Two years ago this week, President Obama issued a sweeping executive order promising to shutter the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center within a year. Today, it's still open and running with little prospect of that changing in the near future.
Mr. Obama says he is still committed to closing the prison at the U.S. naval base in Cuba, which remains — in his words — a marquee recruitment tool for terrorists. But the administration's failure to see through one of Mr. Obama's first pledges as president is also symbolic — a stark indicator of the limits of presidential power and the difficulty of converting his hope-and-change campaign message into concrete action.
"I think I'd be dead by now if I were holding my breath" that Mr. Obama would make good on his Guantanamo vow, said Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, whose antiwar group continues to protest the White House over the Guantanamo prison as it did under President Bush.
Such sentiment is a far cry from 2008 when advocates were heartened by high-profile support from both sides of the aisle as Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Mr. Bush himself joined Mr. Obama in calls to close the prison. But the issue took a back seat to domestic priorities as Mr. Obama threw his energy into shepherding an $814 billion economic-stimulus package through Congress and overhauling the nation's health care system.
Guantanamo, meanwhile, became the ultimate political football as Republican lawmakers led the charge to keep the prison open by highlighting what they described as a humane, state-of-the-art facility and warning of safety risks if detainees were to be transferred to the United States. Mr. Obama had yet to mount a sustained public effort to close the prison before members of his own party — who at one point led Congress with a filibuster-proof majority — joined the GOP last spring to thwart a plan to purchase a federal prison in Illinois and transfer detainees to it.
Human rights activists, wearing orange prison garb and black hoods to represent the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, stand on Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House on Friday to protest that the detention center has not been closed down by President Obama. (Associated Press)Most recently, in one of its last acts before Republicans took control of the House, the Democrat-led Congress in December approved a defense authorization bill barring the use of Pentagon dollars for transferring detainees to the United States. It also hamstrings efforts to send them to another nation by requiring a certification from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that a foreign country abides by a strict security protocol.
"The American people don't see a big problem with Guantanamo," said Rep. Duncan D. Hunter, California Republican and a Marine reservist who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and now sits on the House Armed Services Committee. "They don't want terrorists brought here, and they sure as heck don't want them released here if they were found not guilty. ... These aren't people that belong to another army, and they aren't criminals. They're terrorists, and they need a special classification, and they need a special place."
Earlier this month, Mr. Obama said he had no choice but to sign the authorization bill, which approved billions for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he issued a highly critical signing statement that decried the Guantanamo provisions as a "dangerous and unprecedented challenge to critical executive branch authority" and also vowing to push for a repeal of the restrictions, which expire in September.
"It is important for us, even as we're going aggressively after the bad guys, to make sure that we're also living up to our values and our ideals and our principles," Mr. Obama said in December. "That's what closing Guantanamo is about — not because I think that the people who are running Guantanamo are doing a bad job, but rather because it's become a symbol. And I think we can do just as good of a job housing them somewhere else."
More than 173 detainees are housed at Guantanamo, according to the Pentagon. Opened shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan nine years ago, the facility has been the subject of heated debate ever since human rights groups decried it as illegal, while security hawks pointed to evidence that a number of former detainees have returned to the battlefield — although the exact figure is in dispute.
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