Reprioritizing Gitmo

Since the President discovered the hard way that it's tough to close Gitmo when your own party is too scared to do it, it looks like that little promise is going down the drain for good.

When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them.

“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and supports the Illinois plan. He added that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration.

And Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who also supports shutting it, said the effort is “on life support and it’s unlikely to close any time soon.” He attributed the collapse to some fellow Republicans’ “demagoguery” and the administration’s poor planning and decision-making “paralysis.”

The White House insists it is still determined to shutter the prison. The administration argues that Guantánamo is a symbol in the Muslim world of past detainee abuses, citing military views that its continued operation helps terrorists.

“Our commanders have made clear that closing the detention facility at Guantánamo is a national security imperative, and the president remains committed to achieving that goal,” said a White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt.

Still, some senior officials say privately that the administration has done its part, including identifying the Illinois prison — an empty maximum-security center in Thomson, 150 miles west of Chicago — where the detainees could be held. They blame Congress for failing to execute that endgame.

“The president can’t just wave a magic wand to say that Gitmo will be closed,” said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking on a sensitive issue. 

Since Republicans can't help themselves and automatically play the fear card whenever possible and say that terrorists have super powers and will kill everyone you know if Gitmo is ever closed, it's hard to get things like that doen when the Village and Dems in Congress tkae them seriously.  After all, they've been trained to do so over the last seven years and it's hard to break.

Second, let's not forget that the Republicans are sworn to destroy this President and to oppose everything he does for the simple reason that he's a Democrat.  Despite the fact that reality would seem to dictate the Republicans have no credibility on terrorism after 9/11, Democrats still cower in fear every time a Republican says 9/11 and acts like Bush didn't fail to stop it from happening.

The Obama administration's mistake was underestimating the hatred the Republicans have for him, and the cowardice of his own party.