Swamp: Reports about the complexities that President-elect Obama will have to unknot in order to redeem his promise to close Guantanamo probably help explain why the Bush Administration's initial approach to the prisoners was to essentially lock them up and throw away the key.
Of course, the Constitution doesn't say the nation's chief executive is allowed to sidestep the laws of the land to avoid solving difficult problems which is why we're arguably where we're at now.
The Obama plan which hasn't been finalized amounts to releasing some prisoners outright and bringing the rest to the U.S. where they would either be tried in regular courts or special ones created to deal with those cases involving classified material.
The plan is likely to be controversial with criticism already coming from the left and right.
Obama team determined to find a way:
At the White House, spokeswoman Dana Perino said Monday that President Bush has faced many challenges in trying to close the prison.
"We've tried very hard to explain to people how complicated it is. When you pick up people off the battlefield that have a terrorist background, it's not just so easy to let them go," Perino said. "These issues are complicated, and we have put forward a process that we think would work in order to put them on trial through military tribunals."
But Obama has been critical of that process and his legal advisers said finding an alternative will be a top priority. One of those advisers, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, acknowledges that bringing detainees to the U.S. would be controversial but said it could be accomplished.
"I think the answer is going to be, they can be as securely guarded on U.S. soil as anywhere else," Tribe said. "We can't put people in a dungeon forever without processing whether they deserve to be there."
