President Obama on Tuesday called on members of Congress to help him “close this chapter” of U.S. history during which the country has held dozens of terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and said it’s time to eliminate the facility once and for all.
“Let us do what is right for America, let us go ahead and close this chapter … do it right, do it carefully, take measures to ensure that we’re safe,” he said in a statement at the White House Tuesday. “But do in a way that gives the next president the ability to apply the lessons that we learned.”
Obama’s made those comments just moments after the White House released a detailed plan for shuttering the facility. The administration says closing it down and moving the remaining prisoners to the U.S. would save up to $85 million per year, and a savings of $1.7 billion over 20 years.
“We can assure our security, uphold our highest values and save taxpayers a lot of money in the process,” he said.
Because he is no longer up for re-election, Obama said he no longer has to worry about the politics involved in trying to shutter the facility. But more importantly, he said, the United States can eliminate an international stigma that stems from the prison, tacitly acknowledging the lingering resentment over allegations that some of the inmates at the island facility were tortured while others were held for years without due process.
Other foreign leaders have raised the issue to him repeatedly, citing certain detainees’ cases.
“I have spent countless hours on this, I do not exaggerate,” Obama said.
“I don’t want to pass this problem on to the next president whoever it is,” he added. “As a nation, if we don’t deal with this now, when will we deal with it?”
Obama’s proposal involves continuing a process already in place to transfer cleared detainees to other countries, periodically holding boards to reassess whether a detainee is eligible for release and identifying individuals who could be prosecuted.
The remaining detainees who are too dangerous to release and cannot be tried based on insufficient evidence to use in a court or military commission would be sent to a location in the United States, which is currently prohibited by law.
But Obama said there’s no reason to fear bringing these terrorist suspects to the United States because several dangerous terrorists have already been held in U.S.-based prisons and tried in civilian courts during his time in office.
He specifically mentioned Richard Reid, the so-called shoe-bomber who tried to blow up a airliner in route to Miami just months after the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as Faisal Shahzad, who was convicted of trying to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in 2010.
“They were all convicted and are now behind bars in the United States,” he said. “We can capture terrorists, protect the American people. We can try them and put them in maximum security prisons and it works just fine.”
While he said he understands the fears about holding terrorists on U.S. soil, he said they are mostly unfounded and fanned by politicians who don’t want the terrorists held in prisons facilities in their states and districts.
“I am very clear-eyed about the hurdles to closing Guantanamo Bay – the politics of this are tough,” he said. “A lot of the American public are [sic] worried about terrorism – the notion that having terrorists held in the United States rather than some distant place can be scary.”
But, he said, the U.S. is already holding “a bunch of dangerous terrorists here in the United States because we threw the book at them” and “there have been no incidents.”
“We managed just fine,” he added.
Even before Obama’s statement, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the closure plan was dead on arrival, reminding the president that it is illegal to move any detainees to the United States and shutter the facility.
The plan Obama sent to Congress Tuesday references 13 potential prison facilities in the United States, including the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., the military prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, and the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, N.C.
Ahead of Tuesday’s expected release of the plan, Republican senators from those three states, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Pat Roberts of Kansas and Cory Gardner of Colorado, said they remain adamantly opposed to transferring the prisoners to U.S. soil.
