Obama stands firm on closing Guantánamo | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views
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Barack Obama today laid out a broad case for closing the Guantánamo Bay prison and banning the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that have been condemned as torture – while accusing his opponents of wanting to scare Americans to win political battles.In a grand hall at the US national archives, standing directly in front of original copies of the US constitution and declaration of independence, Obama said the current legal and political battles in Washington over the fate of the 240 prisoners there stemmed not from his decision to close the facility, but from George Bush's move seven years ago to open it.
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Obama stressed at several points that his administration would never free dangerous terrorists into the US, an effort to counter the Republican party's central argument against the closure. He said US prisons were tough and safe enough to handle the most vicious al-Qaida terrorist suspects now held at Guantánamo."I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people," Obama said. "Al-Qaida terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture – like other prisoners of war – must be prevented from attacking us again."
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Shortly after Obama spoke, Dick Cheney gave a rebuttal at a conservative Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. The former vice-president defended many of the Bush administration policies Obama is now unraveling, and mentioned either "September 11" or "9/11" 25 times.Cheney said Saddam Hussein had "known ties" to terrorists, an apparent rehashing of the widely discredited Bush administration effort to link the Iraqi dictator to the September 11 2001 hijackers."After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalised," Cheney said."In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralising as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists."
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