President Joe Biden has reportedly set Sept. 11, 2021, as the deadline for yet another campaign promise: fully shuttering the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
The closure of Guantanamo would coincide with the president's stated deadline for a total U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Both former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump pledged to shut down the prison facility located on a U.S. naval base in Cuba. Biden made closing the detention center a campaign promise and in February ordered a review to "assess the current state of play."
According to NBC News, that process has rapidly accelerated, yet the administration has avoided making public statements on the subject to avoid falling into the same trap that snared Biden's predecessors.
"They don't want it to become a dominant issue that blows up," a Biden administration official involved in the discussions told NBC News. "They don't want it to become a lightning rod. They want it to be methodical, orderly." --->READ MORE HERE
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| John Moore / Getty Images file |
President Joe Biden has quietly begun efforts to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, using an under-the-radar approach to minimize political blowback and to try to make at least some progress in resolving a long-standing legal and human rights morass before the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
After initial plans for a more aggressive push to close the facility — including rebuffed attempts to recruit a special envoy to oversee the strategy — the White House changed course, sources said. The administration has opted to wait before it reaches out to Congress, which has thwarted previous efforts to close the camp, because of fears that political outcry might interfere with the rest of Biden's agenda.
"They don't want it to become a dominant issue that blows up," a former senior administration official involved in the discussions said of Biden officials. "They don't want it to become a lightning rod. They want it to be methodical, orderly."
The administration hopes to transfer a handful of the remaining terrorism suspects to foreign countries, the people familiar with the discussions said, and then persuade Congress to permit the transfer of the rest — including 9/11 suspects — to detention on the U.S. mainland. Biden hopes to close the facility by the end of his first term, the people familiar with the discussions said. --->READ MORE HERE
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