By Michael O'Brien, Political Reporter, NBC News
President Barack Obama cautioned Tuesday against rushing headlong to
take action against Syria’s ruling regime, cautioning that his
administration must gather more evidence before involving itself in that
country’s civil war. The president said that while evidence
suggested that chemical weapons were used in Syria – thereby crossing
the “red line” Obama had established in the Syrian conflict – more
details were needed, namely about who used those weapons, and when.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP
President
Barack Obama arrives to answers questions during his new conference in
the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on Tuesday, April 30,
2013.
“When I am making decisions about America’s
national security and the potential for taking additional action in
response to chemical weapons use, I’ve got to make sure I’ve got the
facts,” Obama said at his first press conference in two months. "And if we end up rushing to judgment without hard, effective
evidence, then we can find ourselves in a position where we can't
mobilize the international community to support what we do."
The
situation in Syria and other issues of national security – a hunger
strike at the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and
the government's response to the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon
earlier this month – have dominated much of the president's agenda over
the past month. The hunger strike – the military said on Monday
that 100 of 166 detainees had participated in the strike protesting
conditions at Guantanamo Bay – prompted the president to renew his call
for closing the prison. While the president signed an order early in his
first term to shutter the facility, lawmakers in both parties have
stymied Obama's efforts to achieve that goal. "I continue to
believe that we’ve got to close Guantanamo. I think it is critical for
us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe,"
Obama said. "It is expensive, it is inefficient, it hurts us in terms
of our international standing, it lessens cooperation in terms of our
allies in counterterrorism efforts, it is a recruitment tool for
extremists. It needs to be closed." Moreover, the president
pledged to "go back at" the issue, adding that his administration was
reviewing ways to achieve its goal of closing the prison, perhaps by
returning to Congress for permission. The theme of international cooperation, though, recurred throughout Obama's remarks about these tricky foreign policy issues.President
Barack Obama expands on what his administration is doing in response to
reports that chemical weapons may have been used by the Syrian regime.The
president, for instance, stressed the need for the United States to act
in concert with international allies in response to the situation in
Syria, and said the U.S. and its partners were already “deeply invested”
in trying to find a solution to the situation in Syria. But Obama
was reluctant to specify what actions his administration might take.
“By ‘game-changer’ I mean that we would have to rethink the range of
options that are available to us,” he said. A bipartisan group of
lawmakers has expressed reluctance to making a U.S. military incursion
into Syria, though more hawkish Republicans have called for targeted
strikes to help cripple parts of the Syrian military and assist rebels
against the Assad regime. Obama also said he'd worked with Russian President Vladimir Putin on
the situation in Syria, but also the intelligence response to the April
15 bombings at the Boston Marathon. Amid questions about whether
the government failed to heed Russian intelligence warnings about the
radicalization of the suspects in the bombing, Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper ordered a review on Tuesday into the U.S.
government's handling of intelligence in the case. "When an event
like this happens, we want to go back and review every step that was
taken," the president explained. "We want to leave no stone unturned. We
want to see if, in fact, there's additional protocols and procedures
that could be put in place that would further improve and enhance our
ability to detect a potential attack."
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