USA - President Obama put new urgency behind his drive to close the Guantanamo Bay prison

President Barack Obama used his State of the Union address today to put new urgency behind his drive to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, raising the issue before a joint session of Congress for the first time in nearly five years. “With the Afghan war ending, this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay – because we counter terrorism not just through intelligence and military action, but by remaining true to our Constitutional ideals, and setting an example for the rest of the world,” Obama was to say, according to his prepared remarks. His high-profile mention of the issue was notable not just because he did not bring up the issue during his four previous State of the Union addresses, but because any discussion of the subject is a reminder of one of the most obvious broken promises of Obama’s early presidency: his vow to close the prison within his first year in office. “Guantanamo will be closed no later than one year from now,” Obama declared as he signed an executive order in the Oval Office on the subject on the first full day of his presidency. Obama never made that one-year pledge in front of Congress, but did speak in his February 2009 speech there — one not considered a State of the Union — of having ordered the closing of the prison. The president announced the plan to close the prison in a year confidently and with little controversy, but essentially abandoned it after lawmakers put up resistance to bringing detainees to the U.S and White House aides decided to focus on other priorities like. During his first term, Obama grudgingly signed a series of bills containing language making it virtually impossible to move detainees from Guantanamo to the U.S. and making it difficult to transfer detainees to other countries without extraordinary confidence they would not later engage in terrorism. This essentially stalled the closure process. However, late last year, Congress passed a defense bill that slightly eased the transfer restrictions. The effort to shrink Gitmo’s ranks has also gained a small amount of momentum in recent months, with eight prisoners sent home or elsewhere abroad since August.