Odama Gitmo Deadline as Firm as his Other Promises

Ready day one, well no one forced Obama to call for its closing without a plan and we have gotten the Chinese Water torture of leaks as his admin has slowly but surely backed away from his deadline

With four months left to meet its self-imposed deadline for closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration is working to recover from missteps that have put officials behind schedule and left them struggling to win the cooperation of Congress.

Even before the inauguration, President Obama's top advisers settled on a course of action they were counseled against: announcing that they would close the facility within one year. Today, officials are acknowledging that they will be hard-pressed to meet that goal.

The White House has faltered in part because of the legal, political and diplomatic complexities involved in determining what to do with more than 200 terrorism suspects at the prison. But senior advisers privately acknowledge not devising a concrete plan for where to move the detainees and mishandling Congress.

To address these setbacks, the administration has shifted its leadership team on the issue. White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig, who initially guided the effort to close the prison and who was an advocate of setting the deadline, is no longer in charge of the project, two senior administration officials said this week.

Craig said Thursday that some of his early assumptions were based on miscalculations, in part because Bush administration officials and senior Republicans in Congress had spoken publicly about closing the facility. "I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives," he said.

It appears Craig will be made the fall guy and punted off as a Federal judge or some other diplomatic assignment as a booby prize. This leaves the admin with one Gitmo promise still unbroken, the admission that it will remain open as the primary anti-terror detention facility in the Western Hemisphere. By the way doesn't this seem odd:

In May, one of the senior officials said, Obama tapped Pete Rouse -- a top adviser and former congressional aide who is not an expert on national security but is often called in to fix significant problems -- to oversee the process. Senior adviser David Axelrod and deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer were brought in to craft a more effective message around detainee policy, the official said.

Isn't this typical, the admin taking a serious issues and viewing merely as a political distraction to be handled rather then a life and death issue, couple that with Afghanistan and you get the impression these guys aren't all that serious about the war on terror.