Obama said he'll close Guantánamo, but will he?

We heard his opaque order the other day, a plan to close down Guantánamo by a year from now, with all the details to be worked out later. That sounded spurious to me from the first minute of this ticking-down year, and I expected the dribbling out of news of complicating, newly discovered circumstances. The dribble starts here:

President Obama's plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials -- barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees -- discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.

No comprehensive files? Bush screwed it up!

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is "scattered throughout the executive branch," a senior administration official said.

Oh! The mismanagement! The files are not all in one place!

The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.

So, first, we have to get all the files in one place, folks, and that's going to take months, after which point we will begin to work on a plan for something to do with the detainees other than to keep them at Guantánamo.

After promising quick solutions, one former senior official said, the Obama administration is now "backpedaling and trying to buy time" by blaming its predecessor. Unless political appointees decide to overrule the recommendations of the career bureaucrats handling the issue under both administrations, he predicted, the new review will reach the same conclusion as the last: that most of the detainees can be neither released nor easily tried in this country.

"All but about 60 who have been approved for release," assuming countries can be found to accept them, "are either high-level al-Qaeda people responsible for 9/11 or bombings, or were high-level Taliban or al-Qaeda facilitators or money people"....

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