Obama’s Gitmo blame game – Politico (10/6/09):

Greg Craig, the top in-house lawyer for President Barack Obama, is getting the blame for botching the strategy to shut down Guantanamo Bay prison by January — so much so that he’s expected to leave the White House in short order.

But sources familiar with the process believe Craig is being set-up as the fall guy and say the blame for missing the deadline extends well beyond him.

Ya think?

[Ken] Gude had advocated an 18-month timeline to “build in a cushion” but he said the only real mistakes the White House made involved failing to anticipate the resistance in Congress – particularly surrounding the Senate’s sharp rejection of Obama’s $80 million request to close Gitmo.

“They made that request without much supporting information and opened the door for Republicans in Congress to make it a Congressional issue and they did it very successfully,” Gude said. “The White House didn’t have a plan to support Democrats who were willing to back up their proposal and it all fell apart.”

Craig’s backers contend that, if that was the White House’s key misjudgment, other top officials share responsibility for the breakdown.

“It seems very unlikely to me that Greg Craig, by himself, engineered a DOD appropriations request,” one lawyer close to Craig said.

Imagine that, the White House didn’t have a plan for Democrats and folded under Republican pressure. Unique!

The U.S. defense budget including off-balance-sheet spending for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but excluding black ops is between $859 billion and $1.16 trillion. The idea that Obama couldn’t have shifted less than one hundredth of 1% of military spending to funding the Guantanamo closure is beyond absurd. Putting the blame on Craig, one of his earliest supporters, and a Clinton-defector in the bargain, is just another example of the political cowardice that plagues Obama.