Obama to Wait on Gitmo Closure

Daily News Article   —   Posted on January 12, 2009

(by Christina Bellantoni, WashingtonTimes.com) – President-elect Barack Obama said Sunday that some of his campaign promises will have to wait … [that] legal and national security concerns have postponed his promised closure of Guantanamo Bay.

In an interview with ABC’s “This Week” that aired Sunday, Mr. Obama said he has come to realize that his pledge to close the federal detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within his first 100 days in office won’t happen that soon.

When he was campaigning for the presidency, Mr. Obama regularly said the prison “sends a negative message to the world” and taints even trade-deal negotiations.

“To the extent that we are not being true to our values and our ideals, that sends a negative message to the world, and it gives us less leverage then when we want to deal with countries that are abusing human rights,” he said during a primary-season debate in Iowa in December 2007.

Guantanamo faded as an issue during the general election campaign because the Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, also wanted to close the facility.

But after Mr. Obama won the presidency, his transition co-chairman, John Podesta, said Nov. 11 that closing Guantanamo was “under review” and nothing definitive could be said because the situation is “complicated.”

On Sunday, Mr. Obama said that closing Guantanamo Bay was a challenge.

“We are going to get it done, but part of the challenge that you have is that you have got a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom may be very dangerous, who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication,” he said.

He said his legal and national security teams strive to balance creating a fair legal process that “doesn’t result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up.”

“I don’t want to be ambiguous about this,” Mr. Obama said Sunday. “We are going to close Guantanamo, and we are going to make sure that the procedures we set up are ones that abide by our Constitution. That is not only the right thing to do but it actually has to be part of our broader national security strategy, because we will send a message to the world that we are serious about our values.”

In the wide-ranging ABC interview, Mr. Obama also said he would take a piece of advice from outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney: that he will not commit to changing interrogation practices until he has all of the information that the current administration holds.

“I’m not going to lay out a particular program because, again, I thought that Dick Cheney’s advice was good, which is that let’s make sure we know everything that’s being done,” Mr. Obama said.

He was responding to the vice president’s warning in a recent CBS Radio interview that “before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric, you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it” to keep the nation safe.

But Mr. Obama said he disagrees with the vice president and thinks that waterboarding is torture.

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“We’re still evaluating how we are going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions and so forth,” he said. “When it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.”

The president-elect, in the discussion with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, also stressed that he would take a “new approach” with Iran, but he declined to go into detail about foreign policy, despite the turmoil in the Middle East, until he is sworn in.

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The ABC interview followed Mr. Obama’s weekly radio address on Saturday, in which he increased the figures for his stimulus plan, saying it could save or create between 3.3 million and 4.1 million jobs, a jump of more than 1 million from his previous estimate.

The president-elect’s week ahead will be busy.

On Monday, Mr. Obama will meet with Mexican President Felipe Calderon. The majority of his Cabinet picks face confirmation hearings this week in the Senate. …..

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