After pledging to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay in the wake of his inauguration, President Obama is now, in his final year in office, pushing a new plan, aiming to “compromise” with Congress by closing the site but keeping scores of detainees at some other unknown black site.
The proposal is the latest in a string of half-hearted efforts to fulfill a promise to close the site, and unsurprisingly was met with the same resistance from Congress as usual, with a series of new bills presented aiming to make it even harder to close the facility.
The usual Congressional hawks are railing about the effort as “dangerous,” and treating it as though it would actual release detainees, or perhaps as shockingly, provide them with access to an actual judicial system.
The White House is trying to assure them that this isn’t the case, and that some prison of some sort inside the US would simply become the new Gitmo, and house those detainees in the same manner as they presently are housed.
Which has human rights groups wondering what the point is. Amnesty International in particular is critical of the effort, saying shifting the program to the mainland won’t solve anything, and that the problem is holding them without charges, not that they’re in Cuba.
The only way I could imagine Obama sorting this one out was to dump all the detainees in Afghanistan or Iraq, or perhaps, these days, Syria. I’m sure ISIS’d like a few more recruits.
If he’d bitten the bullet when he first took power, by now it’d be a done deal. But alas he’s left it all too late.