President Barack Obama's call to shutter the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay on Tuesday reignited GOP rallying cries on the campaign trail to preserve the detention facility, NBC News reported.
"This makes no sense to me. Number one, we're not giving back an important naval base to an anti-American communist dictatorship," Marco Rubio said of the facility in Cuba. "And number two, we're not going to close Guantanamo. In fact, we shouldn't be releasing the people that are there now. They are enemy combatants."
Republicans and some Democrats in Congress have blocked Obama's efforts to close Guantanamo. Among the most contentious aspects of his proposal is the transfer of some detainees to U.S. soil.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich said in an interview with Fox News that Guantanamo Bay is a non-issue likely brought up again by the administration to close on President Obama's 2008 campaign promise.
"I don't favor closing Gitmo," he said. "These are people who are some of the worse of the worst and why would we send them into our country? I don't understand it. Look he promised it in the campaign."
