Free Republic

President Barack Obama is moving ahead with his push to close the Guantanamo Bay prison despite the uproar over the exchange of five Taliban prisoners for a captured American soldier, an administration official said Thursday. The government has been working to reduce a backlog of prisoners already approved after a security review for transfer to their homeland or repatriation elsewhere, the official told reporters. The official said a “significant number” of prisoners are on their way toward release, but he declined to say precisely how many or when they would leave Guantanamo. The remarks were made on condition of anonymity...

Last week, President Obama's advisers told reporters that they'd soon recommend that the president propose a "deal" with Congress on the Guantanamo Bay detainees. Obama would drop his insistence that the detainees be tried in civilian courts and instead let them be tried in military tribunals in exchange for Congress allowing (and funding) the closing of the Gitmo facility and the moving of the detainees to US prisons. Only in Washington could bureaucrats hatch such a deal to trade one deeply unpopular proposal for another. Trying Guantanamo detainees in America and moving them to US prisons are indefensible and dangerous...