The New York Times reports President Bush has privately decided not to close the US military prison at Guantanamo and has never even considered State Department and Pentagon proposals to transfer the prisoners elsewhere. Both of the major presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, have called for closing Guantanamo, but neither has spelled out how this would take place or what would happen to the 250 prisoners currently at Guantanamo. On Monday, a federal appeals court blocked the release of seventeen Chinese Muslims into the United States from Guantanamo. The Uyghurs have been held for seven years, even though the US acknowledges they are not enemy combatants. This comes as the Bush administration is also seeking to extend the sentence of Osama bin Laden’s former driver Salim Hamdan.