Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images
The long-awaited White House plan to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility will recommend moving the prison’s remaining detainees to United States soil, but will stop short of making any formal endorsement on an alternative facility.
Two senior Administration officials, speaking on background to reporters ahead of President Obama’s press conference on the subject, said while teams have surveyed several current facilities in the U.S., they will not name the sites nor make a formal recommendation on which of those facilities is the most viable option. The plan also examines the option of building a new facility entirely, but officials emphasized that the financial estimates aren't reliable.
“We put together cost estimates, but I want to underscore that these are somewhat rough,” one of the officials said. “Congress has prevented us from doing precise design and planning work on a facility in the continental United States that prevented us from coming up with the fidelity needed for either a budget estimate to ask Congress for the authority or even precise estimates of what the sites would cost.”
The officials said the Obama Administration intends to release 31 cleared detainees to third-party countries in the coming months, bringing the prison’s population below 60.
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