That Word Does Not Mean What You Think It Means

So, yesterday, when I was wondering what Obama meant by "closing Gitmo his first week" the NY Times has been kind enough to provide the answer.

President-elect Barack Obama plans to issue an executive order on his first full day in office directing the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, people briefed by Obama transition officials said Monday.

But experts say it is likely to take many months, perhaps as long as a year, to empty the prison that has drawn international criticism since it received its first prisoners seven years ago this week. One transition official said the new administration expected that it would take several months to transfer some of the remaining 248 prisoners to other countries, decide how to try suspects and deal with the many other legal challenges posed by closing the camp.

So really, "closing Gitmo" is much more like "leaving Iraq"or "fixing the economy". It's still the right thing to do, of course, but we still have a long way to go.

Perhaps it's time to divide things into "stuff Obama will complete before his first term" and "stuff that won't be completed by then". Gitmo seems to fall into category one.

For now.

[UPDATE] Via Kevin Drum, Hilzoy points out Obama can still do plenty of stuff NOW to show the world a good faith effort on dealing with the Gitmo situation, and puts succinctly my own dilemma with the President-Elect (emphasis mine)

The problem, of course, is that it's hard to know whether or not they are doing this as fast as possible. Shortly after the election, I wrote that liberals were going to be faced with the question how much to trust Obama. This is the sort of case I had in mind: when May rolls around, if some detainees are still in Guantanamo, we will need to decide whether we think that that's because the administration is dragging its feet, or because deciding what to do with some detainees is just difficult.

Luckily, the Obama administration can help us out here, by doing a couple of things that would clearly demonstrate good faith, and that the administration could do by fiat. First, it could suspend ongoing trials under the existing system of military commissions. That system is a joke. There is no reason to go on using it.

Second, it could accept the Uighurs into the United States. The Uighur detainees at Guantanamo have been found not to be enemy combatants. They have never taken up arms against the United States. The Uighur community in DC is prepared to help them out, as are religious communities in DC and Tallahassee. A judge has ordered them to be released into this country. There is no earthly reason not to do so; after holding them for seven years, it's the least we can do. (In my opinion, we should also offer residence here to the five Uighurs in Albania.)

This would also be very helpful in persuading other countries to take detainees. Sometimes, there are reasons to think that a detainee who cannot go back to his country should be placed in a third country rather than here. But this is very unlikely to be true in all cases, and I would not for a moment blame any third country who wondered why it should be expected to accept detainees when we, who created this whole mess, are not. Starting off by immediately offering the Uighurs residence in the US would go a long way towards solving this problem.

In general, though, my main criterion for assessing the Obama administration's progress on this front after a hundred days or so will be how many detainees they have either released or charged. If Guantanamo is still "open" because there are, say, eight remaining detainees whose cases are particularly intractable, that will be one thing. If most of them are still there, that will be quite another.

Again, Obama's got options here as the President, with a Congress controlled by his own party. He needs to exercise them in a way that shows both competence and compassion. It's not that Obama is closing Gitmo that matters...it's how he does it.