Closing the military prison at Guantanamo Bay turns out to be not so easy after all:
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.
Even before the inauguration, President Obama’s top advisers settled on a course of action they were counseled against: announcing that they would close the facility within one year. Today, officials are acknowledging that they will be hard-pressed to meet that goal.
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 at the prison. But senior advisers privately acknowledge not devising a concrete plan for where to move the detainees and mishandling Congress.
Which is exactly what the Bush administration tried to tell them:
Before the election, Craig met privately with a group of top national security lawyers who had served in Democratic and Republican administrations to discuss Guantanamo Bay. During the transition, he met with members of the outgoing administration, some of whom warned him against issuing a deadline to close the facility without first finding alternative locations for the prisoners. . .
“The entire civil service counseled him not to set a deadline” to close Guantanamo, according to one senior government lawyer.
They had no plan. Nevertheless, the president and White House counsel decided that if they merely set a deadline, it would magically ensure that they would have a plan when the time came.
Good intentions do not constitute a policy.
(Via Instapundit.)
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