White House: Biden wants to close Guantanamo Detention Center
US President Joe Biden wants to close the Guantanamo Bay prison for “terror suspects” before the end of his term, the White House said Friday, echoing an unfulfilled campaign promise from Barack Obama’s administration, according to AFP.
Asked at a press conference about a possible closure of the prison in Cuba during Biden’s tenure, spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, “That certainly is our goal and our intention.”
She said the administration was working through the National Security Council to “assess the current state of play that the Biden administration has — well, we’ve inherited from the previous administration.”
In his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump expressed willingness to keep the Guantanamo prison open and “fill it with bad guys.” The Republican retained this position once elected.
However, some detainees were promised their release from Guantanamo under his Democratic predecessor Obama, but he never succeeded in working out a compromise with Congress. Biden was Obama’s vice president.
In a statement last month on the 19th anniversary of establishing this detention center, UN human rights experts called on the Biden administration to close Guantanamo Bay as soon as possible and said that “Guantanamo is a place of abuse, torture and ill-treatment where the rule of law is effectively disrupted and justice is denied.”
Source AFP