Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has vowed to fight Barack Obama’s plan to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center this year.
“Guantánamo ought to stay open,” he told reporters on Tuesday. “It’s the perfect place for terrorists. The president likes to kill terrorists – and I think that’s great, I’m all for killing terrorists – but even more important is to capture terrorists and interrogate them and try to find out what they know. The president doesn’t seem to be very interested in interrogation.”
He added: “I’m a supporter of Gitmo. I think it ought to stay open. I think we ought to add more terrorists to it and we ought to interrogate them there and if it is concluded that they should be tried, they should be tried by military commission ... I’m a big fan of using Gitmo the way it has been used and I think hopefully he will fail in his effort to completely remove all of these bad guys from Guantánamo.”
Republican candidates for president are generally supportive of Guantánamo Bay. Donald Trump said last month: “I would leave it just the way it is, and I would probably fill it up with more people that are looking to kill us.” Ted Cruz has filed legislation in the Senate that would block the transfer of detainees from the facility. Marco Rubio has vowed to keep it open, declaring that “foreign terrorists caught overseas will receive a one-way ticket to Guantánamo” if he becomes president. But it was recently revealed that Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton sent Obama a memo in January 2013, weeks before she stepped down as secretary of state, urging him to intensify efforts to shut down Guantánamo. Her rival Bernie Sanders is also thought likely to seek its closure.
McConnell, the most senior Republican in the Senate, called on Obama to outline a clear national security strategy in his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening. “What I’d like to hear him say is what his plan, specifically, to get rid of Isil [Islamic State]. Some of us had a chance to meet with King Abdullah [of Jordan] earlier today and I think there’s a good deal of confusion about whether there is a plan to get rid of Isil and whether or not the United States can step up and play the kind of leadership role that is necessary.”
McConnell’s guest at the address tonight will be an unemployed coal miner from his home state, Kentucky. “Tonight we expect the president to try to paint a cheerful picture that the American people do not have in mind when thinking of their country at this particular moment,” he said.
Republicans pointed out with relish that, during Obama’s presidency, the Democrats have lost 13 seats in the Senate and 69 in the House, as well as 11 governorships, 910 state legislative seats and the majorities in 30 state legislative chambers.
GOP senator John Thune from South Dakota said: “This is actually kind of an exciting State of the Union because it’s the president’s last State of the Union, finally. We expect him to present what we believe is a very distorted view of reality and certainly a reality that’s very different from the reality experienced by the American people.”
