I should have closed Gitmo, Obama says Obama says he didn’t expect the bipartisan consensus around closing the island prison to dissipate.

If President Barack Obama could go back to his first day in office, he told a crowd in Cleveland, he would close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

On his second full day in office, Obama did sign an executive order that was cast as a directive to close Guantanamo within a year. But it actually created a task force charged with creating a plan to close the detention facility. By the time the group released its plan on Jan. 22, 2010, the bipartisan consensus around closing Gitmo had dissipated and the administration had other priorities for spending its political capital.


Instead, in response to a seventh-grader’s question about what advice he’d give his inexperienced self, Obama said he should have taken a more immediate approach, presumably by simply ordering the remaining 242 detainees be moved elsewhere. That stopped being an option after Congress passed restrictions on transferring Gitmo prisoners to the United States.

“I think I would’ve closed Guantanamo on the first day,” Obama said. “I didn’t because at that time we had a bipartisan agreement that it should be closed.”

Indeed, Obama’s Republican opponent John McCain had also run on closing Gitmo in 2008, and George W. Bush said in a memoir he would’ve liked to close the facility. But in March 2009, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) started taking to the floor to warn against shuttering the prison.

“No acceptable alternatives exist,” McConnell wrote in The Washington Post, in just one early instance of the Republican leader frustrating Obama’s ambitions.

After opposition grew, Obama acknowledged Wednesday, “the path of least resistance was to just keep it open even though it’s not who we are as a country.”

Obama was also eager back then to draw a contrast with Bush, who the senator accused of overstepping his executive authority — a charge Republicans now lob at Obama. But even if Obama had used his presidential pen to send the detainees to a supermax prison early on, it wouldn’t have been a simple solution — especially since the administration has also faced resistance to abandoning military commissions in favor of civilian trials for the terror suspects.

“That creates certain challenges, both legal and political, because if someone is in the United States, certainly the lawyers would say that there’s different rules that apply,” said Scott Cooper, director of national security outreach at Human Rights First, which published a report on how Obama could close Gitmo under current conditions in December. “There’s a problem of ‘not in my back yard,’” Cooper added.

Obama said he also had some regrets about delaying a new approach to personal grooming.

“I was thinking maybe I should’ve told myself to start dying my hair now, before people noticed, because by a year in it was too late,” he said. “Michelle thinks I look distinguished.”