US Senator Patrick Leahy claims that the United States should have shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba long ago.

HAVANA (Sputnik) —The United States should have shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba long ago, US Senator Patrick Leahy told Sputnik on Friday.

"Guantanamo should have been closed years ago," Leahy said of the US prison facility in Cuba.

Leahy explained that a "group of some very conservative members of Congress" have so far blocked US President Barack Obama from fully shuttering the prison despite his 2008 campaign promise to close the facility.

In the course of the renewed diplomatic relations between the US and Cuban governments, the US Navy base and prisoner detention center at Guantanamo Bay has been a contested issue.

In recent months, the Cubanthis claim, and implicitly questioning anything such groups did, is being made a criminal offense.

Law 2558, the ban on propaganda of “Communist and National Socialist Regimes” makes it a criminal offense to deny, “including in the media, the criminal character of the communist totalitarian regime of 1917-1991 in Ukraine.”

The potential consequences of both these laws are disturbing. Not only would it be a crime to question the legitimacy of an organization (UPA) that slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles in one of the most heinous acts of ethnic cleansing in the history of Ukraine, but also it would exempt from criticism the OUN, one of the most extreme political groups in Western Ukraine between the wars, and one which collaborated with Nazi Germany at the outset of the