Over 20 years later, Guantanamo is still here. While most of the detainees are surely there for a reason, due process has not been observed. This will be a blemish on US history for a long time.
When Obama visited Sweden a long time ago I protested against Guantanamo by calling for him to be sent to the International Court of Justice in Haag.
When I explained why people just didn't think it was a very big deal. Most people, even American tourists, though he was trying to close Gitmo, which he was not. He was trying to move it to mainland US and continue operations there.
Guantanamo Bay was opened in 2002 and Obama reduced the number of inmates there by an order of magnitude.
As an American, my general view of Obama is that he was exceptionally good at doing good while working within the system.
1. The system would not let him close Guantanamo (the military wanted it open, congress blocked him from moving inmates), so he shrank it as much as possible.
2. The healthcare system would never allow single-payer universal healthcare, so he implemented a healthcare marketplace for individual coverage to reduce the number of uninsured.
3. The 2008 global financial crisis (still ongoing during his first term) threatened to collapse the US financial system. He prioritized stabilizing the financial markets with bailouts at the cost of creating moral hazard for the future.
4. He relied heavily on drone strikes in the middle east, but did so in order to limit causalities of American soldiers, which is a reasonable tradeoff of a democratically elected leader.
All in all, he was a remarkably effective pragmatist.
He managed to fudge a largeish consensus to close Gitmo. When he became president, the former president and McCain had voiced will to close it
He could have let them be tried in civilian courts, but chose not to do so because some of the inmates had evidence against them "tainted by torture" and that they were better held in indefinite detention.
If we learned anything from interviews with officials after Obama's presidency was that he, after the first failures in 2008-2009, never considered any alternatives to indefinite detention in "Gitmo North, Illinois".
Point 2-4 has nothing to do with my first points. On point 2 I would say he is the only president in recent times that actually cared about health care decency. In a recent comment here in HN regarding the Mr. beast video with him paying people's cataract surgerys I said that USA is the richest country in the world, yet some people can't afford not to be blind. Why this doesn't upset more democrats and even republicans is completely beyond me.
And regarding point 4 some people argued that the increasing lethality of the war on terror under Obama was due to a reluctance to detain people...
As you might have guessed I stand quite a bit to the left compared to mainstream American politics. I still prefer Obama to all other recent and not so recent presidents.
Why do you think most of the detainees are surely there for a reason?
There might actually be a terrorist in there, who knows, but it seems guantanamo prisoners mostly commited crimes like 'looking at an invading American in a funny way' or 'not being liked by their neighbours'.
When I explained why people just didn't think it was a very big deal. Most people, even American tourists, though he was trying to close Gitmo, which he was not. He was trying to move it to mainland US and continue operations there.