This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 6, 2016,

from Caleb Brown. In her new book, Rogue Justice, Karen Greenberg details the

abdication of courts and Congress to defend liberty.

When Barack Obama became president, many Americans believed his pledges to reverse

many of the troubling surveillance, torture, and other programs undertaken by the Bush administration.

Among those pledges

from the president still undone the closure of Guantanamo Bay.

President Obama is in his last year in office. He promised before he became president that that that would be a

priority for him. It hasn't happened and I would suspect because I had some hopes that that he would

follow through on a lot of these things when he became president and that he

earnestly believed that he would be able to do it.

I suspect that he just got stymied by the Pentagon and others about how to do it and that was sort of left a sort of an impossible

puzzle to figure out and still hasn't been able to do it. So what is your view

on Guantanamo Bay and and getting it closed?

My view is that he miscalculated the pace at which he had to do this if he was going to

make such a bold announcement and that in giving Congress and the American

public a time to push back, he lost his advantage.

However, having said that, I want to say I think Guantanamo could still close

before the end of this presidency. I think he very much wants it. I think it would

not be a good idea to turn this over to the next president, whoever it is. I think the ISIS issue of detention

has to start in a brand new arena, in a brand new conversation. Guantanamo has harmed us in both in backlash in terms of it's

draining resources in terms of pointing out the weaknesses of our own system in a way that is harmful and probably

...