President Obama will fail to keep one of his most high-profile promises — closing the detention facility for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the White House acknowledged on Tuesday.

“At this point, I don’t anticipate that we will succeed in that goal of closing the prison, but it’s not for a lack of trying,” press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at his final media briefing.

“The only reason it didn’t happen is because of the politics that members of Congress of both parties, frankly, played with this issue,” Earnest said with just two full days left in Obama’s term.

The outgoing president had made a top priority of closing the facility, opened under his predecessor in 2002, at the dawn of the modern war on terrorism. Obama contended that it served as a terrorism-recruiting tool and later seized on the argument that keeping the facility open for a diminished population of prisoners was a waste of taxpayer dollars.

“To overcome extremism, we must also be vigilant in upholding the values our troops defend — because there is no force in the world more powerful than the example of America,” Obama told a joint meeting of Congress in February 2009. “That is why I have ordered the closing of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, and will seek swift and certain justice for captured terrorists — because living our values doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us safer and it makes us stronger.”

But lawmakers blocked his proposals to shift the prisoners to prison facilities on U.S. soil and have criticized his efforts to transfer detainees overseas to countries willing to harbor them under close supervision.

In the latest transfer, 10 prisoners were shipped to Oman for what that country called a “temporary” stay. Just 45 detainees remain at the naval base, down from 242 when Obama took office.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest (Photo: Yuri Gripas/Reuters)

Ironically, it was a liberal Democrat who dealt the first blow to Obama’s promise.

In May 2009, Democratic House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey stripped $80 million that Obama had requested to close the prison from an emergency funding bill. “While I don’t mind defending a concrete program, I’m not much interested in wasting my energy defending a theoretical program,” Obey said at the time. “So when they have a plan, they’re welcome to come back and talk to us about it.“

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Republican hardliners (with not just a few Democrats going along) seized on the issue to try to make Obama look weak on national security. The Obama administration provided all the ammo Republicans needed with its clumsy and ill-fated plan to transfer a handful of forlorn Chinese Uighur prisoners to a Northern Virginia suburb, touching off a full-blown NIMBY (not in my backyard) rebellion in Congress.

The Obama team members seriously underestimated how difficult a task they had assigned to themselves. “There was kind of this naiveté that somehow, if the president said we’re going to close Guantánamo, and we have a plan to close Guantánamo, that ultimately that would happen,” recalled former CIA Director Leon Panetta.

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