Scott is among several officials in South Carolina protesting consideration of the naval brig.
Advertisement
President Obama has tried for years to shut down the Guantanamo facility, calling it a recruiting tool for jihadists that costs too much to operate.
“There is an open question about whether or not Congress does want to fairly consider this proposal”, he said.
The showdown comes as a logjam in the Defense Department’s final approval of transfers from Guantanamo to other countries has loosened.
Of the 112 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, nearly half have been approved for repatriation or transfer overseas.
Over the summer, Obama called Sen.
Roberts says that President Obama has overreached his boundaries to close Guantanamo despite strong objections. On that day Obama said, “This is me following through on not just a commitment I made during the campaign, but I think an understanding that dates back to our founding fathers, that we are willing to observe core standards of conduct, not just when it’s easy, but also when it’s hard”. That’s why we have a commander-in-chief; that’s why we have presidents. “If I had been president, I guarantee you there’d a been a plan”. Or when he announced this summer that the White House was in the “final stages” of drafting a plan to close the terrorist detention center in Cuba?
Lawmakers recently approved a defense bill that limited transfers from the prison.
Obama vetoed the original defense policy bill over a larger spending issue. “This plan has been in the works for months now”.
In practice, this would require an executive order from the President, bypassing the will of the Congress. The White House is promising to deliver a detailed plan for the shutdown of the facility, which opened in 2002, shortly after the United States began to engage in foreign conflicts, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
How far does the USA have to go to give locked-up terror suspects religious accommodations? The remaining prisoners, considered the most unsafe, would be transferred to facilities in the United States, though that is a step congressional Republicans have opposed in the past.
Obama advisors had hoped McCain would help them overcome that opposition, and in an interview Wednesday, he didn’t rule it out.
Advertisement
At a separate news conference, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said she is upset that the Republicans have prevented Obama from closing Guantanamo, “which he set out to do, and which he had a plan to do – and he does have a plan to do now”.
