Barack Obama to use executive order to close Gitmo

The White House said on Thursday that if Congress blocks new plans to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison, President Barack Obama may resort to a controversial executive order to get the job done.

With time running out for the 44th President to fulfil an incomplete election campaign promise, he looks increasingly likely to bypass legislators who have blocked the facility’s closure.

“I’m certainly not going to take anything off the tab-le,” White House spokesma-n Josh Earnest said when asked about possible executive action.

He said Mr Obama would do “everything that he can to make progress” towards Guantanamo’s closure, which Mr Earnest described as a “national security priority.”

Mr Obama is expected within days to put forward a plan to Congress that would allow Guantanamo to close. Created to hold terror suspects after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Guantanamo became notorious for harsh interrogation techniques and because many prisoners are, or were, held for years without being charged. As of now, the facility is home to 112 inmates.

The new closure proposal, drafted by Mr Obama’s top counterterror advisor, Lisa Monaco, and defence secretary Ash Carter would lift congressional restrictions on transferring detainees to the United States.

Inmates who cannot be released or transferred abroad would be housed at a US facility like Fort Leavenworth, Kansas or the Navy Brig in Charleston, South Carolina.

But that plan looks increasingly unlikely to pass muster in the Republican controlled Congress, raising the prospect of executive action, which would ignite a political firestorm.

In 2009 Mr Obama issued an executive order to close the camp, prompting a furious Congress to pass rules that made the transfer of detainees to US soil all but impossible.

The White House has long said those rules are unconstitutional as they impinge on executive power. But it has tried to have them overturned rather than engage in a damaging political fight.