“I’m going to be doing everything I can to close it,” Obama said in an interview with CNN’s Candy Crowley that aired Sunday on ‘State of the Union’.
“It is something that
continues to inspire jihadists and extremists around the world, the fact
that these folks are being held,” Obama said.
“It is contrary to our values.”
The President’s comments
followed a flurry of executive action at the start of what he called his
“fourth quarter” in the Oval Office — after Republicans walloped
Democrats in the November’s midterm elections, taking control of both
houses of Congress.
After the election, Obama
quickly announced an overhaul of US immigration rules and new
regulations aimed at curbing environmentally-harmful emissions. He
followed those moves this week with a deal that represented the biggest
steps to thaw the economic freeze with Cuba in decades.
The Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
detention facility — which Obama pledged to shut down as part of his
2008 campaign, but saw his plans thwarted when Congress passed a law
prohibiting him from doing so — could be another target ripe for
executive action.
Obama has transferred
many of the detainees housed at that facility to other countries in
recent months, and said Friday he’ll continue trying to do that, since
Congress won’t allow him to shift those detainees into federal Supermax
facilities within the United States.
“We are going to
continue to place those who have been cleared for release or transfer to
host countries that are willing to take them,” Obama told Crowley.
The toughest challenge,
he said, is dealing with “some really hard cases” in which “we know
they’ve done something wrong and are still dangerous.”
Still, Obama said, he wants to shut the facility down.
“I think that it does
not make sense for us to spend millions of dollars per individual when
we have a way of solving this problem that’s more consistent with our
values,” he said.
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