Obama Administration Seems to Give Up on Closing Guantanamo I'm sure you've had one of those moments when you hear that a celebrity or other public figure has just died and you think, "Really? He was still alive? I had one of those moments today when I read this Charlie Savage article about the Obama administration shutting down the office at the State Department that was working on closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay. That program was still alive? I thought the president gave up on keeping his promise to close Guantánamo a long time ago, but some poor soul was coming to work every day at Foggy Bottom acting as though that still might happen? According to a notice that was distributed internally at the State Department, Daniel Fried, the special envoy for Guantánamo, is being reassigned and no one will take over his job, which focused on repatriating or resettling detainees currently held at Guantánamo - far too many of them on flimsy or non-existent evidence. (Mr. Fried's new assignment is to coordinate sanctions policy, including those imposed on Iran and Syria. Who'd this guy rub the wrong way?) Mr. Obama promised to shut down Guantánamo during the 2008 campaign, and one of his first acts as president was to sign an order mandating its closure. But it never happened. After his administration tried to move Khalid Sheikh Mohamed to the United States for trial in a federal court, Congress prohibited the use of Defense Department funds to move any Guantánamo detainee to the United States for prosecution. As Mr. Savage explained, Mr. Fried spent several years "overseeing the repatriation of low-level detainees and persuading other countries to resettle detainees who had been cleared for release but who could not be sent home." But Congress has put increasing restrictions on that process. A provision in last year's military budget went so far as to ban the use of federal funds for repatriating prisoners who agreed to plead guilty in return for release. Mr. Obama threatened to veto that bill, but instead he signed it and issued a statement saying that he still had constitutional power to override such restrictions. As Mr. Savage put it, rather delicately: "Mr. Obama's intentions were not clear, however, even to internal administration officials." That puts them on equal footing with the rest of us.