Obama makes a new push to close Guantanamo (Congress, legal, suspect)

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Let's hope...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama vowed on Tuesday to make a new push to close the Guantanamo detention center, where about 100 inmates are on hunger strike, saying it was damaging to U.S. interests to keep holding prisoners there in legal limbo.

Human rights groups have long been critical of the 12-year-old camp for foreign terrorism suspects, and their concern has intensified in recent weeks. Some of those on hunger strike are being force-fed at the camp at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba.

Obama, who repeatedly vowed to close the camp, which now holds 166 detainees, when he was campaigning for a first term and when he first took office in 2009, said he would re-engage with lawmakers to find a way to shut the facility and make good on an unkept promise.

However, he offered no new path to overcoming congressional, political and legal obstacles that blocked his earlier efforts to close Guantanamo, where many of the prisoners have been held for more than a decade without being tried or charged.

Obama vows new push to close Guantanamo detention camp

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“Is it any surprise, really, that they would prefer death rather than have no end in sight to their confinement?” a reporter asked during a White House press conference on Tuesday.

President Obama was aware: “It is not a surprise to me that we’ve got problems in Guantánamo,” he said, and then talked about how he said so back in 2007, and how that was part of his campaign, and how Congressional Republicans had made things very hard.

They have; but he, for a couple of years now, has made it easy for them to do so. He said he knew that it wasn’t “sustainable.”

A Hundred Hungry Men at Guantánamo | Common Dreams