WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison by Jan. 22 was followed by a series of mistakes and missteps by his administration that will delay the prison’s closure for months, according to a report from a policy organization with close ties to the White House.
Those mistakes have put the timetable months behind schedule and will push the prison’s closure well beyond the January deadline.
The White House declined to comment on the report.
The administration is expected to announce within days the results of its review of legal cases against the remaining detainees at Guantanamo, a review that originally was scheduled to be finished in July.
In his study, Ken Gude, a scholar at the Center for American Progress, said the White House made mistakes in implementing the high-profile Guantanamo policy from the very beginning.
Two task forces — one set up to study the case files of the more than 200 detainees still held at the prison and the other charged with examining the overall detention policy — fell behind almost from the start.
A key problem was that the Obama administration was hours old and didn’t have enough people to follow through quickly after Obama announced the closing plan. Those who were there couldn’t find needed files quickly.
“The task forces struggled right out of the gate,” Gude said in the report.
With little groundwork done to move some Guantanamo detainees to the U.S. or elsewhere, the Obama administration made what Gude called its “biggest mistake” in April by asking Congress for $80 million to finance the prison closing.
“Asking Congress for money for Guantanamo opened the door for conservatives on Capitol Hill, and the Obama administration was caught completely off guard when they began aggressively pushing back against the funding,” Gude said in his report.
Gude called the backlash “ridiculous” because it was based on the implied argument that the country’s maximum security prisons couldn’t hold terrorists transferred from Guantanamo and that the closing of Guantanamo thus would endanger Americans.
