Obama: I Should Have Closed Guantánamo Bay on Day One

During a Q&A session following his speech on middle class economics to the City Club of Cleveland Wednesday afternoon, President Barack Obama revealed on thing he would do differently if he could start his presidency over knowing what he knows now. “I think I would have closed Guantánamo on the first day,” he told the crowd.

The reason he didn’t, Obama said, is that at the time there was bipartisan agreement that the detention facility should be closed. Instead of making it happen right way, the president chose to sign an executive order that tasked a group with figuring out how to close it within a year.

“I thought we had enough consensus there that we could do it in a more deliberate fashion,” Obama added. “But the politics of it got tough, and people got scared by the rhetoric around it. Once that set in, then the path of least resistance was just to leave it open, even though it’s not who we are as a country and it’s used by terrorists around the world to help recruit jihadists.”

Instead, Obama said, we’ve been forced to “chip away it” a little bit at a time, releasing a small number of detainees who could not be charged but leaving more than 100 still in captivity with no trials in sight.

Watch video below, via The White House:

[Photo via screengrab]

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