Obama's Promise to Close Guantanamo Prison Falls Short

NPR

In one of his first acts as commander in chief, President Obama in 2009 signed an executive order to close the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It was part of a campaign promise the president made, to close the camp and "determine how to deal with those who have been held there." But four years on, the controversial prison remains open.

The president and his administration believed Guantanamo was a symbol of the contentious counterterrorism policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush; ones that included harsh interrogation tactics, rendition and indefinite detention.

John Bellinger, a senior legal official in the Bush administration, says the new administration miscalculated how difficult it would be to close Guantanamo.

"I think part of it was that a number of officials in the administration had come to believe that a lot of innocent people were being held and that they could be released," Bellinger says, "[and those] remaining could be tried in federal court and that all this could be done easily in a year."

But Bellinger says the Obama administration quickly learned that it wasn't so easy to transfer some of the roughly 240 prisoners still held at that time to their home countries — or even to third nations.

A review by the Obama administration found that probably only two dozen of the detainees could be successfully prosecuted in a federal court, because of weak or little available evidence. They also found that about 50 prisoners were deemed too dangerous to ever release.

At about the same time, says Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, Congress began pushing back on plans to move some of the detainees to prisons on the U.S. mainland.