Talk about a rating roller coaster! When we first reviewed President Obama's campaign pledge to close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center in January 2009, we rated it In the Works. By May 2009, we moved it to Stalled, since the White House was facing significant opposition from Congress. In mid-October, it went back to In the Works, as Congress allowed some detainees to be temporarily moved to the United States for prosecution. That rating remained unchanged after our last update in January 2010.
We're well into the second year of Obama's administration, so we wanted to see whether things had changed since January.
First, however, a quick note. We've gotten a ton of e-mails from readers urging us to rate this Promise Broken. Obama promised to close the detention center within a year of taking office, the argument goes, and he has not done that. As we pointed out in our last update, however, he made that statement after taking office, not during the campaign. The Obameter only tracks promises that the President made on the campaign trail, when there was no such self-imposed deadline.
That said, let's look at how things have been unfolding.
In December 2009, the administration announced that it would ask Congress to appropriate money to purchase the Thomson Correctional Center in northwest Illinois to house Gitmo detainees. The plan took a blow, however, in May 2010, when the House Armed Services Committee inserted language into the 2011 defense bill which specifically prohibits the use of funds to purchase or modify any U.S. facility for Gitmo prisoners. The measure was adopted by the full House on May 28, 2010 in a 282-131 vote. The Senate Armed Services Committee adopted a similar proposal on May 28, 2010. The two proposals have yet to become law, however. In June, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich announced that the administration plans to go ahead with the purchase of the facility for regular domestic federal prisoners.
Even more telling, however, are statements that the House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md, made in July 2010. Talking about closing Guantanamo, Hoyer said that "that's not an issue being discussed very broadly. I think that you're not going to see it discussed very broadly in the near term."
Finally, in May 2010 the Guantanamo Review Task Force submitted a report to Congress, which includes recommendations on how to proceed with each of the detainees. But House Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat, said that Guantanamo is not at the top of his priority list. "A war is going on. That"s my concern." Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said that moving prisoners from Gitmo to Illinois is "off the radar screen."
The White House maintains that President Obama is committed to closing Guantanamo, but several high-ranking lawmakers make it clear that this is unlikely to happen anytime soon. As always, we'll keep our eyes open, but for now, we are changing the rating to Stalled.