WASHINGTON — President Obama signaled his intention Wednesday to press forward on his plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, despite a growing challenge from both political parties and a limited set of options to make his detainee policy work.
In a sign of his lost momentum, the Senate on Wednesday voted 90 to 6 to block funding for the shutdown. The vote followed criticism that the administration was backtracking on Americans' security.
But Obama, in a bid to retake the initiative, plans an address today to forcefully defend his proposal for closing Guantanamo by year's end. In the morning speech at the National Archives in Washington, he also will address prospects for a controversial proposal to hold detainees indefinitely without trial, if necessary, and will reassert his argument that closing the prison would advance U.S. security.
"The president signed an order early in his administration to close it, and he intends to keep that promise," said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.
In a possible sign of a new approach, an administration official said that for the first time, a Guantanamo detainee is being sent to the U.S. to stand trial in a criminal court. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian captured in Pakistan in 2004, had been indicted by a federal grand jury in New York on allegations that he took part in attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.
Obama met with leaders of human rights organizations Wednesday as Congress debated the issue and the White House planned its response.
Since Obama's decision four months ago to close the prison, few new options have emerged to ease the way to a shutdown. To clear the political logjam, the administration and Congress face difficult and politically unpopular choices.
"The president is going to have to spend political capital; he will have to lean on people and call out the political cowards," said John D. Hutson, a retired Navy admiral and judge advocate general who advised Obama on detention policy during his presidential campaign. "He is going to have to regain the high ground and the initiative. He had the initiative and it slipped away."
The administration's counterattack began Wednesday, when a top Pentagon official challenged the growing congressional opposition to moving detainees to the U.S., saying some detainees must be placed in mainland prisons.
