The White House on Monday declined to say if it’s working with Sens. John McCain and Joe Manchin to permanently close the terrorist detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, just days after it released another six detainees.
McCain, R-Ariz., said last week that the administration — specifically Lisa Monaco, the White House’s counter-terrorism adviser, and Pentagon officials — have told him they are working on a plan to send to Congress to close the facility. The Senate version of the defense authorization bill contained new restrictions on shutting the facility and transferring detainees to other countries.
It also included new language authored by McCain and Manchin that would allow the prison to be shut down if the White House can lay out how it would handle some of the outstanding legal issues surrounding such a closure, such as how it would handle future extremists the military captures.
But when asked, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said only that the administration has been working to close the facility for a long time, and explicitly said he was not confirming any work with McCain.
“The administration has undergone a great effort to try to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, principally because it does serve as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda and other terrorists,” Earnest said. “It’s also prohibitively expensive and the president does not believe it’s in the best interest of American national security to continue to operate that prison.”
Republicans have criticized the transfer of detainees overseas, and say these moves run the risk of letting enemy combatants return to the fight against the United States. But Earnest said the transfer of detainees to Oman, which sits next to war-torn Yemen, did not pose a risk.
“The transfer would not have occurred if the secretary of defense were not satisfied that the threat that these individuals pose to American national security was not sufficiently mitigated,” he said. He said Defense Secretary Ashton Carter approved the transfer of the six men and provided the administration 30-days required official notice to Congress before the administration transferred them late Friday.
“There are in place significant measures to mitigate the threat that those individuals pose to national security when those transfers occur but the president does believe we would be more successful in this effort if Congress were willing to engage constructively in it,” he said.
Manchin last week told the Washington Examiner that news about new detainee releases transfers was extremely disappointing considering the current effort to forge a bipartisan compromise to finally close the island prison and fulfill Obama’s 2008 campaign promise to do so.
