President Barack Obama is moving aggressively to shrink the prison population at Guantánamo, whittling the number of detainees nearly in half since he took office. But his drive to close the offshore prison before he leaves office in two years faces very long odds.

Among the obstacles: existing law limits transfers, the new Congress seems even more hostile to loosening those restrictions than the previous one, and the president’s plan to bring some prisoners to the U.S. for open-ended detention faces resistance from both the right and the left.


And that’s not all. A terrorism threat that once seemed to be fading has reared up again, with gains by groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and last week’s attack on a Paris newspaper stoking fears that released prisoners could return to the fight.

So, while Obama has defied Congress in recent months on issues like immigration and the environment, and he has stepped up efforts to transfer prisoners overseas — moving a flurry of 21 abroad since mid-November — it’s far from clear that he’ll succeed in closing the base. That’s because just chipping away at the numbers won’t do it.

“How close you are to closing the facility is not now and never has been a function of the number of people held,” said Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution. “The group of people who are moving out now have been cleared for transfer for a long time. … Not until they’re making disposition decisions for people who have not been cleared for transfer for five years is it that you’re going to convince me that we’re in some game-changing Guantánamo moment.”

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Administration officials say their strategy is to keep cutting the number of prisoners, which started at 242 when Obama was sworn in and now stands at 127. When the tally drops below 100 and perhaps even as low as a few dozen, officials say, the cost per prisoner will zoom so high that keeping the facility open will be transparently foolish and lawmakers will abandon their resistance to closing the island jail.

“I think the facts and the logic will be very compelling, once we get it down to a small core,” said Cliff Sloan, who stepped down last year after 18 months as the State Department envoy for Guantánamo closure. “I think the case becomes overwhelming for them to be able to be moved to the U.S. and placed in very secure facilities.”

One proponent of closing the facility said the recent flurry of transfers helps demonstrate that releasing prisoners doesn’t unleash chaos.

“I do think there is value in creating momentum and the demonstration effect of we do this and the sky is not falling,” said Elisa Massimino of Human Rights First.

Several sources also said that in private meetings in recent months Obama has personally and emphatically underscored his commitment to get the Guantánamo prison closed before he leaves office. One of his first acts on his first day was to order his new administration to close the facility, established by President George W. Bush to hold suspected terrorists in a location outside the legal protections of the U.S. judicial system. Its continued operation not only continues to draw criticism from allies and human rights advocates, but also threatens to tarnish Obama’s legacy.

“Nobody should underestimate the determination of the president to close Guantánamo in his presidency,” Sloan said. “He feels very strongly about it.”

In an interview last month, Obama stopped short of vowing to shut the prison by the time he leaves office, but he insisted that he would do what he could to make that happen.

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“I’m going to be doing everything I can to close it,” he told CNN. “It is something that continues to inspire jihadists and extremists around the world, the fact that these folks are being held. It is contrary to our values and it is wildly expensive. We’re spending millions for each individual there.”

Some Guantánamo closure advocates and administration officials say they’re optimistic that the new Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, John McCain of Arizona, could help ease the current restrictions. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he favored closing Guantánamo — a stance that lulled Obama and his aides into believing it could happen within a year.

However, McCain told POLITICO his key concern at the moment is that released detainees not join up again with Islamic militant groups.

“I want to see a plan. I don’t want to see a situation [where] 30 percent of those released re-entered the fight,” McCain said last week. “They’re going to release lots more. Of course, that’s their plan, to release as many as they can, in fact to the point where it costs X million for Y number of detainees.”

Some observers say it’s simply illogical to expect the current Republican-dominated Congress to be more open to closure. And within hours of the new Congress being sworn in, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) made their point, announcing plans to pursue legislation that would essentially halt transfers of “high-risk” detainees.

“If Obama couldn’t win over Congress on this issue when the Democrats controlled one house, how much more likely is it he’ll be able to win over Congress when the Republicans control both houses?” asked detainee lawyer David Remes.

A Republican the White House once counted as an ally in the Guantánamo closure fight is already mocking the administration’s suggestion that costs should spur debate.

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“I tell you whatever money we spend to keep a terrorist off the battlefield is money well spent,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said. “I can’t wait to debate somebody who thinks we can’t afford to keep a committed jihadist in jail.”

At the moment, the administration is not publicly arguing that detainees be released in order to save money, simply that it would be cheaper to house prisoners in the U.S. But many in the GOP believe the White House is shipping prisoners out of Guantánamo so that costs per prisoner appear to rise sharply.

Graham and other critics also said the White House drive to shut the prison is ill-timed, given advances terrorist groups, particularly Islamic State, have made in recent months.

Where the detainees go The number of prisoners at Guantanamo started at 242 when Obama was sworn in and now stands at 127. Here’s a snapshot of detainee transfers from 2009 to present.



“ISIS is a Guantánamo detainee’s worst nightmare,” Cully Stimson, a top Defense Department detainee official during the George W. Bush administration who now works at the Heritage Foundation, said, using an acronym for Islamic State. “It means further scrutiny and further review of all potential future transfers.”

The situation on both sides of Capitol Hill also looks grim for closure supporters. By 230-184, the House cast a largely party-line vote last year to put a one-year halt on all transfers out of Guantánamo, a measure stripped out in talks with the Democratic-controlled Senate. Republicans now have 12 more House seats than they did last year and have gained a majority in the Senate.

New Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has long opposed bringing Guantánamo prisoners to the U.S. and played a key role in mustering congressional opposition to Obama’s first-year plans to shutter it.

“Mitch McConnell, back in 2009, was the one who got the whole thing rolling,” said Chris Anders, a legislative liaison for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The challenges Obama faces in closing Guantánamo aren’t limited to conservatives or even to Democrats fearful of Republican attacks on the issue. Many of the most strident backers of closing the prison approve of transferring prisoners to other countries but strongly oppose bringing them to the U.S. for detention without putting them on trial.

“The problem is not where the detention without charge or trial is happening — it’s the fact that it’s happening at all, whether it’s in Guantánamo or Kansas,” said Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watch.

Several civil liberties and human rights groups have declared that they would rather see Guantánamo remain open than have the government detain prisoners without trial on U.S. soil. “Bringing the practice of indefinite detention without charge or trial to any location within the United States will further harm the rule of law and adherence to the Constitution,” the ACLU, Amnesty International and others told Congress in 2010.

“It’s always been something of a half-baked idea to bring [detainees] here without charge or trial,” Anders said. “They keep proposing that and when everything gets rejected the administration acts surprised Congress didn’t go along.”

Obama seems to have ruled out the kind of charge-or-release policy many Guantánamo critics are seeking. He suggested last month that some prisoners may need to be held indefinitely, but stopped short of saying exactly what should be done with them.

“There’s going to be a certain irreducible number that are going to be really hard cases, because, you know, we know they’ve done something wrong and they are still dangerous, but it’s difficult to mount the evidence in a [civilian federal] court. … So, we’re going to have to wrestle with that,” he told CNN.

While some administration officials have said the number of detainees who must be held without trial will be small, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said Sunday that the count of those the U.S. needs to hold indefinitely will be in the “dozens.”

“There’s going to be dozens of these individuals that have to be detained. Our elected officials need to find a way to detain them,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”

Other challenges to the closure effort include ongoing military commission proceedings at Guantánamo for the Sept. 11 defendants and others. In theory, these could be held in the U.S, but moving them midstream seems certain to generate protests from victims and family members already complaining about the glacial pace of the proceedings.

Obama’s next big decisions on Guantánamo will likely come toward the end of this year. A ban on transfers to the U.S. contained in the so-called Cromnibus budget bill expires at the end of the fiscal year in September. Another ban in the National Defense Authorization Act runs out in December.

If the president wants to take a stand to close the war-on-terror prison, he could declare that he’ll veto legislation that extends the current language limiting transfers abroad and banning transfers to the U.S. The problem: The White House has issued such threats in the past, but Obama never followed through, so lawmakers may view such a stance as a bluff.

Some closure advocates harbor even more improbable fantasies that Obama might simply declare the restrictions an unconstitutional infringement on his executive power and move detainees to the U.S. in defiance of the congressional bans. But even then, limits on using funds to prepare U.S. facilities for Guantánamo detainees would make it hard to make suitable arrangements.

Still, some saw one hint last year that Obama might be willing to take a more aggressive approach. When he traded five Taliban leaders held at Guantánamo for captured U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the president ignored a legal provision requiring a 30-day notice to Congress. Administration officials have described that as an extraordinary circumstance involving the opportunity to save an American and not a paradigm for future presidential actions on Guantánamo.

The recent rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba could also bring changes at some point to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, but one American official said no impact is expected on the base.

“We want to close the detention facility at Gitmo but it will continue its status quo as a U.S. military installation going forward,” said the official, who asked not to be named.

At least one lawyer for Guantánamo prisoners has concluded that if the U.S. is going to continue to detain some suspects indefinitely, it’s actually a good thing for the facility to stay open.

“I want Guantánamo to remain open,” Remes said. “In aiming to close the facility because it’s a symbol of injustice, President Obama is proposing to cure the symptom without curing the disease.”

Jeremy Herb contributed to this report.