President Obama promised to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility at the beginning of his presidency. Seven years later — nearly to the day — he released a plan to do it.
“For many years it’s been clear that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay does not advance our national security,” Obama said.
“It undermines it.”
Speaking from the Roosevelt Room on Feb. 23, President Obama laid out the four elements of the plan drawn up by the Pentagon. Of the 91 detainees still held, 35 have already been approved for transfer to other countries. Obama noted that of the 800 detainees once held, 85 percent have already been transferred overseas, 500 of which were transferred under President George W. Bush.
While the second and third elements of the plan deal with legal tools to assess the status of individual detainees, the fourth element of the plan will likely prove to be the most controversial: holding detainees on American soil.
In 2006, President Bush said that he wanted to close Guantánamo, but the prospect of holding terrorists in the U.S. has caused partisan division on the issue.
While he said he was aware of the difficulty of finding a way forward, Obama reiterated his belief that closing the prison would be favorable both for national security and a fulfillment of American values.
“This is about closing a chapter in our history,” he said.
“If, as a nation, we don’t deal with this now, when will we deal with it?”
Updated at 12 p.m.:
Following President Obama's announcement, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture released a statement applauding the goal of closing the detention facility. NRCAT's Executive Director Ron Stief, however, noted the following: “an important flaw in the President’s plan is that it is immoral and contrary to American values for the U.S. to hold anyone without the reasonable prospect of a trial.”
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