If he could do it all over again, President Obama said Wednesday that he would have closed the Guantanamo Bay detention facility on his “first day” in office.
“I didn’t because at that time, as you’ll recall, we had a bipartisan agreement that it should be closed,” he said when asked at a Cleveland event what he should have done differently as president. “I thought we had enough consensus there to do it in a more deliberate fashion. But the politics of it got tough and some people got scared by the rhetoric.”
Obama’s inability to close the prison facility in Cuba is arguably his greatest unmet promise since taking office in 2008. The White House has acknowledged mulling a possible executive action for shuttering the prison but has not presented a plan to do so.
In the first days of his White House tenure, Obama signed an executive order calling for the closure of Gitmo.
In the face of stiff congressional opposition, the president said he has been unable to do so. Instead, the White House has chosen to expedite the transfer of prisoners from the Cuba facility, hoping to empty it as much as possible through executive means.
Rather than again pledge to close the facility, Obama in Ohio Wednesday said his administration was “chipping away” at lowering the Gitmo prison population.
