The Center for American Progress has released a white paper calling on the administration to establish a new deadline for closing the detention facility at Gitmo now that it’s clear the administration has no hope of meeting the original January deadline. The report recommends:
So is this an administration trial balloon to prepare the left for the inevitable? Perhaps. There are certainly other indications that the report is meant to take the temperature of the president’s liberal base, including a recommendation that all detainees who will not be tried in federal courts be moved to the military prison at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Bagram is already being set up as the next battlefield in the left’s crusade for terrorist rights — the administration will now have a chance to capitulate to the ACLU without ever having made the recommendation in the first place. Still there are obvious problems with this report, not least of which is how ridiculous it would be for this administration to set another deadline after the first deadline became such a deep source of embarrassment for those involved. Go back and read the Washington Post‘s account of how that first deadline came to pass:
Craig has since been taken off the Gitmo portfolio — it seems unlikely that his successor will opt to make the very same mistake that earned Craig his latest “promotion.” But it is amusing that the report urges the administration to also release a plan this time in tandem with the announcement of a deadline. So CAP is suggesting that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea for Obama to offer a bold pronouncement on the fate of Guantanamo, and to take credit for closing it, before studying the issue and examining the alternatives?
