President Barack Obama is laying down final plans to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in line with the commitment he made from the beginning of his presidency.
According to
The New York Times, just 127 prisoners remain at Guantánamo, a decrease from the high in 2003 of 680 detainees who had been rounded up as terrorist suspects in the aftermath of the September 2011 attacks.
The goal is to bring the final total down to between 60 and 80 people.
"If the president doesn't succeed in making substantial steps in closing Gitmo now, it will have a very severe impact on his legacy," J. Wells Dixon, senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented Guantánamo prisoners, told the Times.
In the next two weeks, the Pentagon is expected to release two more groups of prisoners. After that, the president is expected to rely on his nominee for Defense Secretary, Ashton Carter, to accelerate the releases.
The moves come after years of delays and bureaucratic infighting that saw the efforts all but halted between 2009 and 2013. The president then announced he was renewing the effort, the Times reported.
Numerous prisoner releases were made during 2014.
"I can tell you that in the world of Gitmo transfers and our conversations with foreign governments, momentum matters," Ian Moss, State Department spokesman for Guantánamo issues, told the Times.
"We are aggressively reaching out to a wide variety of countries. The support of our friends and allies is critical to achieving our goal of reducing the detainee population and ultimately closing the detention facility."
The Pentagon's special envoy for the Guantánamo prison told the Times that the Defense Department "continues to aggressively pursue the transfer" of low-level detainees and added that the potential threat of the detainees is thoroughly considered before transfers are made.
Most of the detainees were originally from Yemen. The administration had a moratorium on returning prisoners to the country due to political unrest.
Instead it began transferring Yemenis to other countries, the Times reported.