United States President Barack Obama revealed that opening the Guantanamo Bay, or Gitmo, in Cuba when he first took office is one of his biggest regrets in his term.

The President spoke on Wednesday before a crowd in Cleveland just weeks after the Hillary Clinton email scandal and the investigation on the Benghazi incident ensued. Obama shared that not closing down the terrorist detention center is his biggest regret and if he could go back to his first day of being the President, he would have had it closed down.

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In his defense, he noted that he wanted to do that but at the time of his first day in office, there was a bipartisan agreement stipulating that the detention should be closed. But he pointed out that he thought clamping it down in a more deliberate way would be better.

Obama added that when he already wanted Gitmo to be closed down, the politics got a little rough and people got scared of the affectation of the area.

"The path of least resistance was to leave it open, even though it's not who we are as a country," he explained.

Closing down Gitmo was one of the platforms presented by Obama during his campaign back in 2008. The platform pushed through as he signed an executive order that the Guantanamo Bay detention center should be closed after a year he took office.

He then proposed that the detainees in the prison be transferred to Illinois, where there is a federal prison.

However, both Democrats and Republicans did not support his plan and the House even passed a law two years after that to prevent the prisoners from being transferred.

This detention center is used by terrorists all over the world in order to recruit extremists and jihadists that would join them in their militant exercises. 

TagsBarack Obama, Guantanamo Bay, Gitmo