases in Europe and the Middle East.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appointed Daniel Fried to the new post on Thursday, in a State Department announcement that described him as ``a seasoned diplomat with a strong record of accomplishment.''

Fried, a career diplomat and former ambassador to Poland, will become the latest special envoy in a series created by the White House.

He is currently Assistant Secretary for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, responsible for the division that handles NATO enlargement and coordination with the European Union on democracy, human rights, economics, war on terror and nonproliferation issues.

In this case, his mandate is to persuade European countries as well as Yemen to take back some of the 240 or so long-held prisoners.

President Barack Obama has ordered the prison camps emptied by the end of his first year in office, to be preceded by a now ongoing case-by-case review of the detainees' files.

Some of the men are likely to be charged in criminal or military courts, while the U.S. has long been seeking to return or resettle dozens of others under a process the president assigned to Attorney General Eric Holder.

State Department officials had a role in finding nations to take Guantánamo during the Bush administration.

Now, it will be Fried's singular responsibility as a special envoy with a senior diplomat's rank, said a senior State Department official who told The Miami Herald in an interview that the new position was ``critical for our overall effort to get Guantánamo closed.''

Obama administration officials realized they needed a ''senior official who can deal at very senior levels with foreign offices to make these things happen,'' said the official who spoke on condition that his name not be used because he is not a department spokesman.

Resettling Guantánamo detainees is so diplomatically touchy, he said, that ``it's not going to be done by mid-level officials at foreign ministries.''

About 100 of the current Guantánamo detainees are Yemeni. The Bush administration was rebuffed for years in its efforts to reach an agreement with President Ali Abdullah al Saleh on repatriation and rehabilitation of suspect radical Muslims from his nation.

In his new job, Fried will have a seat at the table of the so-called inter-agency review that Holder chairs to be versed on individual files to plead their cases abroad.

''It will require an awful lot of work with Europeans,'' said the official, describing Europe as ''an important place'' to relocate some although not the majority of detainees. ``The diplomacy there is particularly complex because there are so many different countries involved.''

The role is being created just a week after Clinton told reporters in Brussels that the United States had yet to ask specific countries to accept detainees.

Monday, Holder held his first Cabinet-level meeting on the case files. Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, CIA Director Leon Panetta and FBI Director Robert Mueller attended.

Some 17 Chinese citizens of the Uighur Muslim minority are among the hard cases at Guantánamo. A judge ordered them freed last year after the Justice Department said it was no longer considered them ''enemy combatants,'' a war on terror detention category.

An interfaith community group in Tallahassee had offered to resettle three and Uighur immigrants in the Washington D.C. area had offered to take in the others in coordination with a Lutheran Church program. But the Bush administration had insisted that they go elsewhere, not to U.S. soil.

Join the discussion

The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. In order to post comments, you must be a registered user of MiamiHerald.com. Your username will show along with the comments you post. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.

     Showing: Oldest first Newest first Most-recommended first Least-recommended first

@Nyx.AuthorDisplayName@ wrote on @Nyx.PostedAtTime@:

@Nyx.repliedToText@

@Nyx.replyAnswerText@

Reply to this Comment @Nyx.Recommender@ @Nyx.AbuseReporter@