the house that you can really move this. the president tried pretty hard, i thought, and is really, like, a loss 90-6 is hard to cover from. i agree with perry. it s definitely true you had the democrats in there making the same point, basically they didn t want to see detainees come to the u.s. in that respect, the president was very much boxed in. the problem, though, goes beyond the debate as it stood. i think what the president has to do is outline a post-9/11 detention policy that deals with what mr. johnson said in the clip we played. is there political will on the hill even for that? if you get the policy, what democrats at the time said if we go through and understand what the trials and plans, we ll be more likely to support it. there were also, i think, genuine questions about whether they d done the hard work for planning ahead. i want to bring you in here and switch gears a bit.
take these detainees, so congress has frozen our detention policy in the past. president obama, frankly, has not pushed back enough, even though closing guantanamo was a key pledge, of course, from his first presidential campaign. this problem won t go away by itself, and i think the prospect of passing the buck to a third presidential administration is unconscionable. craig? what s happened with the president? you mention it there, it was a promise that he made. is it just a lack of political will or have there been other obstacles? i think there were two phases on this, number one, really into it when the white house council s office took over the stacks of files on every deta detainee and transferred some, but wave two was getting blocked by congress. the reaction to that, quite frankly, no matter what you think congress did, the reaction was, okay, we ll move on to other things. i want to bring in other members of the sunday brain trust, perry bacon, also
bring him to a location, waterboard him, get information, actionable intelligence, et cetera. that rolled forward for three to four years. the dana priest article came out. suddenly the same people supporting this program, sturtu on it and said we must stop this at once. at that point the united states government had a decision to make. if we re going to wipe that program out, what do we do? and the decision that was made was, we ve got to kill them all. and that is where we are today. and that discussion joe, you can t really lay our use of drones on dana priest, the washington post reporter who exposed aspects our detention policy. the administration may i can lay it. i can lay that as the beginning of the end. i m in the talking about drones as we move forward in 2009, but