Even before the inauguration, President Obama’s top advisers settled on a course of action they were counseled against: announcing that they would close the facility within one year. Today, officials are acknowledging that they will be hard-pressed to meet that goal.

The White House has faltered in part because of the legal, political and diplomatic complexities involved in determining what to do with more than 200 terrorism suspects incarcerated at the prison. But senior advisers privately acknowledge failing to devise a concrete plan for where to move the detainees and mishandling Congress…

“It seemed like a bold move at the time, to lay out a time frame that to us seemed sufficient to meet the goal,” one senior official said. “In retrospect, it invited a fight with the Hill and left us constantly looking at the clock.”

“The entire civil service counseled him not to set a deadline” to close Guantanamo, according to one senior government lawyer…

“We assumed that for each detainee there was going to be a file somewhere,” one senior administration official said. “Some of the intelligence files were not even organized by detainee. You had to go into a mainframe database and search the name of the detainee to put together a file. So there were weeks, if not months, of putting together the files of detainees that then could be reviewed by the fresh eyes that we wanted.”