Obama defends plan to close Guantanamo

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-05-21 23:34

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama vigorously defended his plans to close the Guantanamo prison camp on Thursday and promised to work with Congress to develop a system for imprisoning detainees who can't be tried and can't be turned loose.

President Barack Obama delivers an address on national security, terrorism, and the closing of Guantanamo Bay prison, Thursday, May 21, 2009, at the National Archives in Washington. [Agencies]

Obama conceded that some would end up in US prisons and insisted those facilities were tough enough to house even the most dangerous inmates.

The president spoke one day after the Senate voted resoundingly to deny him money to close the prison in Cuba, but Obama said he was still determined. And he decried arguments used against his plans.

"We will be ill-served by the fearmongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue," he declared.

"There are no neat or easy answers here," Obama said in a speech in which he pledged anew to "clean up the mess at Guantanamo." Speaking at the National Archives, Obama said he wouldn't do anything to endanger the American people.

He noted that roughly 500 detainees already have been released by the Bush administration. There are 240 at Guantanamo now.

Obama said opening and continuing the military prison "set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world."

Obama spoke in front of a copy of the Constitution, to members of the Judge Advocate General's Corps, diplomatic, policy and development officials and representatives of civil liberties groups.

"I can tell you that the wrong answer is to pretend like this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo," Obama said. "As president, I refuse to allow this problem to fester. Our security interests won't permit it. Our courts won't allow it. And neither should our conscience."

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