President Obama wants Congress to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but is keeping his options open if lawmakers don’t acquiesce, his spokesman said on Thursday.
“[W]e are … working with Congress to get this done,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “I was asked yesterday about whether … the president has executive authority, that is a question for lawyers to answer.”
“But as the president’s spokesman here, I’m certainly not going to take anything off the table in terms of him doing everything that he can to make progress on a national security priority that he has identified,” Earnest said.
“[O]ur focus is on trying to convince Congress to remove the obstacles that they have erected to prevent us from moving forward with closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay,” he continued. “We are hopeful that members of Congress will receive the plan in the same spirit in which it was written.”
The administration is supposed to present Congress a closure plan any day now.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said earlier on Thursday that he opposes closing it.
Ryan’s stance contradicts that of foreign policy and military experts in his party, such as Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain of Arizona and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Earnest said.
“I’ll also note that the comments of Speaker Ryan contradict the views and priorities established by President George W. Bush. George W. Bush did say, quote, ‘It should be a goal of a nation to shut down Guantanamo,'” Earnest said, adding that five former secretaries of State also believe it should be closed.
Ryan is contradicting “some of the brightest foreign policy thinkers in both parties,” Earnest said.
“Speaker Ryan spends a lot of time talking about the need to shrink government budgets,” he continued. “Closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay makes a whole lot of fiscal sense. The amount of money that is spent per detainee in Guantanamo Bay is far higher than the amount of money that is spent to detain and incarcerate convicted terrorists on U.S. soil right now.”
Earnest also took issue with the argument that the remaining 112 detainees should not be brought to the U.S. because they are too dangerous.
“There are a number of convicted terrorists that are currently serving time on U.S. soil,” he said, listing Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the architects of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid.
