Pres. Obama should be congratulated for his honesty on the subject of the Guantanamo prison in Cuba.  Here is more on this remarkable admission.


from Huffington Post --  

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama said Wednesday that if he could go back and do his presidency over again, he would have immediately shut down the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"I think I would have closed Guantanamo on the first day," Obama said to applause at an event in Cleveland, Ohio.

Obama went on to say that he didn't rush to close the military prison when he first took office because there was already bipartisan agreement that it should be closed. He noted that his GOP presidential opponent Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) had also called for shutting it down.

"I thought we had enough consensus where we could do it in a more deliberate fashion," Obama said. "But the politics of it got tough, and people got scared by the rhetoric around it. Once that set in, then the path of least resistance was just to leave it open, even though it's not who we are as a country and it's used by terrorists around the world to help recruit jihadists."

The prison, which has been operating at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base since 2002, is being used to detain unlawful combatants from Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries who were captured in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The U.S. has come under international scrutiny for holding prisoners there who haven't been charged, for torturing prisoners and for denying Geneva Convention protections. As of January 2015, 122 prisoners were still there -- down from a total of 779.