Gates: U.S. 'stuck' in Guantanamo

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Efforts to close the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are at "a standstill," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a Senate subcommittee Tuesday.

An Army soldier stands guard at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba.

"The brutally frank answer is that we're stuck, and we're stuck in several ways," Gates told the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Human rights groups have long called for the facility to be closed, alleging that detainees endure numerous human rights violations amounting to torture.

CIA chief Michael Hayden admitted this year that the agency had used waterboarding, a controversial technique that simulates drowning, on three Guantanamo detainees.

Gates said that he favors closing the detention center, which currently holds about 270 detainees, but that a number of problems stand in the way.

For one, Gates said, there are about 70 detainees ready for release whose home governments either will not accept them or may free them after they return.

He referred to former Guantanamo detainee Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi, who killed himself in a suicide attack last month in Mosul, Iraq, after being released from Guantanamo in 2005.

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