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By Charlie Savage & Julie Hirshfeld Davis, New York Times–

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday sent Congress a long-awaited plan for closing the Guantánamo Bay prison, beginning a final push to fulfill a campaign promise and one of his earliest national security policy goals in the face of deep skepticism from many Republican lawmakers.

Unveiling the plan from the Roosevelt Room at the White House, the president made clear his frustration at how what was once a bipartisan goal shared by both his predecessor, President George W. Bush, and his 2008 Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, had become a partisan dispute. He urged Congress to give his plan a “fair hearing,” saying the prison wasted money, raised tensions with allies and fueled anti-American sentiments abroad.

“I am very cleareyed about the hurdles to finally closing Guantánamo — the politics of this are tough,” Mr. Obama said during a 17-minute statement. He added: “I don’t want to pass this problem on to the next president, whoever it is. And if, as a nation, we don’t deal with this now, when will we deal with it?”

Congress required Mr. Obama to present a plan as part of the most recent defense authorization bill, and its basic approach echoed the strategy the administration has already been pursuing for seven years. It centers on bringing between 30 and 60 detainees who are deemed too dangerous to release to a prison on domestic soil, while transferring the remaining 91 detainees to other countries.

The plan offered few specifics, and did not identify any of the potential replacement facilities. Pentagon officials visited military prisons at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and Charleston, S.C., as well as several civilian prisons in Colorado — where many terrorists are already held in the “supermax” wing of the complex at Florence — in preparing the study.

But the proposal did provide some new cost estimates. It said upgrading an existing prison would require between $290 and $475 million in one-time construction expenses, but cost $65 to $85 million less annually to operate than keeping detainees at Guantánamo does. If the detainees do stay at the American naval base in Cuba, it said, the Defense Department will need to spend about $225 million to replace or upgrade aging structures there.

The president’s plan faces steep obstacles, however. Congress has enacted a statute that bars the military from transferring detainees from Guantánamo onto domestic soil for any purpose, and Congressional Republicans have shown little interest in lifting that restriction.

Many Republicans have argued that there is nothing wrong with continuing to operate the Guantánamo prison and that bringing wartime detainees into the United States would create security risks. Lawmakers in the three states where the Pentagon studied sites have voiced strong objections to the notion.

Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the detainees should stay abroad for security reasons. “Enemy combatants should remain outside of the United States, where they can be detained away from our communities and without needlessly jeopardizing the safety and security of the American people,” he said.

 

Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, said that he supported closing the prison but that he thought the detainees should be moved to a military prison, not to one of the civilian facilities in his state.

Recognizing the political hurdles to persuading the Republican-controlled Congress to revoke the transfer ban, some of Mr. Obama’s former senior aides and legal advisers have floated the proposition that the Constitution gives him the power, as commander-in-chief, to move the detainees, despite the statute.

The White House will not say whether the president would consider taking executive action to close the prison if negotiations with Congress fail. In his remarks on Tuesday, Mr. Obama framed his latest efforts as asking Congress for cooperation, and he ignored a shouted question afterward about whether he would consider acting unilaterally.

“The fact that I’m no longer running, Joe is no longer running, we’re not on the ballot — it gives us the capacity to not have to worry about the politics,” Mr. Obama said. “Let us do what is right for America.” He added: “I really think there is an opportunity here for progress. I believe we’ve got an obligation to try.”

Human rights groups and lawyers for detainees are divided about Mr. Obama’s plan. Some oppose bringing detainees who are being held in indefinite detention without trial onto domestic soil, saying that would simply move the problem without resolving it.

David Remes, who represents 13 Yemeni detainees – five of whom are on the transfer list – said his clients wanted to be released, not transferred to a prison in the United States, where he said conditions of confinement would probably be harsher than in Cuba.

“The president wouldn’t be closing Guantánamo, he’d just be moving it to the United States,” Mr. Remes said. He said: “It’s being held in Guantánamo that keeps them in the spotlight. Moving them to the U.S. could make them invisible.”

But Raha Wala of Human Rights First said his organization would support moving the final batch of detainees into the United States if that is what was required to finally close the Guantánamo prison.

“Most military, intelligence and law enforcement experts believe that on balance Guantánamo harms, rather than helps, our national security,” Mr. Wala said. “Now that the administration has sent up its plan, it’s imperative that Congress act swiftly to consider it and remove the remaining transfer restrictions so that Guantánamo can finally be closed.”

The Bush administration opened the prison in January 2002, bringing detainees from the Afghanistan War to the American naval base. It declared that they were not protected by the Geneva Conventions and that courts had no authority to oversee what the government did to the prisoners there. In its early years, interrogators frequently used coercive techniques to force detainees to talk.

Mr. Obama had vowed during the 2008 presidential campaign that he would close the facility, and in January 2009, in one of his first acts as president, he issued an executive order instructing the government to shut it down within a year.

But that proved easier said than done, and as the administration studied how to go about achieving that goal, political support for it melted away. The first restrictions against bringing detainees into the United States — first for release onto the streets, and eventually even for prosecution or continued detention — were imposed by Congress when Democrats controlled it.

Still, Mr. Obama has refused to add any more detainees to the 242 he inherited, instead chipping away at the population. Of the 91 who remain, 35 are on a list of those recommended for transfer if security conditions can be met, 10 are charged or convicted before the military commissions system, and 46 have neither been charged with a crime nor approved for transfer. However, a parole-like periodic review board is slowly working its way through their numbers, moving some to the transfer list.