As the Center for Constitutional Rights responds, this is unconscionable.

As we approach the eighth anniversary of Guantánamo and the president’s failed deadline for its closure, it is important to remember that the vast majority of the men at Guantánamo should never have been detained in the first place, and that over 550 have been released and are peacefully rebuilding their lives. Most of the nearly 800 men who were brought to Guantánamo were not captured by the American military on any battlefield, but seized in broad sweeps during the chaos of the Afghan war or in other locations around the world and sold to the U.S. in exchange for substantial bounties. We know from the military’s own records that most of the detainees at Guantánamo have no link to terrorism.

When he accepted his Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama said, ‘We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it's easy, but when it is hard.’ What he said in December should be just a true a month later.

This is not just giving in to the terrorists who want to destroy our freedoms, this is doing their work for them.