White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough headed to Guantanamo Bay on Friday with two top senators to follow up on President Barack Obama’s renewed vow to close the war on terror facility.
McDonough was accompanied by Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Dianne Feinstein on the visit to the military-run camp in Cuba.
National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the trip was to assess the situation at the camp and to “discuss the steps that we can take with the Congress to meet the President’s goal of closing the facility.”
Obama recommitted to closing the camp, where a mass hunger strike among inmates is taking place, during a major speech on national security and counterterrorism policy last month.
McCain, Obama’s Republican rival in the 2008 presidential race, supports closing Guantanamo Bay, but said on Fox News Sunday in May that the administration had put “no coherent plan” forward to do so.
Feinstein was a leading voice calling on Obama to try again to close the facility, after he failed to honor a promise to do so within a year of taking office in January 2009.
She also called on Obama to review his moratorium on sending back prisoners cleared for release to strife-torn Yemen, a step Obama said he would take in his speech last month.
As of Friday, there were 166 prisoners in the camp, of which 104 were on hunger strike and 41 were being force fed through feeding tubes, while four were in the prison hospital, according to US military authorities.
Obama last month called on the Pentagon to designate a site on US soil to hold military tribunals for terror suspects now at Guantanamo Bay, and said Congress must drop efforts to thwart his closure plans.
“I know the politics are hard. But history will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism and those of us who fail to end it,” Obama said.
But he offered no solution for what to do with inmates deemed too dangerous for release but who cannot be tried because evidence against them was obtained through coercion and may not be admissible in court.
White House chief of staff heads to Guantanamo
