Earnest: Obama Admin Is in ‘Final Stages of Drafting Plan’ to Close Guantanamo Bay

NN REPORTER: “Obviously, the administration has made clear that they want Guantanamo to be closed. They’ve made this a priority. Members of Congress have asked for a plan to close Guantanamo. We know that Lisa Monaco and the Defense Secretary have promised that to Senator McCain. Defense Secretary Carter has been speaking about this publicly. Why has the White House been reluctant to acknowledge that they're working on this plan? And why have they cited Congress asking for this plan as a reason to veto the NDAA if, in fact, they want it to be close? Also Secretary Carter suggested he wasn’t confident Guantanamo could be closed in this administration. What reason do you have to be confident that that goal can be achieved? What will you be doing differently to convince members of Congress who perceive perhaps that the White House is putting pressure on the Defense Department to put politics above national security, particularly when we have reporting from The New York Times last night that Susan Rice and other members of the Security Council gave Ash Carter a memo that suggested he had 30 days to make decisions on transfers?”
EARNEST: “There’s a lot there. So let me try to fill you in. Well, let me confirm for you that the administration is, in fact, in the final stages of drafting a plan to safely and responsibly close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and to present that plan to Congress. That has been something that our national security officials have been working on for quite some time, primarily because it is a priority of the President. He believes it's in our clear national security interest for us to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. And in order to reduce that prison population we need to do a variety of things. The first is we need to continue to responsibly transfer to foreign countries those detainees who have been designated for transfer. Of course, that does require certification by the Secretary of Defense, that any national security risk associated with that transfer can be sufficiently mitigated. I would point out -- you’ve been covering this closely, Molly, so you know that just within the last few weeks there was a transfer of some detainees from the prison at Guantanamo Bay to Oman. The second thing we need to be able to do is to continue to carry out prosecutions of detainees who can be charged in the military commission system. There are a couple of individuals, including one of the masterminds of the 9/11 plot, and one of the individuals who was involved in the planning of the bombing of the USS Cole who are currently going through that military commission process right now. We also need to provide the remaining detainees that are not designated for transfer with periodic reviews to assess whether their continued detention remains necessary. And ultimately, we need to explore individualized disposition options for the remaining detainees. So this is complicated work, but we've made a lot of important progress since the President took office. And just this year, the detainee population at the prison at Guantanamo Bay has been reduced from 127 to 116. The concerns that we continue to have with the NDAA are rooted in the fact that for years now, basically since the President took office, we have seen members of Congress -- and this is true of both Democrats and Republicans -- repeatedly impede the effort to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, despite bipartisan agreement that closing the prison is actually in the national security interest of the United States. The fact is continuing to operate that prison is not an effective use of taxpayer resources and it certainly is not consistent with our national security interest because we know that some extremist organizations use the continued operation of the prison at Guantanamo Bay as a recruiting tool. So there are a variety of reasons why this continues to be a priority, and there are a variety of reasons why we expect bipartisan support for our effort to close the prison, and not continued obstruction from Congress. That's why we're continuing to work on a plan that, when it's completed, we'll be prepared to present and share with Congress.”