Jay Leno’s Gitmo Solution
From 2013.
Jay Leno has an idea. President Obama, now in his fifth year as President, thinks that someone should close Gitmo. It would have happened in 2009, except that something or other has kept this from happening. Leno has a solution:“President Obama held a press conference earlier today, and he said he still wants to close the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, but he doesn’t know how to do it. He should do what he always does: declare it a small business and tax it out of existence. It will be gone in a minute. Be gone in a minute! One month! Be out of there!”
I can see why NBC wants to get him off the air. With jokes like this, he makes the President look silly.
Closing Gitmo was one of his 2008 campaign promises.
But that was then. This is now.
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Posted on May 2, 2013. The original is here.
From Wikipedia:
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp (Spanish: Centro de detención de la bahía de Guantánamo) is a United States military prison located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, also referred to as Guantánamo, GTMO, and "Gitmo" (/???tmo?/), on the coast of Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Of the 780 people detained there since January 2002 when the military prison first opened after the September 11, 2001 attacks, 731 have been transferred elsewhere, 39 remain there, and 9 have died while in custody.The camp was established by U.S. President George W. Bush's administration in 2002 during the War on Terror following the September 11, 2001 attacks. Indefinite detention without trial and torture led the operations of this camp to be considered a major breach of human rights by Amnesty International, and a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution by the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Bush's successor, U.S. President Barack Obama, promised that he would close the camp, but met strong bipartisan opposition from the U.S. Congress, which passed laws to prohibit detainees from Guantanamo being imprisoned in the U.S. During President Obama's administration, the number of inmates was reduced from about 245 to 41.
In January 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep the detention camp open indefinitely. In May 2018, a prisoner was repatriated to Saudi Arabia during Trump's term.
In early February 2021, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden declared its intention to shut down the facility before he leaves office. In July 2021, an additional detainee was released.
There are 38 prisoners to go.
In September 2019, The New York Times estimated that it had cost $540 million to operate the prison camp for one year. It housed 40 prisoners. In 2013, the Defense Department estimated that it cost $454 million to house 166 prisoners.