Detroit bomber rekindles row over Guantanamo Bay

President Barack Obama flew back to Washington yesterday from Hawaii to face anger from senior Republicans who say his administration is being too lenient with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with attempting to blow up an airliner bound for Detroit on Christmas Day.

The president also faced pressure to reconsider his promise to close Guantanamo Bay. Almost half the remaining inmates of the prison camp are from Yemen, where Abdulmutallab prepared the bomb he allegedly planned to detonate on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit.

The Obama administration has decided to try Abdulmutallab in a federal court rather than holding him as a military prisoner. This means that he enjoys the rights of any American civilian charged with a crime - including the right to a public defender, which he now has.

"If we had treated this Christmas Day bomber as a terrorist, he would have immediately been interrogated military-style, rather than given the rights of an American and lawyers," said Jim DeMint, Republican senator for South Carolina. "We probably lost valuable information."

Senator Joe Lieberman, the one-time Democrat but now an independent who chairs the Senate's Homeland Security Committee, claimed it was a "very serious mistake" to send Abdulmutallab to federal court. "He was trained, equipped and directed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," Lieberman told ABC. "That was an act of war. He should be treated as a prisoner of war, held in a military brig, questioned now, and should have been ever since apprehended for intelligence that could help us stop the next attack or get people in Yemen."

Spurred on by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who said last week that the Obama administration is not aggressive enough against terrorism and does not appreciate that the nation is "at war", Republicans have used the row over Abdulmutallab to have another go at Obama's promise to close Guantanamo Bay.

The president's insistence on abandoning the controversial prisoner-of-war facility will mean the release or transfer of the 198 prisoners who remain there - 91 of whom are from Yemen. According to a report in the Times, at least 12 former Guantanamo inmates have already rejoined al-Qaeda to fight in Yemen and there are fears more will follow if they are released.

Senator Kit Bond of Montana, the senior Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said: "If we don't stop the practice of releasing Guantanamo detainees to Yemen or to other countries . . . we're asking for even more trouble."

Bond, whose committee is due to begin hearings on the Christmas Day incident on January 21, added: "I think there ought to be an immediate halt put to releases from Guantanamo."

However, Obama's chief adviser on counter-terrorism, John Brennan, argues that Guantanamo Bay has to be closed because it has become "a propaganda tool for al-Qaeda".

As for the decision to give Abdulmutallab a civilian hearing, Brennan said this would enable prosecutors to offer the young Nigerian a plea agreement in return for information about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen.

Brennan told NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday that there were "different ways" of obtaining information from people in the criminal justice process. "A lot of people . . . understand what they're facing, and their lawyers recognise that there is advantage to talking to us in terms of plea agreements, [and] we're going to pursue that."

Brennan said on CNN's State of the Union that other terrorism suspects had "given us very valuable information as they've gone through the plea-agreement process."

Meanwhile Abdulmutallab, currently being held in a jail in Michigan, is due to appear in court on Friday - with his public defender. ·