Not So Fast...

So closing Gitmo is harder than Team Obama thought. Who knew?

Via Memeorandum, the Washington Post digs into the problems with closing the facility, and as things would have it, it's George Bush's fault.

Well, there's a bit more to it than that, but this administration is so accustomed to blaming Bush for everything that this one just fell in line. The Post quotes "senior administration officials" who say that the detainee files were such a mess that Team Obama couldn't properly review them, explaining it this way:

"The central roadblock during those early months was the condition of the detainee files, which had been left in disarray by the previous administration. 'We assumed that for each detainee there was going to be a file somewhere,' one senior administration official said. 'Some of the intelligence files were not even organized by detainee. You had to go into a mainframe database and search the name of the detainee to put together a file. So there were weeks, if not months, of putting together the files of detainees that then could be reviewed by the fresh eyes that we wanted.'"

And to complicate matters even further, Americans didn't want the detainees moved into their neighborhoods, American support for closing the place plummeted, lawmakers balked, and the Senate voted overwhelmingly not to fund the closing operation. So what did Team Obama do? What else but "sneak" four Uighurs into Bermuda causing a diplomatic rift with Britain.

George Stephanopoulos quotes "an official" who says " “the President’s not going to sacrifice national security for the sake of the deadline.” Well we can be thankful for that, but isn't that what we all were saying before the inauguration when he announced the deadline?

I guess it's all part of Obama's on-the-job training for a job he never had the experience or the background for.