In a 10-paragraph January 11 Battleland blog post marking the 10th anniversary of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, Time magazine's Mark Thompson called the prison "the persistent headache that pretty much all Americans would like to go away."
Thompson failed to back up the claim with polling data, however, which actually runs squarely against his claim.
A CBS News poll from November 2011 shows a full 52 percent of Americans want Gitmo to remain open. A 2010 poll by CNN found 60 percent of Americans favor keeping the prison open.
"President Obama’s pledge to shut down the prison within a year of taking office passed two years ago," Thompson complained, and "It has been a year since any of the remaining 171 detainees left, because of congressional bars on bringing them to the U.S., and the willingness of the U.S. government to sanction indefinite detention."
"Is the White House any closer to closing Gitmo today than it was on January 20, 2009, the day Obama became President?" Thompson rhetorically asked in his penultimate paragraph before providing what he saw as the White House's unsatisfactory answer, "'This this is a process that faces obstacles that we’re all aware of,' Carney said Monday when he was asked, 'and we will continue to work through it.'"
"That’s White House-speak for don’t count on it," Thompson groused.
