Carol Rosenberg has a great piece drawing on some new WikiLeaks cables to show how the U.S. refusal to take any Gitmo detainees hampered the administration's ability to resettle others abroad:
Many factors worked to thwart Obama's plans to close the camps -- from a tangled bureaucracy to fears that released detainees would become terrorists. But Congress' prohibition on resettling any of the detainees in the United States hamstrung the administration's global search for countries willing to take the captives in.
The U.S. refusal to take in the captives ``comes up all the time,'' acknowledged a senior Obama administration official of U.S. efforts to find homes for released detainees.
``Were we willing to take a couple of detainees ourselves, it would've made the job of moving detainees out of Guantánamo significantly easier,'' said the official, who agreed to speak only anonymously because of the delicacy of the diplomacy.
The most successful talking point against Guantanamo was the most absurd -- the idea that terror detainees at Gitmo were Muslim supervillains who would easily break out of a supermax prison and then rampage across the heartland.
