Asked what he would do over again since the start of his time in office, President Obama on Wednesday said that he would have “closed Guantanamo Bay on the first day.”
“I didn’t because at that time we had a bipartisan agreement that it should be closed,” the President told a crowd at an event for the City Club of Cleveland.
“I thought that we had a consensus there that we could do it in a deliberate fashion,” Obama added. “But the politics of it got tough, and people got scared by the rhetoric around it.”
Obama said that his administration then took “the path of least resistance,” and left the detention center open, while noting that he felt it was “not who we are as a country and it’s used by terrorists around the world to help recruit jihadists.”
Congress has blocked Obama from trying suspected terrorists in U.S. courts, but much to conservatives’ chagrin, the administration has made progress transferring prisoners out once they have been cleared.
As a result, the prison’s population has dropped from from 680 detainees in 2003 to 122.
Obama on Wednesday said that he has been forced to merely “chip away” at the detention center since taking office.
Watch the clip, courtesy of Huffington Post:
