A final plan by Barack Obama to fulfill his pledge to close Guantánamo Bay – functionally identical to what he has already proposed – has already run into heavy political opposition, underscoring the likelihood Guantánamo will remain a detention facility after Obama leaves office.

The plan, released on Tuesday in accordance with a congressional request, reiterates previous administration insistences on closing Guantánamo rather than proposing a long-elusive new option with the chance of breaking through more than seven years of GOP refusal on Capitol Hill.

Obama, expressing frustration at what has been for seven years a futile battle, again implored Congress to “go ahead and close this chapter”, portraying Guantánamo as “counterproductive to our fight against terrorists”.

“For many years it’s been clear that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay does not advance our security,” said Obama in a White House press conference. “It undermines it.”



He added: “Fifteen years after [the September 11 attacks] we’re still having to defend a facility where not a single verdict has been reached in those attacks. Not a single one. When I first ran for president it was widely recognized that this facility needed to close ... There was bipartisan support to close it.”

While little is new in the plan, the administration for the first time identified that it believes it will continue to hold between 30 and 60 detainees indefinitely without charge in a replacement domestic facility – a decision, strongly opposed by human rights campaigners since Obama adopted it in 2009, that has earned the plan the derisive sobriquet “Gitmo North”, whereby the practices that made Guantánamo internationally infamous migrate rather than stop.

As well, the administration offered a ballpark estimate that what it calls “closing” Guantánamo will cost between $290m and $475m this year, covering new construction to leasing costs to transfer costs. It hopes that the subsequent costs of detaining the 30 to 60 detainees will offset the total cost.

There are currently 91 detainees at Guantánamo Bay, including 35 cleared for transfer that the State Department expects to repatriate by the summer.

As first reported by the Guardian on Monday evening, the plan does not name any alternate location within the US for continuing to hold detainees, despite being the centerpiece of the logjam with Congress, which for six years has made it illegal to bring detainees to the continental US for any purpose.

Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the armed services committee, all but rejected a plan he himself has urged the administration to submit. McCain has shifted his positions on Guantánamo from the Bush to the Obama administrations, but has positioned himself as the last gasp of Obama’s ambitions to win congressional support.

McCain, while pledging to look at the plan in hearings, termed it “a vague menu of options, not a credible plan for closing Guantánamo, let alone a coherent policy to deal with future terrorist detainees”, and said Obama had “missed a major chance”.



Senator Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican on the armed services committee, preemptively rejected the final proposal in a statement.

“The president is doubling down on a dangerous plan to close Guantánamo – a move that I will continue to fight in the Senate,” Ayotte said.

Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican and war veteran, dismissed the plan as a “political exercise”. Cotton, a rising star in GOP national security circles, received significant media attention for declaring Guantánamo detainees “can rot in hell” last year.

Along with intelligence committee chairman Richard Burr, Ayotte and Cotton have already introduced a bill to keep Guantánamo from transference back to Cuba as part of geopolitical rapprochement. On Tuesday, Marco Rubio, the establishment choice for the Republican presidential nomination, endorsed the bill.

“We simply cannot hand over this critical base, especially not as the end result of President Obama’s dangerous plan to release terrorists back into the battlefield or bring them to US soil,” said Rubio, who is Cuban-American.

Aides outlining the plan conceded that they were looking to start a “more sustained conversation” with Congress on closing Guantánamo, rather than adopting any new tool out of the morass.

They said Obama was not focused on taking any unilateral action until Congress had spoken, a move that in effect sets the clock on a dramatic closure action of the sort Obama has rejected throughout his presidency for his final days in office, unless a last-ditch deal with Capitol Hill can defy the odds and become reality.

“I think it’s an occupational requirement to be optimistic in this business,” a senior administration official who would not be named told reporters.

The plan expressly concedes its reliance on Congress to lift the Guantánamo transfer ban: “To accomplish this plan, the administration will work with Congress to lift unnecessary prohibitions in current law.” The concession complicates any subsequent legal argument that Obama has the unilateral authority to transfer detainees to US military prisons inside the United States.

More than seven years of insurmountable opposition in Congress, as well as intransigence within the Pentagon, has left the administration with little more than optimism as a strategy.

Since Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell rejected closing the facility in March 2009, unified Republican opposition has turned Guantánamo into a conservative cause célèbre. It has proven to be politically beneficial to the party, weakening Obama on a core pledge and incurring no reprisal. Democrats in Congress have offered muted support for shuttering Guantánamo, and always on Obama’s terms to retain indefinite detention and military tribunals within the US.

Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state running for the Democratic presidential nomination, urged Obama to intensify efforts at transferring detainees out of Guantánamo in her final days in office. She has not made Guantánamo central to her presidential campaign.

In a microcosm of the opposition engendered by every administration action on Guantánamo, the chairman of the House armed services committee, Republican Mac Thornberry of Texas, rejected the transfer of 10 detainees last month – not to US soil, but to Oman.

Although an internal, multi-agency review process had determined all 10 detainees posed no significant danger in 2010, Thornberry called them “10 dangerous detainees” and suggested the administration was ignoring “that a significant number of detainees have returned to the battlefield”.

Thornberry, in a Tuesday statement, did not rule out consideration of the plan, but sounded doubtful notes: “It suggests to me that the president is more interested in fulfilling a campaign promise at any cost, than in transparently addressing the risk associated with bringing terrorists to the United States.”