Of all the things President Obama would like to have done differently at the start of his presidency, he singled out closing the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as chief among them.
Following his remarks at the City Club of Cleveland Wednesday, Obama was asked by a seventh grade student what do-over he would like to take advantage of on his first day in the White House.
“I think I would have closed Guantanamo on the first day,” Obama answered to a round of applause. “I didn’t because, at that time, as you will recall, we had a bipartisan agreement that it should be closed. My Republican opponent [John McCain] had also said it should have been closed, and I thought that we had enough consensus there that we could do it in a more deliberate fashion.”
Instead of closing the military prison immediately, the president signed an executive order calling the facility to be closed within a year. Of course, that didn’t happen.
“The politics of it got tough and people got scared by the rhetoric around it and once that set in, then the path of least resistance was just to leave it open even though it’s not who we are as a country and it is used by terrorists around the world to help recruit jihadists,” Obama continued. “So, instead, we’ve had to just chip away at it year after year after year. But, I think in that first couple of weeks, we could have done it quickly.”
Guantanamo was opened after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and about 120 prisoners currently remain in the prison, according to the Washington Post. The Obama administration plans to continue to “chip away” at the Guantanamo population.
Watch Obama’s full remarks at the City Club of Cleveland below.
