Can Obama still close Guantanamo?

The U.S. has 104 prisons that can hold the remaining Gitmo detainees if Congress allows it

U.S. military guards move a detainee inside Guantanamo in 2010.
(Image credit: John Moore/Getty Images)

As President Obama prepares to start his second term, his first-term "pledge to close Guantanamo Bay looks deader than Osama bin Laden, thanks to a buzzsaw of bipartisan congressional opposition for the past four years," says Spencer Ackerman at Wired. On his second full day in office, Obama signed an executive order that, among other things, sought to close the U.S. military prison in Cuba and send the remaining detainees to countries or move them into the regular U.S. judicial system. Congress said no, blocking funding to modify U.S. prisons, banning the president from transferring any detainees to U.S. soil, and making it difficult to repatriate them abroad. The Senate renewed those restrictions in the current Defense Department funding bill, despite a veto threat, voting 54-41 on Thursday to re-up the ban on transferring Gitmo detainees stateside.

The reasons for opposing Obama's push to shutter Guantanamo take "a variety of forms, but the thread that unites them is: Not in my backyard," says Wired's Ackerman. As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) argued on the Senate floor Thursday, "The American people don't want to close Guantanamo Bay, which is an isolated, military-controlled facility, to bring these crazy bastards that want to kill us all to the United States." Most Americans, he added, believe the detainees "are bent on our destruction," not "some kind of burglar or bank robber."

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Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.