Hello and thanks for joining us. Today's topic: delays in closing the military detention facility at   Guantanamo Bay. With us to answer your questions is Brookings senior fellow Benjamin Wittes. Thanks for being here, Ben.

It was probably a mistake to announce a specific date for   the closure of Guantánamo without a detailed sense of how to handle the myriad issues the closure would necessarily raise. (Several of us were warning about the difficulty of the project early on.) That said, I don’t think it was a mistake to announce an intention to close the facility at the outset of the administration—and I think the deadline was a very forgivable error.

I think it’s pretty unlikely that Gitmo will remain open. Backing off the central promise to close it would be such a humiliating climb-down for the administration that I have to think the President’s people will do everything possible to make the closure happen. Whether it happens on time is a different matter.

The current delays have several distinct causes—all of them knowable and predictable in advance:

1)           Turns out it’s not so easy to resettle people one decides to release. Not a lot of countries are eager to resettle Guantánamo detainees, some of them cannot be sent to their home countries for fear of torture or other mistreatment, and Congress does not want them here.

2)           Figuring out how to bring to trial those you want to try for crimes is very hard.

3)           Nobody quite knows how to handle those the government does not believe it can put on trial (in either military commissions or federal courts) but also does not feel comfortable setting free.