'Gitmo Forever'?

[joeybee12]

President Obama's decision to suspend sending any detainees being held in the Guantánamo Bay detention facility back to Yemen was "politically, a no-brainer," a senior administration official tells NEWSWEEK.

But the move will do more than complicate Obama's commitment to shut down the base: it has raised new questions about whether the facility will be shuttered at all, at least in the first term of Obama's presidency.

"I'm beginning to think that Guantánamo is not ever going to be closed," says John Bellinger, the top State Department lawyer under former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and a persistent advocate of shutting down the facility. Given the current political obstacles, "I would bet some money that it's not going to get closed in the Obama presidency."

"To some extent, I think the administration has blown it," adds Marc Falkoff, a lawyer who represents some of the Yemeni detainees at Gitmo. "It has delayed, and they've gotten themselves into a reactive state and you can't get anything done when you're reacting to political winds . . . It looks like Guantánamo will be around for the foreseeable future."

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2010/01/06/guantanamo-is-not-ever-going-to-be-closed.aspx

[cherokeeprogressive]

1. Gitmo closing per President Obama's Executive Order: T- 14 days and counting. Woohoo!

Oh, wait...

[tabatha]

2. Did you not hear Obama's press briefing ?????????

He said that the decision not to send any detainees to Yemen for a while, WILL NOT STOP HIS PLANS to CLOSE GITMO!!!

[Llewlladdwr]

3. I also heard...

Obama promise that the entire health care debate would be broadcast on C-SPAN.

The more things change....

[tabatha]

4. He did not say "entire".

[joeybee12]

5. And I also heard NAFTA needed to be changed...DADT had to go...

...I may be getting older, but I know I'm not hard of hearing yet.