President Obama directly acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay will not close by the January deadline he set, but he said he hoped to still achieve that goal sometime next year.

Obama refused, however, to set a new deadline.

In an interview in the Chinese capital with Major Garrett of Fox News, Obama said he was “not disappointed” that the Guantanamo deadline had slipped, saying he “knew this was going to be hard.”

“People, I think understandably, are fearful after a lot of years where they were told that Guantanamo was critical to keep terrorists out,” Obama said. Closing the facility, he added, is “also just technically hard.”

As Marc Ambinder and Spencer point out, one of the questions that remains is what the administration plans to do with the dozens of detainees it deems too dangerous to release, but who “cannot be prosecuted because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material.”

This post has been updated.

Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be tried in federal court or military commissions. About 90 others have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement in a third country, and about 75 more have been deemed too dangerous to release but cannot be prosecuted because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material.

My emphasis. As Marc writes, that sounds a lot like the administration will just simply hold them in legal limbo, as per the so-called “Fifth Category” of detentions outlined by President Obama in his May speech at the National Archives. Adam Serwer wrote a great piece on how that category of detainees has roiled the civil liberties community.

Now, the Obama administration has subsequently stated that it’s not going to seek any additional authority from Congress for such preventive detention. But that doesn’t solve the problem of what becomes of those detainees. Will the courts ultimately decide that the administration doesn’t, in fact, have the power to hold them without charge? And where will they be held if Guantanamo is to close? After all, if they’re moved into the United States, the courts will almost certainly exercise jurisdiction over them.

A possible clue comes in a recent and widely discussed report from Ken Gude of the well-connected Center for American Progress. As my colleague Daphne Eviatar reported, Gude proposed simply sending the detainees to Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan — which would, in effect, create Neo-Guantanamo. There has been a lot of discussion over whether Gude was floating a trial balloon for the administration. We may soon see.

Update: Adam corrects me on what Gude was actually proposing:

Spencer Ackerman speculates that these detainees might be sent to Bagram. That was the Bush administration’s solution for avoiding judicial scrutiny of detention, but that approach is distinct from what Ken Gude and the Center for American Progress are proposing. The CAP proposal is to send those detainees who were captured in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area, and who have lost the first round of their habeas appeals, back to Bagram. Sending “fifth category” detainees captured in third countries would jeopardize the government’s position in appealing the judicial ruling that granted detainees captured in third countries and held at Bagram habeas rights.

Apologies to Ken; I appreciate the correction.

From a statement issued by the trio:

We are confident that the government can preserve national security without resorting to sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition that has served us effectively for over two centuries.

Civilian federal courts are the proper forum for terrorism cases. Civilian prisons are the safe, cost effective and appropriate venue to hold persons convicted in federal courts. Over the last two decades, federal courts constituted under Article III of the U.S. Constitution have proven capable of trying a wide array of terrorism cases, without sacrificing either national security or fair trial standards.

Likewise the federal prison system has proven itself fully capable of safely holding literally hundreds of convicted terrorists with no threat or danger to the surrounding community.

The scaremongering about these issues should stop.

Barr has a unique position in the conservative coalition–he left the GOP to run for president as a Libertarian candidate, but his campaign is not seen to have spoiled anything for the McCain-Palin ticket. Keene and Norquist remain conservative powerhouses, and the former played key role in making Doug Hoffman’s NY-23  campaign into a national cause.

Although the video (after the jump) doesn’t give any sense of why these men in particular were seized and detained by the United States and whether any of them did anything to attract U.S. government attention, the fact that all the men were eventually released without charge suggests, at least, that the Bush administration’s claim that they were among “the worst of the worst” didn’t turn out to be true.

The video also gives a strong sense of how and why the Guantanamo detention center, and the treatment of the men imprisoned there, ended up being a powerful recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.

Somehow, these documents had slipped through the cracks before, the administration acknowledged recently. That is, the Justice Department learned that they existed due to references to them in court filings made during the Bush administration. But Obama Justice officials just couldn’t find them. (The government’s detailed explanation of how this all happened can be found here.) The documents were apparently discovered in September, according to the government’s court filing, and sent to the CIA and other agencies for review. Depending on whether the contents turn out to be classified or can otherwise be held under the FOIA, we may see more torture-related documents released Friday.

The Standish City Council unanimously approved a resolution targeting President Barack Obama and federal authorities with one message: Send us your prisoners.

The city is staring down the short end of a deadline imposed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who has ordered the maximum security prison in this tiny town in Arenac County to shut down at the end of October. Officials from the town of 1,200 residents say the loss of the 350 jobs provided by the prison, as well as the sewer and water bills that were expected to keep the city’s water system functional, would economically devastate the community here.

So, the council passed a resolution on Monday telling the Obama administration to please send them prisoners, any prisoners, even the terror suspects from Guantanamo Bay, just keep the prison open. The resolution passed Monday night was originally slated for a vote weeks ago, but was tabled while city officials awaited word from the feds. No word came, but the council also used the time to expand the language to include all federal prisoners, not just those from Gitmo, Politico reports.

Shortly after taking office in January, President Obama ordered the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay closed by January 2010. Earlier this month, Attorney General Eric Holder raised the possibility that the administration may not meet that deadline.

The government had produced the transcripts with heavy redactions that largely concealed the detainees’ claims that they were abused and tortured during interrogations.

In August, the government argued to the court that it should be allowed to continue to redact the documents, because releasing the information in them would reveal “intelligence sources and methods” and might aid enemy “propaganda.”

Today, Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia refused the ACLU’s request that he review the documents privately in his chambers to determine if they should remain classified.

ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner said after the ruling that the court is allowing the government to suppress the evidence “not to protect any legitimate national security interest, but to protect current and former government officials from accountability.”

He added that the records requested are important because they would provide “critical missing information about how the CIA’s torture program was actually carried out and whether interrogators followed, or exceeded, Justice Department legal guidance that purported to authorize brutal interrogations.”

Wizner said the ACLU would appeal today’s ruling.

The provision was proposed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Ct.), as Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News explains, specifically “to thwart a successful FOIA lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union” which wants the government to turn over photos documenting abuse of detainees in U.S. military custody.  I wrote about the bill and its progress last week here. Although a federal appeals court ruled last year that the government must produce those unclassified photos under the Freedom of Information Act, the government has refused, and filed a petition to the Supreme Court for review.

The Supreme Court hasn’t yet decided whether it will hear the case, though, and given that Congress may resolve the matter by hiding the unclassified photographs with this legislation, Solicitor General Elena Kagan last week asked the court to put off deciding, since it looks like Congress is prepared to decide the matter — and conceal the photographs — on its own.

“From an open government point of view, it is dismaying that Congress would intervene to alter the outcome of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act proceeding,” writes Aftergood in his blog, which has done a terrific job of exposing the government’s efforts to hide what’s supposed to be public information. Aftergood adds that the move reveals Congress doesn’t have much confidence in its own Freedom of Information Act, the federal courts interpreting it, or the principles behind it, if it feels the need to exempt this specific set of photos from the law’s purview.

On the other hand, he notes that it could be worse: the Supreme Court could have taken the case and upheld the Obama administration’s right to exempt the photos “simply because they may pose an unspecified danger to unspecified persons.” “Such a Supreme Court ruling would have left a gaping hole in the Freedom of Information Act even larger than what the Obama Administration and Congress have now created,” writes Aftergood.

Or, of course, the Supreme Court might have just done its job, and recognized, as the two lower courts who’ve heard this case did, that unclassified documents can’t be concealed based simply on the executive’s fear that exposing government wrongdoing will incite anger at the United States and endanger national security. After all, if preventing anger at the United States were a legitimate reason to conceal unclassified information about the government, then there would be considerably less Information left for the Act to protect.