Out of all the questions President Obama answered this morning during a press conference at the White House, this is the only one I found to be substantive. Of course that’s not saying much considering that the other questions asked concerned Benghazi and “juice” and whether or not he still has it.
I don’t want to sound like a broken record, so I’ll let President Obama take the wheel on this one.
Q: Mr. President, as you’re probably aware, there’s a growing hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay, among prisoners there. Is it any surprise, really, that they would prefer death rather than have no end in sight to their confinement?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, it is not a surprise to me that we’ve got problems in Guantanamo, which is why, when I was campaigning in 2007 and 2008 and when I was elected in 2008, I said we need to close Guantanamo.
I continue to believe that we’ve got to close Guantanamo. I think — well, you know, I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.
Now Congress determined that they would not let us close it and despite the fact that there are a number of the folks who are currently in Guantanamo who the courts have said could be returned to their country of origin or potentially a third country. [...]
And it’s not sustainable. I mean, the notion that we’re going to continue to keep over a hundred individuals in a no man’s land in perpetuity, even at a time when we’ve wound down the war in Iraq, we’re winding down the war in Afghanistan, we’re having success defeating al-Qaida core, we’ve kept the pressure up on all these transnational terrorist networks, when we’ve transferred detention authority in Afghanistan — the idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried — that is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.
Now, it’s a hard case to make because, you know, I think for a lot of Americans, the notion is out of sight, out of mind, and it’s easy to demagogue the issue. That’s what happened the first time this came up. I’m going to go back at it because I think it’s important.
President Obama is exactly right and, in case you forgot, here’s how it played out.
The president signed an executive order to close Guantanamo within 24 hours of taking office, and what followed over the next several months and years was congress taking several unanimous votes to keep Guantanamo open. Because even though several prison systems offered to accept detainees while others would not, congress could not stomach the unprecedented fearmongering over moving suspected terrorists into the states.
Congressmen, pundits, and citizens alike cried out that they didn’t want terrorists to be housed in their states because they may escape or make them a target. This lead the Senate to vote 96 to 0 to keep Guantanamo open. This irrational, pants-crapping fear also lead congress to disapprove of civilian trials for detainees.
(On another note: who could forget the feargasm over of the possibility of prosecuting Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York?)
More recently there was much ballyhooing over the fact that the National Defense Authorization Act maintained the status quo at Guantanamo, but in a usual manner the president took much of the blame for that even though he issued a statement to reiterate that he does not approve of keeping Gitmo open after congress voted overwhelmingly to do so once again.
And that brings us to today where I have no more confidence than I did previously that blame will be appropriately assigned. And as long as congress escapes culpability, nothing will change.
(Transcript via WaPo)