GOP Pegs Hopes to Gitmo [View All]

[babylonsister]

Guantánamo Closing Hands Republicans a Wedge Issue

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: May 23, 2009


WASHINGTON — If there was one thing both presidential candidates agreed on last fall, it was the need to close the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But almost as soon as President Obama took office and ordered the camp shuttered within a year, Congressional Republicans — including his former opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona — saw a singular political opportunity.

“Where are we going to send them?” Mr. McCain said in an interview on Fox News, just days after the inauguration. “That decision I would have made before I’d announced the closure.” Referring to the not-in-my-back-yard uproar over the proposed nuclear waste site in Nevada, he added: “You think Yucca Mountain is a Nimby problem? Wait until you see this one.”

Now the consensus from the campaign trail has dissolved, leaving Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike at odds with the White House. The conflagration has been fanned by the determined focus of Republican leaders, fed by the alarms of talk-show populists and aided by the miscalculation of a new president who set a date for a closing without announcing a detailed plan for the inmates. The debate now threatens to make it much harder for Mr. Obama to keep his campaign promise.

Armed with polling data that show a narrow majority of support for keeping the prison open and deep fear about the detainees, Republicans in Congress started laying plans even before the inauguration to make the debate over Guantánamo Bay a question of local community safety instead of one about national character and principles.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/us/politics/24gitmo.html?ref=todayspaper