Gitmo

Colin Powell: Gitmo was always closing

By NICK GASS

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell reiterated his support for closing the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay on Wednesday, remarking that the facility has "always been slowly closing over the last 10 years."

Addressing complaints from fellow Republicans that the plan is not specific in terms of where it would place current detainees on U.S. soil, the retired general told MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports" that senators like John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) should press President Barack Obama for specifics and then assess.

"As secretary of state, Guantanamo was a heavy load to carry as I went around the world talking about human rights, talking about how you treat prisoners, talking about how you can’t have indefinite detention or the use of torture to get things out of people. And I always had pushback at me, 'But look at what you were doing at Guantanamo,'" Powell said. "And the fact of the matter is, it has always been slowly closing over the last 10 years. We started with almost 800 people in Guantanamo."

"We’re down now to less than 100. Well, where’d the other 700 go? They’re gone, they’ve been sent back because we didn’t have charges on them, we didn’t know how they’d gotten there in the first place," he said. "And so we’re down to under 100 and we’re going to cut that in half over the next several months. Do we really want to keep, do we really need to keep this place open for 50 remaining detainees who we could easily move to a secure facility in the United States?"

Federal courts, Powell stressed, have actually prosecuted and charged individuals suspected of terrorist activity, unlike military tribunals, expressing confidence in the federal system to work out an appropriate solution.

“The federal courts have been determined to bring these people to justice, and they are getting hard time. You put a terrorist before a jury of Americans who are worried about their security, and I’m not worried about them getting off on some plea deal," he remarked. "They’re going to get hammered, and they have been hammered.”

In announcing his proposal on Tuesday, Obama himself ticked through a list of terrorists who have been charged, prosecuted and imprisoned in the U.S., including 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Faisal Shahzad, who attempted to bomb Times Square in 2010.

Powell called opposition to prisoners being accepted into certain states "a political problem," remarking that while he knows "that nobody really wants to accept these folks ... there are some prison facilities in the United States, and we were looking at this years ago, who are anxious to get these folks into their unused prisons or their almost vacant prisons."