Why hasn't Barack Obama closed the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay?

[TheKentuckian]

49. He doesn't have the power now, except on a Constitutional basis that he is hard pressed

to argue since he signed the very bill that now ties his hands into law.

I think he really wanted to be able to say he closed it without really doing it and lots of Democrats seem to agree with that because they hang on Congress refusing to fund Gitmo North as the reason Gitmo is still open, when folks that actually cared about it being closed aren't going to lose the scent because of relocating the facility and slapping a new name on a building.

The point was never the location of the gulag, how that got conflated with closing the facility and placing those who we could on trial and releasing those we had no case against, I don't know other than a willfull effort to conflate the two in hindsight.

I don't think he claims the power now, in fact he just remains silent. He did have the power and elected not to use it, instead he sought a politically safe middle ground and got left standing alone. He signed away such power save a constitutional crisis level battle, asserting executive authority and flipping off Congress.

Of course he might also choose to cede to Congress entirely and bog the institution up for years and years by insisting on an appropriations bill for every transfer, release, and court proceeding in an effort to make a mockery of their overreach here.