Obama Guantanamo 'not necessary'

Obamameter; Politico; 

The challenge in closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay is not actually the detention facility itself. The problem is the 166 detainees, each of whom has to be moved somewhere else. A basic premise of Gitmo, after all, was that these are people would be kept in perpetual limbo. Each detainee can leave that limbo through one of four different routes: a civilian trial, a military tribunal, a foreign country's prison system or freedom.

Sounds simple enough, right? Except that the first two routes – civilian trial or military tribunal – were blocked by Congress, which passed legislation barring the federal government from funding trials for Guantanamo detainees or buying a prison in the U.S. to house them.

The third route, to send the detainees to a foreign country's prison system, is only legal if the U.S. can be sure that the detainees will not be tortured there. Given some of the countries from which the detainees originate, this is not always an easy guarantee to make. And there have been doubts about foreign governments' ability to appropriately safeguard the detainees.

Center for Constitutional Rights