WASHINGTON (AFP) — Barack Obama's presidential transition team said Tuesday it was working though the complicated issues involved in his campaign pledge to close the Guantanamo Bay "war on terror" camp in Cuba.
The Democratic president-elect is already under fierce pressure from human rights groups to close the controversial high-security facility but faces a legal minefield in deciding where to house inmates and how to try them.
"Senator Obama has said that he intends to close the facility at Guantanamo, that's a complicated matter," said his transition co-chair John Podesta.
"It's under review ... when we have something to say about that, we'll say it," Podesta said at the first news conference of the transition in Washington.
"I think that moving the process forward and undertaking the review of how one would exactly accomplish that is a project that the transition will undertake, and then will be implemented by the new administration."
Any decision to close Guantanamo, which opened in 2002 and has scarred America's image abroad, will involve working out where to put inmates and require a new kind of legal structure to prosecute them.
On Monday, Obama foreign policy advisor Denis McDonough denied reports that his team was considering a new national security court to try detainees deemed too dangerous to release and who could not be put through federal courts.
"President-elect Obama said throughout his campaign that the legal framework at Guantanamo has failed to successfully and swiftly prosecute terrorists, and he shares the broad bipartisan belief that Guantanamo should be closed," McDonough said.
"There is absolutely no truth to reports that a decision has been made about how and where to try the detainees, and there is no process in place to make that decision until his national security and legal teams are assembled."
Also on Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union took out a full page advertisement in the New York Times urging Obama to restore America's moral leadership and close the prison on day one of his administration.
Guantanamo now holds 255 of the total of 800 prisoners who have passed through its gates -- including some of those accused of organizing the September 11 attacks in 2001.
Labelled "enemy combatants" by a US military tribunal, the Guantanamo inmates are indefinitely detained without charges. They have only had the option of challenging their detention in a civilian court since June 2008.
The White House acknowledged last week that President George W. Bush will likely not close Guantanamo before handing over the White House to Obama on January 20.
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