Guantanamo Bay Will Close Later Than Expected

Guantanamo BayObama made a lot of campaign promises, from getting troops out of Iraq to working for healthcare reform to bring affordable health care to all people. Another that he made was to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, commonly known as Gitmo. The U.S. naval base detention center was established by the Bush administration in 2002. Used as the holding-place for terrorism suspects, initially for suspects arrested after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Gitmo has been controversial for years owing to allegations of torture and prisoner mistreatment by U.S. authorities.

It is the source of much attention by liberal groups and human rights advocates around the world- closing Gitmo is seen as a necessary gesture by the U.S. to help repair our image around the world. I don’t know the inner workings of what it takes to open or close a prison, especially this well-known and high profile one, but what I do know is that the January 22 deadline for closure that the Obama administration set has been in place for a while and it doesn’t strike me as a particularly difficult goal. According to Reuters, a collection of legal, political and diplomatic issues with the detainees there have made closing Gitmo difficult.

Where will the detainees go? Is the big issue. Those who are held there often cannot return to their home country and cannot come to the U.S., leaving them in without a home or place to go. Some detainees will be moved to detention centers in the U.S. when a suitable facility can be found. There are still 223 detainees at Gitmo.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told ABC that "It's going to be tough" to close Guantanamo by the January 22 deadline.

"I actually was one of those who said we should (set a deadline) because I know enough from being around this town that if you don't put a deadline on something, you'll never move the bureaucracy. But I also said and then if we find we can't get it done by that time but we have a good plan, then you're in a position to say it's going to take us a little longer but we are moving in the direction of implementing the policy that the president set.”

Nice, Mr. Gates. So you need more time- ok. It’s not the first deadline that Washington has set that it hasn’t been able to keep to, you know? Deciding not to close Guantanamo at all would raise eyebrows- taking longer than expected to close a prison for international terrorism suspects seems pretty reasonable.

This was one of the things that Obama and McCain actually agreed on during their campaigns. McCain said:

"We should continue to work toward the closure of Guantanamo Bay because of the image it has in the world of brutality. It harms our image very badly."

Fair enough- it sounds like the U.S. will not really change what we are doing, just do it in a different place. Closing Guantanamo, while happening slower than expected, is going to happen- and we can use all the public relations we can get.