A previous post: http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2009/06/27/obamas-second-thoughts-on-gitmo/
Hat tip to Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard.
With four months left to meet its self-imposed deadline for closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration is working to recover from missteps that have put officials behind schedule and left them struggling to win the cooperation of Congress….
The White House has faltered in part because of the legal, political and diplomatic complexities involved in determining what to do with more than 200 terrorism suspects incarcerated at the prison. But senior advisers privately acknowledge failing to devise a concrete plan for where to move the detainees and mishandling Congress.
To address these setbacks, the administration has shifted its leadership team on the issue. White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig, who initially guided the effort to close the prison and who was an advocate of setting the deadline, is no longer in charge of the project, two senior administration officials said this week.
Craig said Thursday that some of his early assumptions were based on miscalculations, in part because Bush administration officials and senior Republicans in Congress had spoken publicly about closing the facility. “I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives,” he said.
……Senior administration officials said the central roadblock during those early months was the condition of the detainee files, which had been left in disarray by the previous administration.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/24/AR2009092404893_2.html
More at The Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/09/friday_news_dump_comes_early.asp
In his feverish attempt to avert responsibility for the delay, Obama blames the Republicans, George W. Bush, the international community, and the American peoples’ opposition to closing the facility and bringing the Islamic thugs here. Craig’s statement that the “broad consensus” about keeping GITMO open, was that it ‘did damage to our national security objectives’, is patently false. The only “consensus” was on the far Left, who sympathizes with terrorists, in the first place.
If he had any guts at all, he’d admit that closing GITMO is a dangerous, stupid idea. The terrorists are right where they belong, but that won’t stop Obama from catering to anti-American ‘world opinion’.