Gitmo survives: Obama's detainees.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Citings - Issues surrounding Barack Obama and the operations at Guantanamo Bay - Brief article

ON JANUARY 22, 2009, two days after his inauguration, President Barack Obama signed an executive order requiring that the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be closed within a year. He seemed to be swiftly delivering on a campaign promise to shut down the facility, an international symbol of the legal limbo to which the Bush administration consigned suspected terrorists and other "enemy combatants." But January 22, 2010, came and went, and Guantanamo is still open for business.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Obama attributed the delay to congressional resistance and the difficulty of deciding what to do with the remaining 200 or so detainees. The New York Times reports that "the Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly So detainees ... because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too...