Obama: Guantanamo closing ‘next year’
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President Obama, who made closing the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within one year a priority of his presidency, allowed that a January deadline for shutting down the controversial facility will be missed.
“We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantanamo will be closed next year,’ Obama said in an interview with Fox News conducted during the president’s visit to China. “I’m not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend upon cooperation from Congress.
‘I’m not disappointed,’ Obama said. “I knew this was going to be hard. It’s hard not only because of the politics; people, I think, understandably are fearful after a lot of years where they were told that Guantanamo was critical to keeping terrorists out.
“So, I understood that that had to be processed, but it’s also just technically hard,’’ the president told Fox News’ Major Garrett in an interview with a news network with which the White House has been at odds lately. “I just think, as usual in Washington, things move slower than I anticipated.”
The president, sitting for a round of interviews with American television networks during a tour of Asian nations, also bore some evidence of the economic concerns that Chinese President Hu Jintao and others in Beijing were voicing:
Speaking of continuing economic troubles at home, the president said, “I think it is important, though, to recognize that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession. ...’’
“One of the trickiest things we’re doing right now is to, on the one hand, make sure the recovery is supported and not withdraw a lot of money either with tax increases or big spending [and] at the same time making sure that we’re setting up a pathway long-term for deficit reduction,’ the president said. “It’s about as hard of a play as there is. ...”
And he said this about a U.S. unemployment rate that has reached 10.2%, the highest in 25 years: ‘Nobody’s been more disappointed than I have to see how high the unemployment rate has gotten. And I spend every waking hour, when I’m talking to my economic team, about how we are going to put people back to work.”
-- Mark Silva