Obama: I’ll Be Doing ‘Everything I Can’ To Close Guantanamo Bay

"I'm going to be doing everything I can to close it. It is something that continues to inspire jihadists and extremists around the world, the fact that these folks are being held, it is contrary to our values and it is wildly expensive. We're spending millions for each individual there. And we have drawn down the population there significantly. There are little less than 150 individuals left in this facility.

We're going to continue to place those have been cleared for release or transfer to host countries that are willing to take them. There's going to be a certain irreducible number that are going to be really hard cases, because, you know, we know they've done something wrong and they are still dangerous, but it's difficult to mount the evidence in a traditional Article 3 court. You know, so we're going to have to wrestle with that.

But we need to close that facility and I'm going to do everything I can to close it ... I think that it does not make sense for us to spend millions of dollars per individual when we have a way of solving this problem that's more consistent with our values."