Obama says he didn’t expect the bipartisan consensus around closing the island prison to dissipate.
By SARAH WHEATON 3/18/15 6:31 PM EDT Updated 3/18/15 6:57 PM EDT
If President Barack Obama could go back to his first day in office, he told a crowd in Cleveland, he would close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
On his second full day in office, Obama did sign an executive order that was cast as a directive to close Guantanamo within a year. But it actually created a task force charged with creating a plan to close the detention facility. By the time the group released its plan on Jan. 22, 2010, the bipartisan consensus around closing Gitmo had dissipated and the administration had other priorities for spending its political capital.
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Instead, in response to a seventh-grader’s question about what advice he’d give his inexperienced self, Obama said he should have taken a more immediate approach, presumably by simply ordering the remaining 242 detainees be moved elsewhere. That stopped being an option after Congress passed restrictions on transferring Gitmo prisoners to the United States.
“I think I would’ve closed Guantanamo on the first day,” Obama said. “I didn’t because at that time we had a bipartisan agreement that it should be closed.”
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