Why Obama failed to close Guantanamo

July 2024 ยท 2 minute read

CAROL ROSENBERG:

Well, for the most part, they're saying that they will โ€” certainly the military would say that they're follow whatever the next commander in chief tells them to do. But I do think there is a fair amount of, you know, free-floating anxiety about what will come.

Donald Trump said that, you know, he โ€” during his campaign, that he intended to load the prison up with some bad dudes. He's not closing that prison. He wants to add more prisoners to it.

So, there's a real question about where they're coming from, who they are, what will be the authority to detain them? And, you know, bringing in new prisoners from the global battlefield, from, let's say, perhaps, Iraq, or Syria, they'll be completely different people than the men who are there now.

Remember, these men have been detained for at least a decade, and some of them for, you know, 15-plus years. And when they were captured, and when they got to Guantanamo for the most part, there was no ISIS. There was no al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula.

So, the idea that you're going to bring in, you know, perhaps the bad stepchildren of the original al Qaeda and put them in the detention center raises a whole bunch of questions. If Donald Trump makes good on his plan to bring more prisoners in, where will they go? And, you know, in many ways, it's like it was when it first opened โ€” lots of questions, and very few answers.

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