The White House said Thursday that it couldn’t say for sure that it will make a deadline next week for submitting a plan to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, after having just missed a separate deadline for developing a plan to destroy the Islamic State.
“I don’t want to speculate at this point that we won’t meet the deadline. But if Feb. 23 comes around and we haven’t presented the plan, then we can talk about what … we’ll try to communicate to Congress,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Thursday. He was discussing the looming deadline for the administration to submit to lawmakers a long-awaited closure plan for the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has said the Pentagon-drafted plan is at the White House, awaiting presidential approval.
“I don’t have an update for the timing of that plan,” Earnest conceded. “We’re certainly mindful” of the provision in the annual Defense policy bill requiring the administration to tell Congress how it would close the prison and what it would do with the remaining inmates.
“I know … that the Department of Defense has been working very diligently with other components of the president’s national security team to put together a thoughtful, workable, sensible plan that reflects the national security interests of the United States and reflects the responsibility that the United States government has to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars,” Earnest said.
As for the administration’s plan to defeat the self-proclaimed Islamic State, contained in the same Defense law, that deadline passed on Monday without being met, and Earnest suggested that this week’s congressional recess made the deadline less urgent.
“I would anticipate that the Department of Defense and the Department of State will be able to present to Congress shortly,” Earnest said. “Congress is on recess this week, so I know that they’re working diligently to complete this plan.”
Earnest said that when they do, lawmakers aren’t likely to learn much new.
[G]iven the number of senior-level administration officials that have testified in public, under oath, some of them who even testified in a classified setting about our ongoing efforts to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL, I don’t anticipate that there are a whole lot of people in Congress that are going to learn a whole lot new in that plan,” Earnest said, using the administration’s preferred acronym for the Sunni terrorist group.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has tried to keep the administration’s feet to the fire regarding the deadlines, but has not said what more forceful action he will, or can, take to make the administration comply.
